Stephen Harrigan

“There it was, set out with cold data in the official report and with occasional colorful description in the newspaper reportage, the story of my father’s death. The story, in a way, of the beginning of my life.” A man uncovers the past of the father he never knew: a World War II pilot, James Erwin McLaughlin, who died in a crash in 1948.

It’s 1973, and the Children of God would like you to know that they are, in fact, very respectable. And also, that they love you.

Mireh probably loves me too, but he knows uptightness when he sees it and he doesn’t seem much on high-pressure techniques anyway; in fact, he seems unusually reserved and tolerantly amused about everything, like a monk who has the key to the wine cellar. But there is no such thing as an unfriendly Child of God, and Mireh is cordial and articulate even though he seems to be repressing something everytime he speaks, laughing about the press version of the Children as a band of Jesus Freaks, kidnapping, drugging. hypnotizing the youth of America into a life of cretinoid worship and toil. It’s hard not to laugh along with him, in this meeting room of the refrigerated warehouse, where no doubt close by pigs and cows are hanging skinned and scalded by their hooves; hard not to laugh because there’s no discernible difference between the meeting that’s about to begin and a PTA assembly.

A writer of made-for-TV movies reflects on his middling successes and near-misses from a career of steady but not spectacular work in Hollywood:

“On occasion during my 30-year screenwriting career, the amount on these checks has been life-changing, enough money to buy a car or temporarily pay off our credit cards. But I don’t really expect to see that kind of windfall again. I haven’t had a movie made in eight years, and my current career status is somewhere between emeritus and irrelevant. Still, the check that came yesterday was a nice surprise. The total was $2,588.95. Included with the check was an itemized list of movies for which I had received sole or shared screenwriting credit and that had been shown again and again around the world. The biggest amounts were for Cleopatra ($716.41), a lavish and maybe-just-a-little-bit-cheesy ABC miniseries, and for King of Texas ($854.30), a Western retelling of King Lear with Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden that had originally aired on TNT. A half-dozen other movies were on the list. They included a few boilerplate TV movies like In The Line of Duty: Blaze of Glory (56 cents), an ‘inspired by a true story’ bank heist movie starring those then-titans of the small screen Bruce Campbell and Lori Loughlin; a steamy Lifetime murder mystery called Widow on the Hill ($341.60), which remains the only thing I’ve ever written that my mother implied she would just as soon I hadn’t; and The Colt ($122.53), a nicely rendered little Civil War movie that aired on the Hallmark Channel that I had adapted from a seven-page short story by Mikhail Sholokov. The Guild statement provided scant information about which parts of the world embraced these movies most fervently, but I doubt that I’m far off the mark in imagining an unwatched TV screen in the back of a kebab stand in Kota Kinabalu.”