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- We're done with Harlan unplugged.
This is Harlan plugged in now.
- This is the real Harlan Ellison.
This has been a myth,
everything we've seen in the edit room.
- Just shoot the fucking thing
so I can go back to my life.
- Yes or no. True or false.
Yes or no and you can qualify them if you want.
- Okay. - This will be not
used against you.
- Yeah, not in a court of law.
- No, no, We've done that already.
- Okay. - Okay, ready?
- Yeah. - First one.
Mailed dead gopher to a publishing house.
- Absolutely true.
And it went during the summer
and it went by fourth-class mail.
- So you wanted to make sure that it was there
and a little bloated by then.
- Cost them thousands to fumigate.
- Attacked ABC executive, breaking pelvis.
- True. Absolutely true.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
I went for him, climbed up onto the conference table
in Erwin Allen's office.
There was a lot of papers on the desk.
It was highly polished.
I slipped, very heroic of me,
and face first, went into him like that
and caught him in the throat with the fist.
He went over backwards and hit the wall
and there was a six-foot long model
or 18-foot long model of the Sea View on the wall,
and it broke loose from its moorings
and fell on him and broke his pelvis.
- Threw fan down elevator shaft.
- Never!
Never, never happened.
Never happened!
- Barbra Streisand stole his Night Club tapes.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Bitch stole--
Yeah!
$21 worth of-- - Gonef!
Gonef, hello, gorgeous, I need the money.
Banged over 500 women, boast about it in print.
- Not true. - Okay, good.
- Over 700.
- We'll be right back.
- Drove dynamite truck.
- Yes. - Okay.
- Actually nitro truck.
- Nitro truck, you--
- North Carolina. - Wonderful.
That's always good.
Harlan, well, I want my Jewish friend
to drive this down that bumpy road.
- I mean, really, it was--
- And take Twitchy with you.
- And the only reason I got the job
was because I was nonunion!
- That's it. We did it.
We did it. - Oh, God.
Oh.
I wanna have your children.
- Oh, well, I've got three, I'll send one over.
- At the close of our program yesterday,
Tom held up this envelope containing a piece of paper
and the words on it said,
"August afternoon, a person walking along
"a rocky beach in Maine,
"picks up a pair of broken sunglasses."
What happened next was at 9:45,
Harlan Ellison climbed in the window
of a 5th Avenue bookstore.
Read Tom's words for the first time,
as the crowds looked on,
and then began to write,
until finally five hours later,
The Night of Black Glass was completed.
- I do it because I think, particularly in this country,
people are so distanced from literature,
the way it's taught in schools,
that they think that the people who write are magicians
on a mountaintop somewhere.
And I think that's one of the reasons
why there's so much illiteracy in this country.
So by doing it in public,
I show people that it's a job of work
like being a plumber or an electrician.
I am told that my story,
Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,
is one of the 10 most reprinted stories
in the English language.
Academics tell me this and I have to listen
because there in lies my posterity.
You see, long after I am dust,
they will still be reprinting
Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,
and so, here is a piece from Repent, Harlequin.
"Get stuffed!" the Harlequin replied, sneering.
"You've been late a total of 63 years,
"five months, three weeks, two days, 12 hours, 41 minutes,
"59 seconds, 0.063111 microseconds.
"You've used up everything you can, and more.
"I'm going to turn you off."
"Scare someone else.
"I'd rather be dead than live in a dumb world
"with a bogeyman like you!"
"It's my job."
"You're full of it.
"You're a tyrant!
"You have no right to order people around
"and kill them if they show up late!"
"You can't adjust.
"You can't fit in."
"Unstrap me, and I'll fit my fist into your mouth!"
"You're a nonconformist!"
"That didn't used to be a felony!"
"It is now.
"Live in the world around you."
"I hate it, the world around me.
"It's a terrible world!"
"Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman.
"Get stuffed!"
- I remember being in a public library,
sitting there with my book open
and tears coming down my eyes at the end of this story.
- It's like having a spike driven into your head.
- There's a real power to the way he uses the language
and how he draws pictures in your mind.
- I always saw him, sort of in my head, in the writing,
he's a cocky guitar god.
- I saw Prince a while ago playing
a show where he came on stage
and he was playing a Jimmy Page riff
with one hand not looking.
I thought, that's Harlan.
- The words, there is an attention to the words.
There is an attention to the sound of the words.
You're reading them in your head and they sing.
- The running line of what could be sensed,
but not heard was ominous, threatening,
sensuously compelling in ways
that spoke to the skin and nerve-ends.
It was like the moment one receives the biopsy report.
It was the feeble sound an unwatered plant makes
in the instant before all reserve moisture dries
from the taproot and the green turns to brown.
It was like the sigh of anguish from the victim of voodoo
at the instant the final pin is jammed into the ju-ju doll
half a continent away.
It was like the cry of a mother
brought to see the tiny, crushed form
lying beneath the blanket on a busy intersection.
It was like the kiss of a spider.
- You can't separate the work and the man.
I felt, ever since I first met Harlan,
that really what Harlan is engaged on,
the art form that Harlan is creating,
is this huge piece of performance art called Harlan Ellison.
- How do you explain a hurricane?
I don't know how to explain Harlan.
He is what he is.
- Everything about him is quirky.
Every single thing about him is quirky.
He doesn't do anything straight ahead.
- He's got the combination of borscht and Berkeley.
When you realize that he, in the '60s and the '70s,
was as radical as it gets.
And if he was on Nixon's list,
I'd think of it as highlighted as much as Nixon goes,
"Tell that prick I want him and all his balls.
"Yeah, I want the little Jew."
- Harlan Ellison should probably be read in schools.
They should probably make you read it,
and you should be challenged
by material like that when you're young.
- Harlan doesn't have an off switch.
He doesn't have a censor button.
He is simply incapable of sugarcoating it for you,
and I think this is one of the things that makes him human.
It's one of the things that makes him lovable.
It's one of the things that, in a way, makes him tragic.
I think he wishes it were otherwise.
- This is one of the hardest jobs I've ever had to do.
Ted Sturgeon lived with me,
and they've been publishing his stories,
in 12 volumes so far,
and they finally got around
to wanting me to write the introduction.
Would you like to hear first paragraph here?
We both smoked pipes,
but Ted tamped his bowl full of a grape-flavored tobacco,
so sweetly and sickly redolent, it could stun a police dog.
I was a little over 35 years old
when Sturgeon came to live with me.
Herewith, the ninth time I have started
to write this recondite introduction
to Volume XI of the North Atlantic books collected oeuvre
of the iconic H. Hunter Theodore Waldo Sturgeon,
a great writer of our time, in initial caps.
In preparation for this day,
one I have foolishly hoped would never come,
and now it's here and now I have dawdled
and postponed and evaded as would the helot duck the knout.
Eight times before I sat down,
put my two typing fingers on the keyboard
of the stout Olympia manual office machine,
that Ted sometimes used,
and eight times I have written,
and eight times I said, ah, fuck it, and torn out the paper.
Eight times.
Now nine.
And here's the flat of it, friends,
and Ted would understand,
most of what I know about Ted Sturgeon, I cannot tell you.
