Television: The Fingers of God

The “highest-paid apprentice writer in the world” (by his own calculation) is a fellow named Stirling Silliphant. At 45, Silliphant and his one-man corporation gross a million a year, though for tax reasons he manages to hold his salary down to $145,000. This may or may not put him ahead of the world’s other ranking apprentice writer, Novelist Mickey Spillane. The crucial difference between the two is that Spillane writes for the paperbacks whereas Silliphant writes for television—a medium that devours prose the way a school of piranha devours a steer. Silliphant, along with four or five other apprentices in his own exalted income bracket, works 13 hours a day, seven days a week, feeding the cathode tube — with such astonishing success that he has become something of a legend in the trade. “Stirling Silliphant,” says one producer, “is almost inhuman. He is a writing ma chine. Any man who’s been in this business as long as I have can only see him as the finger of God” — which, having writ, moves on.

The Corporations. The four other fingers of God in Teleland these days are Writers Paul Henning (creator of last season’s most popular TV show — Beverly Hillbillies’), Reginald Rose (The Defenders), Rod Serling (Twilight Zone) and Nat Hiken (Car 54). All, like Silliphant, have incorporated themselves in one way or another and all of them have incomes that are astronomical by comparison with the av erage established TV writer’s take of about $20,000 a year. Silliphant will not even consider writing an hour-long script for less than $10,000 (although he magnanimously charges his own com pany only $5,000 per script). But the real money comes from residuals and royalties and from owning a piece of the show. “The rich writers today are the proprietors,” says Producer Irving Elman. “A Stirling Silliphant really isn’t in the position of a television writer. He’s an owner-writer.” Silliphant himself professes to deplore the trend to “hyphenated billing.” “Why permit insight to be curtailed, sensitivity to be blunted, by deliberately plunging into the miasma of memos and meet ings?” he says. But he nevertheless owns a healthy 25% of Route 66 and insists that from now on he will hold out for 50% ownership of any show he writes. He installed a Dow-Jones ticker tape in the study of his home in Glendale to keep tab on his stock transactions. He agrees with his fellow apprentices that TV writers are grossly underpaid.

Frozen Force. In piling up his ele gant string of credits (among them: 13 Hitchcocks, six Markhams, scripts for General Electric Theatre, Alcoa, Goodyear, Schlitz Playhouse), Writer Silliphant has become known as television’s thinking man. His scripts, say his devoted admirers, may occasionally be a little short on “heart,” but they always have an esoteric slant that is uniquely Silliphant’s own.

Route 66, for instance, has to do with two young men who wander about the U.S. in a Corvette seeking adventure (one of the sponsors: Chevrolet). But any single episode may end up dealing with anything from evangelism to sound engineering to murder. This is because of Silliphant’s reluctance to write a script “unless there is a profound meaning.” The meaning of Route 66, he says, has to do with “a search for identity in contemporary America. It is a show about a statement of existence. If anything, it is closer to Sartre and Kafka than to anything else. We are terribly serious, and we feel that life contains a certain amount of pain.”

Serious Martyr. Silliphant became terribly serious about television scripts only ten years ago. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Southern California, he joined 20th Century-Fox and had risen to the post of Eastern publicity manager before he decided that “it was time either to write or be unhappy for the rest of my life.” He batted out a short story that the fiction editor of Collier’s deemed “the most horrible story she’d ever received.” Silliphant passed it on to Screen Directors’ Playhouse and promptly got an enthusiastic acceptance and a check for $750. That was it. “I said, ‘How long has this been going on?’ and I was in television.”

Like many another television writer, Silliphant would like to retire some day to a farm to write plays. In the meantime, he finds that his television work is a “way of learning” to write that both exhilarates and terrifies him. He is so compulsively chained to his typewriter that he recently decided to consult a psychiatrist to determine what the compulsion is all about. On the other hand, he wakes up every morning in terror, convinced that his writing is “just a trick, and people will get on to it.” Television, says he, “is a form not of masochism but of martyrdom. I believe if you survive this, you come out a fantastic human being.”