Analysis
If key elements on the page, like subtle displays of dictatorial power, do not translate well to electric media, how does a writer control his product? As Mason migrated from book to film to radio to TV, multimedia authorial control is precisely what Gardner learned. The Perry Mason movies were “embarrassing.” 26 And so he tried to exert more control over the characters in the radio shows. As Hughes notes, “With all the reasons for wanting to sell the radio rights, he was firm about not letting his characters be falsified, as he contended they had been by the movies.”27 But this authorial control was not easily wrestled from the radio producers and sponsors. He sold the radio rights to soap opera sponsor Procter & Gamble, who exercised some control over the content.28 Again, Gardner could not maintain control of his characters:
When the sponsor brought in another writer to punch up the Mason character, Gardner felt his control of the show (he had ‘veto rights’) slipping away. He came to dislike the show’s writing, the plots, the production, even the ads. And he must’ve been qualified to judge. He monitored the program every day, taking notes—not many of which were complimentary.29
He had tried to write for the radio soap opera, but confessed that he was not a adept in that medium. “As a soaper, I stunk,” he said. 30 Still, despite not being able to write in the medium, he “was determined to keep control the radio show.” But for all his copious notes and veto power, he could not regain control of the show from the sponsors. “In the end he wasn’t able to; it wasn’t the way things were done.”31 Gardner learned too late how to navigate the power structure of radio, but it was not until transitioning Mason to TV that he could apply the lessons. “He would not give full control of his books in another medium until television, when he would form his own company to produce the Perry Mason show.”32
Returning to the TV version of the story in question, we can see that Gardner had, by this point, regained authorial control of his characters.33 Or, more precisely, he had learned how to navigate the power structures in the new medium. He wrote that the adaptation of The Case of the Spurious Spinster—the name of which he changed back to the original (pre-book) The Case of the Mystified Miner—was the best he’d ever read. “This is one hell of a good script, and is one of the best jobs of adaptation I have ever seen. In my opinion it is going to make a bang-up show.”34 So the transference of power from Mason’s dictation to Drake’s more aggressive methods is made under Gardner’s authority, as he exercised both oversight and approval. The pages are white and blue so we can see that they haven’t undergone a lot of revision during the teleplay editing. (Blue pages conventionally mark round two of revisions.) The bulk of the changes happened during the adaptation to TV. The show had to fit into an hour block of time as determined by scheduling established by ad revenue. So it had to be compressed. This compression required characters who did not use the slowly unfolding conversational tactics of Mason and Street.
Dictation is not an innocent act, free of aggression and threat. We must take into account the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of dictation as “the exercise of dictatorship.”35 Both Mason and Gardner must have secretaries to dictate to. Gardner had the three Walters sisters.36 A lot could be said about how male characters dictating to female secretaries in the media reinforce the gender bias of the power structures of twentieth century America. But it is also interesting to put gender aside (for the moment) and examine what the office of the secretary represents. When Mason says, “Della, take out your notebook,” he is not just saying, “I need to write something down and I don’t happen to have anything to write with or on.” Rather, he is performing a powerful act for Lowry to behold. When Mason needs to write something down, he has someone at his side who will comply; Lowry has no such person. The implication is that he also has someplace to file the dictation. The words will not float around, divorced from significance. His words will be fed into the existing bureaucratic structure that is the court, where their full power can be realized. In this case, the person taking the dictation represents agency. Mason has it. Lowry does not. In some ways, the dictation is more powerful than Drake’s sarcasm and physical presence. Lowry stands up to Drake. Lowry tells him to get out of the way and that his sarcasm is not funny. But the forms of power Mason and Street display are more insidious. They actually have Lowry believing by the end that they have done him a favor. In fact, his candidness with Mason and Street gets him killed in the book, just as his candidness with Drake gets him killed on TV. The dictation in the book does not represent a better or more humane form of power than Drake’s straightforward display of power on TV, but the book format allows for a more complex display of power.