- Now, here is Harlan Ellison
and I've already outlined your expansive credits.
- You got it wrong.
- I did? - Yeah, it's not five Hugos,
it's six Hugos.
- I'm sorry. - And you missed
the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe Award
and the fact that I'm a credit to my race.
- Yes, you are human.
But I didn't say that when you went
to Ohio State University,
you were there for a year and a half
and some writing professor, or somebody of that sort, said,
"You don't have any talent.
"Go and earn a living in a respectable way."
You showed him, didn't you?
- Yeah, and I told him to go perform hideous obscenities
upon himself, and then left.
And then I preceded to go to New York, to this very city,
and sold a hundred stories the first year full-time writing.
Up until recently, I've sent him a copy
of every single thing I've ever had published.
When I got listed in Who's Who,
I had a perma plaque, sent that to him.
Photos of the awards-- - Are you a vengeful guy?
- Oh, yeah. - Did you take delight
in sending that man that?
- Oh, yeah, I think revenge is a very terrific,
good thing for everybody.
- One day I got home
and the light was flashing
on my telephone answering machine,
and I pressed the button and it's Harlan,
and the voice says, "Gaiman, this is Ellison.
"You are dead.
"You are dead meat.
"I am going to kill you.
"I am gonna come to your house,
"I'm gonna rip out your trachea.
"I am going to nuke your house
"and then I'm gonna come and I'm gonna sow salt on the place
"where the radioactive ruins of your house have been.
"You are dead.
"You are so dead.
"Call me."
Click.
- Okay, let me be very candid with you.
- Yes, you can.
- Aim that fucker elsewhere.
- I worry more about Harlan busting a valve
in his violent reaction to something bad or stupid
that somebody else did
than I worry about the other person
ending up in the hospital.
- Get off the fucking phone
when your going through an intersection!
You'll run people down, you fucking pinhead!
- He doesn't go gently into that good night,
as he will tell you, you know.
- Yeah, it's a horn!
You douche bag!
- He's done things that I think he would stand by 100%.
I'm sure he's done things that he would go,
"Oh, my god, what the hell was I thinking?"
- Here we go.
Arriba!
Andale!
Yippa, yippa!
- Harlan has the unique position of being
sort of the St. Paul of Christianity
he does not necessarily believe in.
- The one question I always get is,
"Where do you get your ideas?"
Now, Aristotle couldn't answer that question.
Aeschylus couldn't answer that question.
But when they ask me that, I say, Schenectady.
And they look at me and they go, "What?"
I say, yeah, Schenectady.
There's an idea service in Schenectady.
I send them 25 bucks a week and every week, like clockwork,
they send me a fresh six-pack of ideas.
And believe me, believe me,
on the grave of my mother and father,
who were terrific people,
there's always some schmuck who comes up to me
afterwards and says, "Could I have the address?"
- Got a call yesterday
from a little film company down here in the valley.
And they're doing the packaging for MGM on,
not MGM, for Warner Bros. on Babylon 5, which I worked on.
And I did a very long, very interesting on-camera interview
about the making of Babylon 5,
early on when Joe Straczynski hired me,
and they wanna use it.
A young woman calls me and she says,
"We'd like to use it on the DVD.
"Can that be arranged?"
I said, absolutely, all you gotta do is pay me,
and she said, "What?"
I said, you gotta pay me.
She said, "Well, everybody else
"is just doing it for nothing."
I said, everybody else may be an asshole, but I'm not.
I said, by what right would you call me
and ask me to work for nothing?
Do you get a paycheck?
"Well, yes."
I says, does your boss get a paycheck?
Do you pay the Telecine guy?
Do you pay the cameraman?
Do you pay the cutters?
Do you pay the teamsters
when they schlep your stuff on the trucks?
Would you go to a gas station and ask to give you free gas?
Would you go to the doctor and have him take out
your spleen for nothing?
How dare you call me, want me to work for nothing.
"Well, it would be good publicity."
I said, lady, tell that to someone a little older than you
who has just fallen off the turnip truck.
There is no publicity value in my essay,
my interview being on your DVD.
If you sell 2,000 of them, it'll be great.
And what are people gonna say?
"Ooh, I really like the way that guy gave that interview.
"I wonder if he's ever written a book.
"Let me go and buy the," there's no publicity value.
The only value for me is if you put money in my hand.
Cross my palm with silver, you can use my essay.
You can use my interview.
And she says, "Well, all right, thank you,"
and she hangs up.
I'll never hear from them.
They want everything for nothing.
They wouldn't go for five seconds without being paid,
and they'll bitch about how much they're paid and want more.
I should do a freebie for Warner Bros.?
What is Warner Bros., out with an eye patch
and a tin cup on the street?
Fuck no!
They always want the writer to work for nothing.
And the problem is that there's so goddamn many writers
who have no idea that they're supposed to be paid
every time they do something, they do it for nothing.
"Guh, guh, they're gonna look at me.
"I'm gonna be noticed."
You tell me, are they any less the media whore than I?
I think not.
Nobody's offered to buy their soul.
I sell my soul, but at the highest rates, the highest rates.
I don't take a piss without getting paid for it.
I get so angry about this
because you're undercut by all the amateurs.
It's the amateurs who make it tough for the professionals
'cause when you act professional,
these people are so used to getting it for nothing
and for mooching and for being able
to pass off this bullshit.
They don't even send you a copy of the DVD!
You have to call them and say, where's the DVD?
"Well, it's been out for six months.
"You could go to the store and buy it."
You could go to the store and buy it, motherfucker.
You go to the store and buy it.
You send me the goddamn DVD now
or I'm gonna come down to your house
and I'm gonna burn it to the ground.
How about that?
"Well, you don't have to get mean about it."
Yeah, I do have to get mean about it.
Six months since the damn thing came out.
People say to me, even Susan says to me,
"My God, does everything make you angry?"
I say, yeah, everything makes me angry.
And they say, "Well, you should be a little mellow.
"Get a little mellow."
And I say, oh, really?
Gee, I had never thought of that.
"Get a little mellow," woo.
What an epiphany.
Like I enjoy this?!
You think I enjoy getting up angry every morning?
Going to bed angry every night?
To go through the day with the veins standing out,
the bolts unscrewing in my neck?!
Jesus Christ, I would give anything
to be able to be as mellow and cool as most people.
I'd be one of the slaves, the walking dead,
but it would be a relief.
Give me six months as a walking dead man,
I'll never say anything angry again.
- Harlan, Harlan, Harlan, Harlan,
Harlan, Harlan, Harlan, Harlan.
- Jesus, I can't be at two places!
There's a fucking line of people
who want their goddamn book signed
and they pout if you don't sign them!
I had a guy, I swear to you,
I had a guy follow me into a bathroom
to either ask me some stupid question or to
and I turned around, pissed on his shoe.
I said, oh, yes, may I answer that?
And I just gave him a flash.
Look, part of the job is signing.
It's an odious and thankless job
because, first of all,
why in the world would anyone want an autograph in a book?
I know that signing the books
is for people who like, they love my stuff.
Fine. I'm happy.
That's not the point.
They assume a manner
that is like talking to the cast
of Night of the Living Dead.
