CHRIS BUNCH
by Norman Spinrad
Chris Bunch was a good friend and a man of many parts, which maybe only
came together when you got to know him well. Chris did tours in Viet Nam
with an outfit that considered Lurp "a bunch of pussies" in comparison to
the behind the lines wet-work that they did. Chris came back from Nam
against the war, as many did, and became editor of an underground paper
called Open City. It was one of the best, and open to me too before I
began writing my political columns for the Los Angeles Free Press.
Chris was against the war, against war itself, with a cynical and jaundiced
view of things military, as witness his Sten series, military science
fiction like no other. Chris was in a way a philosophical pacifist, but
also, well, a gun-nut, and no pacifist on a personal action level when
necessary. He was a "hard guy" but he loved his cats to the point where he
would kill in their defense and when he had to, he did.
Chris was a biker, a most intellectual biker, and for a while edited a
biker magazine, for which he prevailed upon me to write a science fiction
story, the only one it ever published. Chris was my neighbor in Laurel
Canyon, and one afternoon showed up with his biker housemate Larry and
announced that they were "kidnapping me to a biker party" and I had no
choice in the matter. After a wild pick-up truck ride knocking down
garbage cans, I spent a long night at the party, and the next morning went
to breakfast with Chris and a gang of bikers.
The waitress screwed everything up, and I was getting royally pissed off
and wondering what these bikers would do. When the meal was finally over
and the waitress approached with the check, one of them said: "You must
have had a terrible night."
"Oh yeah," she groaned.
And they left her an enormous tip.
It was a lesson I never forgot.
Later, when Chris was living in Manhattan Beach, my ex Lee Wood and I
visited and stayed overnight. In the morning, while perusing his extensive
library, Lee discovered a hidden pistol. As she picked it up, Chris came
into the room, saw, snatched it from her. "Is this thing loaded?" she
asked.
"Of course it is!" Chris told her.
Later he proudly showed us his collection of automatic weapons, displayed
on the wall. He took one down and handed it to her for her admiration.
"Is this loaded too?"
"Of course it is! "What kind of idiot keeps an unloaded gun in the house?
What happens if you grab the wrong one when you need it?"
Another lesson of sorts.
Chris and his writing partner Allan Cole wrote A RECKONING FOR KINGS, far
and away the best novel to come out of the Viet Nam War, and I said so in a
review at the time, the only Viet Nam novel to write sympathetically,
knowledgeably, and caringly from the points of view of many characters on
all sides and at all levels of the conflict.
Chris and Allan also wrote a lot of television and at one point were story
editors on a show called WEREWOLF, produced by Frank Lupo. Chuck Conners,
the star heavy, the chief werewolf, wanted more money near the end of the
season, and when he didn't get it, walked off. Chris and Allan had to
write the episode transitioning to the show with a new chief werewolf
without Conners appearing in the episode, no easy task, and asked me to
write the bridge episode before that.
It was a real rush job, since the were shooting an episode a week and
needed these two episodes shot within a month or less. I wrote mine at
flank speed and sent it in. Chris told me I'd have to get the rewrite done
in something like five days from the time I sent in the draft. I fretted
and fumed for two or three days, hearing nothing. When I finally called,
demanding how in hell I was supposed to get it done in two days, I was told
the unheard of:
"We're shooting your script now, Allan and I did a quick polish, that's all
it needed."
And when the show was broadcast, the director, James Darren, had not only
done the best rendition of any script I've ever written, but I declared
something I've never heard a tv writer say before or afterward: "Without
violating anything, the director told the story better than what was on my
pages or even in my head."