It is tempting to transfer the complex representation of power afforded dictation in the book to Gardner’s real-life dictation. It was, after all, the exercise of the very same dictation skills he used as a lawyer that allowed him to begin writing novels. Were it not for dictation, he may have spent the rest of his days as a lawyer or a pulp fiction hack. But, although the act of dictation is powerful, it is not, in either case, the source of the power. Dictation for Gardner was a sign of agency. His real power came from his ability to navigate and adapt to various media systems. Gardner’s agency—as happens with displays of power—would be challenged. As he produced more and more books, people began to suggest that he used ghost writers.37 Thayer Hobson put up $100,000 payable to anyone who could prove the rumors true. (No one did.)38 Gardner did not use ghost writers, but he did create what many have called a “fiction factory.” The term comes from the pulp fiction writer William Wallace Cook, who wrote a book called The Fiction Factory (1912) that greatly influenced Gardner. Cook’s book is where Gardner came up with the goal of writing 66,000 words a week.39 In the book Perry Mason: The Authorship and Reproduction of a Popular Hero, J. Dennis Bounds writes that “An examination of his notes on the creation of Perry Mason reveals a writer in search of a ‘machine’ or formulaic process by which the writer’s only effort would be to feed the information, flip a switch, and await the outpouring of the story.”40 This approach to writing might have given rise to rumors that Gardner hired others to write for him. But this is a misunderstanding of the context in which the term was used. Hughes clarifies:
By ‘fiction factory,’ he did not mean that he hired other persons to turn out a reasonable replica from his story patterns. When he first used the phrase, he was referring to his writing per se, no more than that. Even as late as 1967, when interviewed by Charles Morton, an editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Garner spoke of ‘my one-man fiction factory.’41
Although Gardner originally used the term “fiction factory” to refer to his style of writing, the term’s meaning eventually expanded to encompass his whole writing process. As Hughes writes:
Through the years the fiction factory assumed a further meaning: he dictated into machines of various kinds, others typed what he had dictated, he edited for continuity of plot, made revisions, and the manuscript was then retyped, proofread by others for final typing, and so on in an assembly line until the book was in hand. This procedure enabled him to turn out the extraordinary amount of material for which he was justly famous.
When he started writing, there was no such organization.42
Gardner was, in a way, writing that organization into place. He didn’t just write books. He dictated narratives and characters that could be fed into and processed by multiple media systems. He took Cook’s metaphor of the factory and applied it to himself. But Gardner is actually a post-industrial figure. His system is at first adhocracy (in the radio days when he didn’t understand “the way things were done”) and then bureaucracy (when he had created a production company, hired producers and writers, and established procedures that enabled his prolificacy). But it is never a factory. Although Cook used it in 1912, the factory metaphor is more aptly applied to publishing in the handpress period, when there was less separation between authors and the producers of books. The factory metaphor suggests that Gardner was producing a material good when his real contribution was the creation of a process.
Though he was not directly producing a material good, the process he authored had wide-ranging and real-life consequences. In some cases, the dissemination of Perry Mason that was enabled by this process actually changed the way cases were argued in real courtrooms. In an article titled “The Perceived Impact of Crime Scene Investigation Shows on the Administration of Justice,” Thomas Hughes and Megan Magers note that:
It has also been asserted in the past that media representations have impacted the criminal justice system. For example, the television show Perry Mason was said to have led to lawyers approaching witnesses during questioning, a practice the show used to fit both actors into a frame at the same time.43
Thomas Hughes and Magers are referring to a 2004 article in Time that was reported by Amy Lennard Goehner, Lina Lofaro, and Kate Novack. The reporters quote Christopher Stone, a director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit that promotes innovation in the justice system:
When Perry Mason first aired, lawyers were not allowed to approach witnesses to question them...But you couldn’t fit Mason and the witness in the same frame, so the directors had Mason walk over and lean on the witness rail. Then juries expected lawyers to do that, and if they didn’t, jurors thought something was wrong.44
According to Thomas Hughes, Magers, Goehner, Lofaro, and Novack, the physical necessities required for a desired camera shot altered the way real people act in real courtrooms.
So, returning to the question of what we can learn about multimedia writing by looking at Gardner’s process, we can see his deployment of an increasingly efficient system—even if it only churns out ordinary entertainment—changes the way people interact in real life. Sometimes the changes are authorized. But other times, changes are byproducts of the adaptation. The dictation scene might have been removed simply to get the episode to fit in the one-hour prime-time TV show slot, just as the decision to have Mason approach the witness stand was pragmatic, rather than authorial. But regardless whether the dictation scene was removed based on principles or pragmatics, the consequences remain. On TV we see power exhibited mano-a-mano with Drake and Lowry; in Gardner’s original spoken version through to the book, the exercise of power is a more complicated affair. This should not suggest that complexity is inherent to the book or impossible on TV, but it should bring up questions about the ways in which complexity is sacrificed for production values.