They don't hear a word you say,
and when you say something jocular to them,
they treat you as if you're the Delphic goddamn Oracle.
I am not, I'm a little Jew from Ohio.
I don't know any answers.
I fake it.
And I sit there and I do it.
And I sit for an hour and I sit two hours
and I sit for three hours.
And I will do it for everybody, I will sign their books,
but then when it's three hours, and they start pouting.
Please, Lord, kill me now.
I say, folks, I'm a human being too.
I have to go have some dinner.
Dinner, folks.
Or I have to take a dump.
Folks, please.
And they all go--
- "Would you sign my dump?"
- Yeah, "sign my dump."
Y'all talk among yourselves for a moment here.
I'm gonna go sign the asshole, uh, the fellow's book.
- I think his love-hate relationship with fandom
has to do with a feeling that a lot of these people
who he identifies with in a very, very real way,
don't fulfill their potential.
- Stop cringing, I won't hit you.
Could you bend forward please?
- And they use fandom
and they use the institutions that are created by fandom
to kind of hide out from the real world,
where Harlan Ellison has always taken pains
to engage the real world.
- Okay, are we happy?
- Yes, we are. - We're square, okay.
The deranged traditions of science-fiction fandom
are overwhelmingly attractive,
particularly to those few boys and girls
who are outcasts of their high school classes
because of wonky thought processes, a flair for the bizarre,
and physical appearance that denies them
the treasures of sorority membership
or a position on the football team.
For the pimply, the short, the weird, and intelligent,
for those to whom sex is frightening
and to whom come odd dreams in the middle of study hall,
the camaraderie of fandom is a gleaming, beckoning Erewhon;
an extended family of other wimps,
twinks, flakes, and oddballs.
- Over the 25 years that I have represented him,
I've received phone calls that sounded something like this.
It's Harlan.
I realize it's Yom Kippur,
but goddammit, I haven't received my two copies
of the fourth printing of the Mongolian edition
of Deathbird Stories!
Do you know a kick-ass lawyer in Ulaanbaatar?
- Whenever you hear one of George Gershwin's songs,
you know within three notes
that you are listening to Gershwin.
It sounds like nobody else, it can't be imitated,
and that is what Harlan Ellison's stories are like.
- What's important is not the personality.
What is important is the work.
Harlan is getting the Grand Mastership,
not for the personality, not for the journalism,
not even for editing work that changed the face of SF.
He's getting it for the stories
and the stories will last
and the stories will be read a long time from now,
and they're what make Harlan Ellison our new Grand Master.
Thank you.
- And so it was, strangely, strangely,
that I found myself standing in the backyard of the house
I had lived in when I was seven years old.
At 13 minutes till midnight
on no special magical winter's night,
in a town that had held me
only till I was physically able to run away.
In Ohio, in winter,
near midnight, certain I could go back.
At 42, I had come to that point in my life
toward which I'd struggled since I'd been a child:
place of security, importance, recognition.
The only one from this town who had made it.
The ones who had had the most promise in school
were now milkmen, used car salesmen,
married to fat, stupid dead women
who had, themselves, been girls
of exceeding promise in high school.
They had been trapped in this little Ohio town,
never to break free.
To die there, unknown.
I, I had broken free,
had done all the wonderful things I'd said I would do.
So...
Why should it all depress me now?
When I was a kid, I was beaten up every day.
Probably I was beaten up because I had a big mouth.
I don't deny it.
But you still don't deserve to have the crap
beaten out of you every day just because you're a smart ass.
But in those days, I was a little kid.
God, I think I'd a had a been
soaking drench wet to weigh 50 pounds.
And it was a very antisemitic town.
Painesville was about 30 miles northeast of Cleveland.
And they would wait for me on the schoolyard.
They would pound me every day.
And when I was the same size, I held my own okay.
But they kept growing, I kept staying small,
and groups of them would beat the crap out of me.
And when you've been made an outsider,
you are always angry.
You respond to it in a lot of different ways.
A lot of people get surly.
A lot of people get mean.
Some people turn into serial killers.
I got so smart that I could just kill them
with logic or their own mouths.
But there's a photograph we've got upstairs here
of my third grade class.
And I'm the shortest kid in the class.
I'm shorter than the smallest girl.
And everybody else is standing like a normal kid.
I'm standing there at the far end on the left, like this,
with my hands on my hips and I'm leaning forward.
And my lips are skinned back like some feral creature
and I'm wearing my Captain Midnight Secret Decoder badge
and there's a Band-Aid on my forehead.
And way down at the other end is Bill Brown.
And Bill Brown's got an even bigger bandage on his face
'cause I had been in a fistfight with him
earlier in the day.
This piece of film was found.
My mother had it.
When my mother died, she gave it to her granddaughter,
to my niece Lisa, and Lisa sent it to me.
These two pictures, that come and go very quickly,
were our house at 89 Harmon Drive in Painsville, Ohio.
That's where I spent my earliest days.
And that's me on the corner, standing on the corner.
This is my mom and me.
My mom and me at Niagara Falls.
I look to be about 10 years old.
Boy, what a pencil neck geek I was.
Yes, thank you, you little fucker.
And my mom and I are walking.
My dad's gotta be taking the pictures.
My mom was just a wonderful woman, put up with me.
That's my dad.
He looked just like Brian Donlevy, the movie actor.
Look at that.
Look at that, was he a handsome guy?
Boy, do I miss him.
Phony cigar in my mouth.
My dad smoked cigars.
This is me trying to be a bigshot.
This is me and my mom.
Look, you can actually see, my mom was about five feet one,
and you can see how small I was.
Look, it's my dad, has his hand on me.
My father has his hand on my shoulder.
Ah, he was a nifty guy.
This is the only shot that I have of my dad.
The only pictures at all.
Jack Wheeldon, Teddy Beckwith,
they were the bullies to me.
I have no idea what they were like
in the rest of their lives.
They may have been terrific kids.
But they used to like to beat me up regularly.
And one time, they caught me on the playground...
My mind likes to say, in the dead of winter
and a great deal of snow, but I think it was in the fall.
It was cold, but it wasn't that cold.
And they beat the shit out of me.
And I was obviously not dead.
I was obviously not seriously injured,
but I was bloody and I was torn apart.
And my mother took me upstairs to wash me off,
get me squared away,
and I tried to explain to her what had happened.
And when you're that age,
you cannot explain to an adult the irrational.
Everything has to have a progression, an interior logic,
and there is no interior logic
to bullies picking on someone.
Why you?
Well, why, in fact, not me?
And my mother said,
and I remember this as if it were yesterday,
my mother with a washcloth in her hand
and me standing at the sink,
she said, "You must've said something to get them angry."
It was an icicle just jammed into my chest,
that my own mother...
And with cause.
It was not as if I was the greatest kid in the world.
I was a troublemaker.
I was a brat.
I was a big mouth, pain in the ass.
But that my own mother would not understand...
At that moment, I had what now, at age 72,
I understand was an enormous epiphany, which is...
I really cannot support it.
I cannot bear it when people laugh at me.
