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SOHL, JERRY (Gerald Allan Sohl, Sr. 1913–2002). American writer.
Film based on his work: "Counterweight" (1964), episode
of The Outer Limits.
Long before Sohl worked in Hollywood, author Damon
Knight had glimpsed his juvenility in an hilariously vicious review of his
novel Point Ultimate, reprinted in his book In Search of Wonder,
where Sohl's plotting is eviscerated in an imagined conversation between a
befuddled young reader and his equally befuddled father. But children can
impress adults with both their shallowness and their good-heartedness, and the
first scripts Sohl wrote were literally acts of charity, credited entirely to
Charles BEAUMONT (though he contributed little more than a few ideas) at a time
when he was unable to write and desperately needed money to pay medical bills.
Of these, "The New Exhibit" and "Queen of the Nile" were unremarkable
variations on familiar themes—respectively, wax museum statues coming to life
and an ancient immortal who stays alive by sucking life from new victims—but
"Living Doll" was more impressive. A talking doll purchased for Telly Savalas's
stepdaughter keeps telling him "I'm going to kill you," and eventually, she
does, when the increasingly frazzled man trips over the doll and falls to his
death. Surely an influence on the later Chucky films, the episode's depiction
of a tiny doll triumphing over intimidating adults may have had
autobiographical overtones, corresponding to Sohl's dreams for success as a
Hollywood screenwriter.
Next recruited to write for The Outer Limits, Sohl adapted one of his
stories to produce the series's emptiest episode, 48 minutes of astronauts
on Mars trying to dodge a malevolent dragon slithering underneath
the swirling sands. The desperate efforts of three uncredited collaborators
could not make this endless hide-and-seek game interesting. The fact
that such a limited writer could not cope with the dark visions of
H. P. Lovecraft should have been obvious, yet when Sohl graduated
to the big screen, that's precisely what he was twice hired to do,
predictably reducing two Lovecraft stories to routine horror films
(Die, Monster, Die and The Curse of the Crimson Altar)
that are dealt with too gently by film historians solely out of respect
for their star performer, an aging Boris KARLOFF.
I have not been able to pin down precisely how he contributed to the
Japanese monster movie Frankenstein Conquers the World—probably,
uncredited assistance in adapting the translated script for its American
theatrical release—but it is resonantly another story about a big
kid accomplishing great things, this time a boy who eats the preserved
heart of Frankenstein's monster, grows into a giant, and battles a
dinosaur.
Sohl's greatest achievement was his stupid but strangely endearing
Star Trek episode, "The Corbomite Maneuver": Captain Kirk,
feeling like a helpless little kid in the face of an overpowering
alien menace about to destroy his ship, tells a big, big lie in order
to buy some time and unaccountably gets away with it—because, it
turns out, the alien is himself a little kid, played by none other
than the brother of child star Ron HOWARD.
If the whole story seems silly, it is at least a justifiable sort
of silliness, an adult acting like a child in order to deal with a
child. As one might expect, Sohl's collaboration with the sentimental
D. C. FONTANA ("This Side of Paradise") transformed
the logical Mr. Spock into a lovesick teenager, while a third episode
("Whom Gods Destroy") allowed Steve IHNAT
to shine as a childishly tyrannical madman in an otherwise uninvolving
melodrama.
More detailed analyses of Sohl's other television
scripts—two episodes of The Invaders, a television movie about alien
invaders, Night Slaves, and an early adventure of The Man from
Atlantis—might provide more hints of youthful playfulness in an adult
world, but the medium of television was growing up, and there was increasingly
no place for a writer like Jerry Sohl. Turning to other business, he published
the books Underhanded Chess and Underhanded Bridge, humorous
compendiums of various ways to cheat or gain an unfair advantage in those
games, perhaps seeing some relevance therein to his own, undeserved career in
screenwriting. One hopes that he died a contented man, living at a retirement
home and using old tricks to beat his buddies at bridge while pulling the wool
over their eyes with tall tales about all his tremendous successes in
Hollywood.
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