- My first vivid memory of Harlan
is we were both members of the,
what was then called, the Curtain Pullers,
the children's theater of the Cleveland Playhouse.
And he was playing a penguin on roller skates.
Harlan went through some traumas in his very early life,
around the age of 12 when I first him.
And I think he's had a defense mechanism
about that ever since.
If there's anything in the world that upsets him,
it's people putting him down.
And I think he fights that constantly.
I think he goes overboard with it.
- It was all...
God, there doesn't...
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!
You don't have to have a deep rosebud every time.
I always wrote.
I taught myself to read when I was a year or two old.
I read milk cartons.
I read the back of Kellogg's Pep boxes.
I read anything that fell into my hands.
There were bookcases in the house, not many, but a couple,
and I remember reading W. Somerset Maugham's
Ashenden: Or the British Agent when I was very young.
I had a library card before I was 10.
I always knew that I mattered.
When I was a little kid, I remember the moment, absolutely.
I was standing on Harmon Drive, front of our house,
89 Harmon Drive and I looked around
and I said, the world is mine.
I have and do anything I wanna do,
I had that thought, because I was bright.
I was very, very smart.
I got straight A's.
And then I ran away again and I hitchhiked all the way
to Canada to Matawatchan, Ontario,
and I worked in a lumber camp.
Well, I came back from that, did some more school,
hitchhiked down again, went down to Galveston,
worked on tuna boats, back and forth,
back and forth, back and forth.
By the time I was 15, 14, 15,
I was driving a dynamite truck in Shelby, North Carolina,
on a construction job up in the mountains.
All of these things have shown up in my stories.
It all got filed away.
And all that time if I wasn't writing, I was thinking about,
gee, I could write this down like this.
I knew how to tell stories.
It was one of the ways I got fed.
I picked up the writer's true education on the road.
- I could only tell you from personal experience
that several years ago,
when I was making up my will, and my attorney said,
"Do you wanna be buried in Cleveland?"
And I said, no, I've already done that.
And I think Harlan feels the same way.
- When I got thrown outta college,
I went to New York and I lived there for a while.
That's when I got started writing.
Or selling, I've been writing all of my life,
but that's when I started selling.
And eking out an existence
in a 15-dollar a week room
and that's when you got paid a penny a word for a story.
- No kidding.
- Oh, yeah, and I could write a 3000-word story
in a night, in an evening.
And a take it in the next day to,
say Ziff Davis's Publishing Company,
and they would give you a chit,
and you'd go down to the paymaster
and he'd give me 30 bucks,
and that was my food for the week.
That's how I lived.
Here I am maybe 86 pounds dripping wet
and carrying an anvil.
And I'm in with the Rangers in a barracks full of guys,
who were offered the opportunity of either going in the army
or being thrown in prison for the rest of their lives.
The only reason they didn't kill me was,
we'd come back from a 20-mile march, full pack,
in those days we carried an M1.
None of this little pussy AK-47 crap made of plastic.
We had an M1 which weighed 900 pounds.
And the full pack.
And I never fell out.
I was a mean little dog.
I just wouldn't go down.
And we'd come back and everybody would just fall
face forward on their bunk with the pack still on.
I would take out, from under my mattress,
a board that I had secreted there
and take my typewriter out of the wall locker
and I would go into the head, into the toilet,
and take the furthest toilet in the line
so nobody would hear me.
And I'd put the board across my lap
and I would work on my novel.
After everybody was exhausted and dead,
and I was still, and that's how I did my book.
Well, they called me the author.
"Hey, author, hey, author."
And I've always been
pretty good at figuring out systems
and how they work and finding ways around them.
So now here's my here's the parameters of my problem.
I'm small,
I'm surrounded by bullies,
I'm in a system that has me in its thrall
from the moment I wake up
till the moment I go to sleep at night,
and I've gotta protect myself from being brutalized.
How do I do it?
Real simple.
Most of the people in the barracks were illiterate,
and I volunteered to write their letters home
to their girlfriends.
I became their Cyrano.
Anybody came near me or if I got extra duty,
they would take it.
They would do it for me.
And she wrote, "To Harlan Ellison,
"with admiration, envy, and heartfelt wishes
"that I could be as good a writer as he is.
"Dorothy Parker, Hollywood, 1962."
You can think you're a real hot stuff,
but, like they say in the movie Hearts of the West,
"You're not a writer till a writer says you're a writer."
I learned in the pulps,
and that means writing and writing a lot.
50 years worth of writing,
sometimes I'm good, sometimes I'm terrific,
sometimes I'm terrible, but never intentionally terrible.
If I am, it's just I didn't know
how to do the job well enough.
But to keep going for 50 years is very, very tough.
I always say becoming a writer is easy.
If you look at some of the crap Judith Krantz writes
and Tom Clancy and people like that,
things that live in Petri dishes can become a writer.
The trick is not becoming a writer,
the trick is staying a writer.
Day after story after year after novel,
and just keeping going.
And learning as you go and getting better,
not doing the same thing over and over and over again.
- What do you like to write about?
- I like to write about those moments
when something strange, peculiar, and untoward happens
to an average human being,
who in that moment discovers something in him or herself
that makes them a different kind of person.
- If someone were to
create a course offering at a university or at a high school
around Harlan Ellison's fiction,
I think that they could title such a course offering
something like Strategies for Survival with Dignity.
- We all know that you exaggerate a little bit.
Mentally, I say, okay, well, it wasn't 30 people,
it was two, or whatever.
And then I'll talk to someone who was there
and they'll say, "There were 30 people there."
- When I go into hyperbole on my stories,
I try not to stray from the facts,
but if you alter the angle of persistence,
it's funnier from this angle than it is from this angle.
From this angle, I got a parking ticket.
From this angle,
it's one of the great tragedies of our time.
- Because Harlan is as good a writer as he is,
he's open to a certain amount of misinterpretation
from people from who are not reading critically
and who are not paying a lot of attention,
certainly not paying as much attention to the work
as Harlan paid writing the work.
- Most writers I know run that idiotic number about,
"Oh, I like having written, but I don't like to write.
"It's hard work."
Well, fuck you, "hard work."
If you don't like, go out and sail sailboats.
Of course it's hard work.
If it weren't hard work, everybody would be doing it.
And the better you do it, the harder the work is.
It's supposed to be hard.
Art is not supposed to be easy.
Building roads is supposed to be easy.
Fielding crops is supposed to made easier for people.
Art is supposed to be hard.
Art is supposed to be demanding.
That's the way I feel about it.
I got out here in '62 with exactly 10 cents in my pocket.
It's one of those great Horatio Alger
up from the streets kind of stories.
And I knew maybe three people in the whole town.
I came out with these horrible visions of William Holden
lying face down in Gloria Swanson's swimming pool
and I told everybody, I'll be back in six months.
And I kept going back to New York,
but as time went on, I began to perceive the differences
between New York and LA,
and they were manifest.
Los Angeles is the cutting edge of the culture,
despite the claims and pretensions of San Francisco
and New York and Boston and Washington.
It has all the verve and dynamism that I found in New York
when I went there in 1950.
Verve and dynamism that New York has lost,
that Chicago wanted
and for which it substituted brutality and angst,
that New Orleans is afraid to let loose.
For me, for me,
LA is like a big, gauche baby with a shotgun in its mouth.
It'll do anything.
And with more style, with more fire,
with more Errol Flynn go-to-hell vivacity
than any other city I've ever experienced.
I love LA.
And it's become a big city now.
And it's just like everywhere else in America,
it's in chaos.
But here I live on the top of a mountain
with 200 acres of watershed land behind me.
If you just look past me here,
that's the San Bernardino mountains,
what we call the San Berdoos,
and that's the San Fernando Valley,
and that's about 40 miles over there.
And I'll go to some place like Coshocton, Ohio,
or East Wee Waa, Wisconsin,
and some smart ass will say,
"Now, how can you live in Los Angeles with all that smog?!"
And I just kind of giggle because I say,
I don't see any smog.
The only smog there is down there
is down in the valley killing Republicans.
I don't give a shit about that.
- What is great about taking somebody to Harlan's house is
it's like going there for the first time all over again
as you pull up outside
and it is the Lost Inca Temple of Mars,
and it's like nothing you've ever seen.
And then you go inside.
- Every time I go in the house, I go, look at that.
I have an homage, but an actual ripoff.
I have a small room and then an incomplete hallway
up in my ranch and a tower with a bell.
And I hired a hunched back kid, oh, don't tell anybody.
"I work on the weekends.
"Mr. Williams said I'll get a scholarship."
You will, Timmy.
You will.
When Harlan got me into the idea of having these spaces,
crawl spaces filled with this stuff that...
Well, maybe we'll just bury Harlan in the house.
It'll be like Nefertiti and we'll have to find some people.
I'm sorry, we have to bury you with Harlan.
And these?
- These are my extra typewriters.
Well, you gotta--
- This is like an ammunition dump.
- Well, yeah, I use typewriters.
They're all Olympias.
And I have all my typewriter ribbons in the refrigerator.
- So they won't deteriorate?
- Yeah, 'cause you can't get typewriter ribbons.
- Aw, man.
- The fact that he's had the time in there
to write even a couple of stories that anybody read,
let alone amazing stories that have changed people's lives,
let alone some of the best television ever written,
let alone having time to have had sex
with all those women in the '70s.
Where does he get the energy?
- I have never known anybody that could seduce a woman
as quickly as Harlan could.
It became a passion with him and he was an expert at it.
- He saw more puss than a litter box.
That was part of him in the early days.
He was the one working the room.
♪ Found out the ladies like the little Hebrew boy ♪
- The 25th of March, 50,000 people walking
the red mud roads of Alabama, singing, singing.
The outsiders come to tell a crazed bigot
that the Civil War was long dead,
that a house divided was soon to topple,
that the stain of evil that Alabama had become
would no longer be tolerated in a United States.
The Freedom March on Montgomery, Alabama.
A biased report.
And if you weren't marching with us, go screw yourself.
I know the '60s were good and I'll tell you why.
I know they were good.
In the '60s and on into the '70s,
you would go to a college
and there was an electrical charge.
There was a sense that people were weighing and evaluating,
that they were taking all the parts of society
that we have lived with for over 200 years,
and they were sort of jostling them and shaking them up
and seeing which ones would fall through the cultural sieve,
and which ones had enough weight and substance to stay.
I'm not saying that there were not foolishness,
love beads, and people streaking.
When an entire decade,
and we're talking about a decade that runs
from about '61, '62 to about '75,
so it's more than 10 years,
but that era, when one talks about it
in terms of its dumbest parts
rather than its most noble parts,
you know you were dealing with a prejudiced,
with a closed, and with a mean spirited mind.
And that's what they invariably do.
They don't talk about any of the things,
all of the emerging African nations,
the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement.
They see the worst parts of all of these things
because they fear change.
These are the reactionary elements
that have been in our society since the very beginning.
We have been always a fiercely anti-intellectual nation.
Fiercely anti-intellectual.
"If you're so smart, why ain't you wealthy?"
Or "You can't fight city hall."
Or, "Who the hell do you think you are?"
Or, "I'm entitled to my opinion."
No, schmuck, you are not entitled to your opinion.
You're entitled to your informed opinion.
Without information, it's just babble,
hot air, and farts in the wind.
So, the '60s was a period
in which a lot of things were questioned.
They got smog in the Aleutian Islands, man.
They got smog in Anchorage, Alaska.
They got smog at the polar ice caps, can you believe it?
Smog at the polar ice caps.
There's no place that you can go hide anymore.
So, the days of thinking
that the Thames or the English Channel
or the Rocky Mountains was gonna keep you safe
from some ding-dong on the other side, doesn't go anymore.
A nitwit in Hanoi can blow us all
just as dead as a nitwit in Washington.
College campuses are very strange these days.
Mr. Nixon had his way with this country
after the college unrest of the '60s and '70s,
and you find a nice quite hum there now.
A lot of drinking going on
and there's lot of trying to get a piece of the pie,
meaning getting into big business and getting money.
It's a replay of the '50s in some ways.
- What happens when you're at a college campus
and a kid stands up in the back of the room and says,
"Oh, your just trying to shock us
"when you say something like that"?
- I usually call him a dip and insult him
and invite him up to duke it out on the stage.
All right, so we're at MIT. - So, okay, we're at MIT,
we're in the question and answer bit.
We've all done a little talk.
We're now at the giant Q and A bit.
A kid comes up, I don't even remember what he said,
but it was stupid.
And it was ignorant.
- Yeah.
- And you lost it with him
in a way that I would never have lost it with him
or that Peter David would never lost it.
And it was a question directed at you.
- Yeah. - And you lost it.
And the kid, but instead of being upset or anything,
it was like the Bible.
It was strangely biblical because the kid basically said...
You gave him the "you are ignorant, you know nothing" rant
and he basically said, "Yes, master.
"I am ignorant."
- I'm concerned that you seem to like
to offend or shock people, which is okay,
but it seems that you have wisdom
that you'd like to share with most of us,
being dumb as posts, and--
- I get the question, I get the question.
- With trying to be irreverent--
- I got the question. - You see where I'm going.
- No, I see where you went,
and I can answer the question perfectly.
Now, put the microphone back in its stand
and I'll give you the answer.
- It would be my pleasure.
- Good.
Okay, first of all,
give me an honest straight answer, for yourself.
Do you think you are dumb as a post?
Shut the fuck up. I'm serious.
Do you think you're dumb as a post?
- Yes.
- Why do you think that of yourself?
The fact that you asked the question
means you are not dumb as a post.
- No matter what his position was,
he knew what he felt and what he wanted to say,
and he was gonna be damned if he was gonna be run off
that stage by a bunch of yahoos in this audience.
And that image really struck with me
and really made an impression on me
about what it meant to write something,
to stand behind it, to believe in it,
and to not care if you were the only one in the room
that believed that you still stood by the work.
- As Kafka said, "Art is like a brick.
"It should be thrown through a window.
"If it does not break the ice that lives within you,
"why bother to do it?"
So, if I seem to you to be offensive, so be it.
- When I was in ninth grade,
I had an English teacher named Janet Goldstein.
And she saw something in me
and gave me a copy of Ellison Wonderland,
and I think this is the original.
And I remember reading it, getting about half way through,
this really is the first time I ever said,
this is what I wanna do.
And I've got this autograph in here.
It says, "Josh, you've got to pay attention to this:
"My name is Harlan Ellison.
"I wrote this book for you.
"I am up ahead in time, the year 2006 in your future.
"I came back in time and used my empath-O-meter
"to plant in teacher Janet's mind, in your ninth grade,
"back in my past, 1979, so she'll give it to you,
"and it's important that you read it.
"See you soon.
"Your pal, Harlan."
And Harlan Ellison is the man who made me wanna be a writer,
and, for me at least, the question of why Harlan matters
is answered by that.
- Among you, and not even introduced today,
probably because Marshal didn't know he was here,
and that is not Marshal's fault,
is probably the best writer of us all in the room.
The best writer of us all.
A writer named Dan Simmons.
Where are you Dan?
There's Dan Simmons.
If you have not read his book, Song of Kali, K-A-L-I,
you are missing one of the important books of our time.
It is the first novel so blindingly brilliant
that it won the World Fantasy Award.
First time a first novel ever did.
- As you jump from genre to genre, what's next?
- Thought I'd stay out of genre for a while.
There's this genre called best seller-dom,
I thought I'd give it a shot.
I research while I write and serendipity would lead me
to new information all through the writing.
- Oh, wow.
Thank you very much.
- Thanks for coming.
Excuse me, time out just a minute.
I'll give this to you now.
I brought this...
I got up in the middle of the night
before I left on tour...
Harlan's meeting with me at a workshop,
a small workshop in Colorado, became the stuff of legend,
but do you know about this?
It's a fairytale, but it's true.
Harlan Ellison told me what I'd known for years,
but had lost the nerve to believe.
He told me that I had no choice but to continue writing,
whether anything was ever published or not.
He told me that few heard the music,
but those who did, had no choice but to follow the piper.
He told me that if I didn't get back
to the typewriter and keep working,
that he would fly to Colorado and rip my fucking nose off.
- I adore Dan Simmons.
But whenever he's got a bad situation
with a producer or something,
he'll either come to town and say,
"Okay, here's what the situation is.
"Tell me what to do," or "Tell me what you would do,"
which is mostly, he doesn't want to know what he should do.
He just wants to know what I would do.
And I said, well, I'd get a garden hoe
and I'd bury it in the motherfucker's head.
- What was different about Dangerous Visions?
- Well, the stories were written especially for the book,
and so by intent, the anthology tried to go some places
that anthologies had not gone before.
As much vehemence as is put into restrictions on writers,
as much as they're told don't curse,
don't write about unnatural sex,
don't offend the establishment,
by most of the commercial media,
that was the same vehemence
with which I told the writers, get it on.
Really do it.
I really want you to write what you've never written before.
I want you to just put your stomach on paper.
It was the best fucking anthology anybody had ever done
in the genre of imaginative literature,
and has sold more copies than any other anthology
from that time to this time,
prior to that time, in between that time.
It's now in its 35th year and people are still reading it,
and people are still getting it in high schools
and taking it off the shelves and reading it.
It made reputations, and was important enough
that it became a millstone around my neck,
because I was then pressed into doing the sequel,
Again Dangerous Visions in '72.
And they bought so many stories for that,
that I had to go onto a third book,
which has never yet come out.
- I think that he could have been and he still could be
a giant in American Literature
if he was able
to bring himself to sit down
and do a full-blown work.
- Nothing has hurt his writing.
It's as fresh and colorful
and insightful as the very first story
that he ever published.
Career is a different matter.
- You're talking about somebody who has managed,
at one point there was a de facto organization
that called itself the Enemies of Ellison.
Out to get Harlan.
You have to live a certain kind of life
in order to generate something like that.
- This is my desk and this is where I work,
and I have iconic quotes all over the place here
that mean a lot to me.
There is...
From Michelangelo, "Trifles make perfection
"and perfection is no trifle."
From Rimbaud, "Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."
And Eleanor Roosevelt,
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
Here is the quote that I sort of work by.
It's from PJ Proby, the rock singer, and it says,
"I am an artist, and should be exempt from shit."
There's also, over here, a Latin proverb which says,
"Sat ci sat bene," which means,
"It is done quickly enough if it is done well,"
which is my response to all editors
when they call me because they have schedules.
Perfectly candid, I don't give a shit about their schedules.
I work at the pace that the work demands I work.
- I remember once arriving in Los Angeles
and calling Harlan to let him know that I was here
and him saying, "Just come up to the house.
"Come up to the house now."
And I thought, oh, okay.
Came up to the house and he came over to me, said,
"Look, this is," and he introduced this editor to me.
And he said, "Now, come in here with me."
And I came in, he said, "She's come down.
"I told her I'd finish this story
"and I haven't actually finished it.
"I told her that FedEx wasn't working,
"I had a problem with FedEx,
"and she's turned up here to get it.
"Can you keep her talking while I write it?"
- Sometimes when I don't wanna work, I,
oh, gee, have to dust.
The desk is a little dusty.
And, God, I wonder if I should transcribe this
from pencil to ink, yeah.
I'm absolutely a genius
at finding ways to avoid doing the work I have to do.
- Without the writer,
most of what we watch on television
would be no more exciting than animated test patterns.
Few writers have written for and about television
with more success than Harlan Ellison.
Ellison enjoys an adversary relationship with the medium.
- So CBS called me,
I guess it was about six or eight weeks ago.
And they said, "We want you to write a miniseries.
"$360,000."
I will say that again slowly.
$360,000.
Now, I don't know, I can't picture in mind $360,000.
When I think of it, all I can see in my mind
is a big nickel, okay?
They call me and they say, "We want you to do a miniseries,
"anything you wanna write, anything you wanna write."
They wanted fantasy or science-fiction, something like that.
They said, "All we require is that
"you use latest state of the art."
I said, what?
They said, "Use latest state of the art."
I said, well, I use a typewriter.
Papyrus and quills are so hard to come by.
They said, "No, no."
After we got through this semantic jungle,
I found that what they were talking about
was special effects,
that they had all kinds of crazed special effects,
laser blasts and robots and a lot of metal things,
and they wanted me to put a lot of things
that made booms in space, the vacuum of space,
where there is no sound.
And as long as I would do that, they didn't give a damn.
They didn't give a French fry in hell
what the story was about.
I could have had talking mice, they didn't care.
And I said, put it in your rear and get out of my face.
Just get back in the wind and leave me alone.
- Television is a lot of compromise,
especially running a how over a course of a season.
It's about managing compromise and picking battles.
I'm gonna fight for this and I'll let that go.
And I don't know if that's in Harlan's makeup.
I think he fights all the battles
'cause I think he thinks all the battles are worth fighting.
Sure, you could compromise on that,
but then it's gonna suck.
- Through all the legends of ancient peoples,
Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Semitic,
runs the saga of the eternal man.
- It's funny because I can't remember...
I have to really strain to think about what happened
on the last episode of Heroes
or what my agent's daughter's name is,
but I can remember where I was sitting
and what the TV looked like
when I first saw Demon with a Glass Hand.
- I was born 10 days ago.
A full grown man born 10 days ago.
And they tracked me down and tried to kill me.
Why?
Who are you?
I ran.
Then the hand, my hand, told me what to do.
- 70 billion Earth men.
All of them went onto the wire and the wire went into you.
They programmed you to think you were a human
with a surgically attached computer for a hand.
But you are a robot trapped.
You are the guardian of the human race.
- Still, to this day, when you meet someone
and you talk about old TV shows or something
and you get into the Outer Limits,
when that episode comes up,
there's this look people get in their eyes when they talk.
"Oh, ever see the one with Robert Culp and the hand.
"Remember the hand and the fingers?"
- So, I write this Star Trek episode,
which, I am told by only the wisest heads,
is the all-time best Star Trek segment ever written.
It was called City on the Edge of Forever.
And it was mucked about by a lot of people,
including Roddenberry,
and they put a much inferior version of it on the air.
This is a scene in which Kirk and Spock...
These two guys walk into the time portal,
they come out on the other side
and they see a lot rocks and the rocks have runes on them.
R-U-N-E-S.
Unfortunately, the person who did the set design
didn't know what the word runes meant
and he thought it meant ruins.
So, instead of having large, obelisk,
Stonehenge-like stones,
pilasters if you will, with runes on them, archaic glyphs,
they had old broken stones.
And you're supposed to be able to see
this city up on the crest.
That was the city on the edge of Forever.
La-di-da.
And this is the way I described it in my script.
There's a panning shot, like this,
from Kirk's immediate right, around the bowl of the plateau.
The gray sky, you can see the gray sky,
past the rock prominences.
Light and an eerie mist
that gives the entire area an ethereal look.
There are niches in the rock walls,
boulders of the same bright substance
here and there, on a higher peak.
But still, quite far off, the city, this magnificent city
glittering like a hashish eater's dream.
And as the camera pans around,
we see, for the first time, the Guardians of Forever.
The shot continues a beat
and then the camera zooms in on them
who, for just that beat,
they had looked almost like part of the stone walls.
Then they come away and you see
they are men as the camera closes on them.
And Kirk says with wonder, "Who are you?"
And the first Guardian answers
with a voice of power, incalculable power,
"We are the Guardians of Forever."
And Kirk says, "You live in that city?"
And the Guardian says,
"Since before your sun burned hot in space.
"Before your race was born."
And Spock says, "This place is dead, empty.
"Why do you stay?"
And the First Guardian says,
"Only on this world
"do the million pulse-flows of time and space merge.
"Only here do the flux lines of Forever meet.
"Only here can exist the gateway to the past
"where the Time Vortex of the Ancients can work.
"Only here."
And Spock, very scientific, says,
"Can you give us a demonstration?
"Is that possible?"
And the Guardian's answer is oddly tinged
with weariness and yet pleasure.
And he says,
"Time is weary for the craftsman
"who cannot demonstrate his craft."
- Can I feel your goiter?
- Yeah, feel my goiter.
Go ahead.
- Oh, that's vile.
- Isn't that vile? - That's vile.
- Major disgusting.
- This is just a disgusting place to work.
- I dropped a piece of sausage on the floor.
I feel like a schmuck.
- Ew.
Ew, does that feel good?
You like that? You like that?
- Palping my podge.
I write a very explanatory visual script.
I am not a believer in writing master scenes
and leaving everything up to everybody else.
When they hire me to write a movie or a TV show,
I write what I see.
I run the movie in my head and I describe it.
The camera shots, the music, everything.
I spent a page and a half, in this script,
describing what the main saloon looks like,
and I described it in detail.
I described the plants.
I described the furniture.
I said, this is a ship filled with crap furniture
that came from thrift shops,
and the clothes everybody wears
are from all periods of American history,
all the way back to the '30s for God's sakes.
And I'm looking at the character
that appears in the scene that I'm doing today,
and I had very specifically said,
this is a 13, 14, 15-year-old cheerleader.
This is a little girl.
Little slim, gymnast girl.
And the only thing about it is she's very, very pretty,
except she's only got one eye,
this one gigantic eye in the middle of her head.
And I looked at the design that the costume designer had up
and it was some kind of weird flowing schmata,
which is a Yiddish word meaning schmata.
And--
- I think it's Yiddish for not a cheerleader outfit.
- Not a cheerleader outfit.
I said, this is not a cheerleader outfit.
She said, "Well I thought," and I do not want to hear that.
At that moment, my creative instincts
override common civility, and I said to her,
no, no, no, you don't think,
you give me what I ask for because I'm God!
I knew my film career was over the night I saw The Oscar.
I practically wept.
- Hollywood's biggest star, The Oscar.
- You're gonna be a very important man in this town.
I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
- And as I saw this film on which I had worked for a year,
I said, this is the end of my feature film career.
And I got one or two more jobs
because the film was just opening and I was the hot writer.
My 15 minutes went like that
and I never regained it.
I never went back to feature films.
- Listen, Buster, when somebody dates me,
they better know that I require a lot of attention.
- That oughta get you some attention.
- Did you know from the rushes that The Oscar
was gonna be what it was? - I never saw the rushes.
Never saw the rushes.
They would not let me see one moment of it.
I wrote the film for Steve McQueen and Peter Falk,
both of whom were just beginning on the rise in their career
and I knew how great they were.
And they cast Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett
in his only acting role.
And he's a nice man, but the poor soul, he cannot act.
He hasn't got this much acting ability.
He's a great performer, he's a great singer,
not that much acting ability.
- What happened to me?!
When did I die?!
When did I get buried inside you?!
- It gets a half a star.
A half a fucking star.
And it's always in the hundred worst movies or 50 worst.
Wouldn't matter if they did the 20 worst movies,
it would be one of them.
Many of you have grown up in a time when you think
that just because you want something,
you're entitled to fucking have it!
No, folks.
It's called paying for it.
That's how people live.
- No, it isn't just information.
It's like the old thing of it's very special information
put out by a very special person and it should be protected.
And he should be compensated in some way,
at least, even in the simplest way of all,
being acknowledged, saying, yeah, he wrote this.
- You want your music?
Buy your music!
Go and buy it!
You want my books?
Put your hand down, I'm on a roll.
You don't wanna get in front of me now.
Really, you don't wanna get in front of me now.
It's like walking in the front of a McCormick thresher,
Sonny Jim.
Well, the ground rules for me now
make it almost impossible for me to be hired.
I ain't gonna go through it anymore.
I'm just not gonna go through it.
Producers, studios, production companies, no matter...
They probably don't beat their children,
they wouldn't think of running over a dog,
they treat writers like chattel
and we're absolutely dispensable
once they have gotten what they want out of us,
which is a script.
Until they get the script,
man, they just are the most sycophantic
brown nosers you've ever seen.
Once they get those pages in their hands,
you could be hit by a Peterbilt
and they wouldn't give a fuck.
And then they feel it's theirs,
they can do whatever they want.
And here comes a director, a year later,
and says, "Well, I see it this way
"and I see this and I see that."
Fuck you!
You wanna get your vision?
You write the goddamn script.
Where were you when the page was blank?
- Yeah, it's like a skin graft on a leper.
He's always there trying to bring quality, you know?
He's always been about that.
When he wrote The Glass Teat,
it was a great criticism of the death of television
and the transformation of television
into a medium versus media,
something that can transform
versus something that just to conform.
- There are people who would sit and watch them drag books
out of libraries and burn them in piles in the streets,
they would stand and watch old ladies mugged to death
by street gangs and they would not lift a finger,
but if you were to take their TV away from them,
they would be on the steps of city hall
with pitchforks and pump shotguns in five minutes.
That is because nobody likes
their dope taken away from them.
And that's what TV is, it's dope.
We went up to Fresno last weekend.
We stopped in a couple of roadside places,
and all of them had the TV set on.
Nobody watching!
But the goddamn TV set going.
And when you say, "Would you mind turning off the TV?"
They say, "Why?"
'Cause it's making noise and it's disturbing me,
and there's no one else in the restaurant
and I'm your customer.
Can you handle that?
And they look at you as if you have just said
their grandmother was butt fucked by Adolf Hitler.
They simply feel imposed upon
if you remove that giant tit from their mouth.
Well, people are stupid
because they've got the handmaiden of television.
Television is not like movies.
Television is not like books.
Television is not like anything but television.
It gives you everything.
I think it's ironic that you probably,
whoever ever sees this will be seeing it on a TV screen.
I doubt that they'll be seeing it on a big movie screen.
And maybe it'll be a cassette,
but they'll be watching it on a TV screen.
It gives you that.
It's not like radio.
Radio is wonderful.
Radio, you create it in your mind, and you can see it.
You can make it just as colorful and as smart
and as opulent as you wish it to be.
On television, that's it.
That's what you get, and that's the whole thing.
This means you don't have to work for it.
You can sit there like the couch potato, and that's it.
You gotta have a good thumb and that's about it.
That's one reason people are stupid.
They just are not using their brains.
You don't use a muscle, it atrophies.
Susan, my wife, and I,
one night we were going somewhere.
We were channel surfing.
We were going somewhere, I don't know where it was,
and we wound up, for some inexplicable reason, we paused,
I don't know why, we paused
and were watching The Weakest Link.
Now, if this is, in fact, turned into a film,
and 20 years from now, someone's looking at it,
they'll say, "What was The Weakest Link?"
Weakest Link is a television show
in which they have people who are brought in as contestants.
I think they are tested on their DNA.
And if their intellectual level falls below seven
or that of an ocelo sponge mop, they become a contestant.
If you actually know anything,
you cannot possibly win a dime on this goddamn show
because you are surrounded by people
who have the intellectual level of a marmoset.
So, one of the people who was ,
she weathered the first couple of rounds, I guess.
And here she was standing there,
and she was a very well turned out young woman,
about 25, I would say.
And the question that was asked of her was this:
What S,
letter S, what S who was a star
of Lawrence of Arabia wrote a long a running,
award-winning bridge column?
Well, okay, it's not a terribly obscure
piece of information.
I know some of you know it.
I know you know it.
But even if you don't know that it was Omar Sharif,
her answer was Naomi Campbell.
Now, this is wrong in so many ways
that Susan and I sat there
with a hypertension buzz running through our head,
as if we had stuck our hand into a generator.
A, there's no S in Naomi Campbell.
B, or two, whichever I started with,
Naomi Campbell wasn't even born
when Lawrence of Arabia was made.
Three, Naomi Campbell is a supermodel
who can barely write her name.
She may be the nicest person in the world.
She wouldn't bite the head off a chicken.
But Naomi Campbell has never written
a column or anything else.
And this answer was so stupid, was so wrong,
was so illiterate, so culturally devoid
of any resonance at all that around this house,
it now became the answer to every question.
What was the name of the ship that struck an iceberg
in the North Atlantic and sank?
The Naomi Campbell.
Who was it who discovered radium?
Naomi Campbell.
Name the third president of the United States.
Naomi Campbell.
Naomi Campbell is now the answer in our household.
Whenever we wanna sound like
an absolute gibbering orangutan, we use Naomi Campbell.
Hey, Sue!
Susan!
- Yeah?!
- Would you bring the hat and the glasses, please?!
- Okay, okay.
- Thank you, Susan!
Stay with me. Come on over here.
Over here, never get within, never get outside, like that.
You strange woman, you.
- Well, let's get a closeup of that udder of yours.
- Oh my. - Let's get a copy
of the happy loving couple now.
- Hey.
- There we are.
Stop that, I got a better idea.
Put your arm around her.
Act like you love him.
- No!
- There you go.
- Kiss?
- It's my wife.
It is my wife, this is my honey over here.
In every human being there is only
so large a supply of love.
It's like the limbs of a starfish, to some extent:
if you chew off a chunk, it'll grow back.
But if you chew off too much, the starfish dies.
Valerie B chewed off a chunk of love
from my dwindling reserve,
a reserve already nibbled by Charlotte and Lori and Sherri
and Cindy and others down through the years.
There's still enough to make
a saleable appearance of a whole creature,
but nobody gets gnawed on that way
without becoming a little dead.
So, if Cupid, that perverted little motherfucker,
decides his lightning ought to strike
this gnarly tree trunk again,
whomever or whatever gets me,
is going to get a handy second,
damaged goods,
something a little dead and a little crippled.
Having learned that,
all I can advise is an impossible stance for all of you:
utter openness and reasonable caution.
Don't close yourself off,
but jeezus, be careful of monsters with teeth.
I just hope you'll know what they look like
when they come clanking after you.
The package is so pretty,
one can only urge you to remember Pandora.
Be careful which boxes you open, troops.
- What's the most embarrassing thing Harlan has done
in front of you or to you?
Oh, sorry. - Okay.
He threw me out of the house naked once.
- She makes his demons go away.
They are an incredible couple and she keeps up with him,
and she takes no shit from him,
and I've watched her take no shit from him.
And they work.
- And I happened to be naked.
All my stories end up with me naked.
- Those are the best.
- She's the gift.
She is his...
It's more than you could say
behind every great man is a great behind,
and she does have a beautiful ass,
and I know Harlan knows that.
But you just see her and she's a light.
She is the light to his dark.
- He threw me out of the house.
I was completely naked, locked--
- Front door or backdoor?
- Front door, of course. - Oh.
- Oh, is-- - Oh, all the neighbors
right there. - And it's one of those
where you're out naked-- - Daylight?
- Daylight. - You know those stained glass
windows on either side of our door?
- Yeah.
- So we're wrestling around
and I said, ah, fuck this, and I just put her outside.
And she was naked.
This is the height of decorum, this woman.
We're talking here, someone who just,
and she's banging on the door, and screaming,
"Let me in, let me in!"
And I'm saying-- - Wait, you forget.
We live on a quiet street.
It's at that moment that a herd of people
came marching down the hill. - Oh, my god!
- Yeah.
Most of whom were Jehovah's Witnesses.
- Did they offer you a copy of Watchtower or Awake?
Have you heard the word
of God that day?
- Oh, I heard the word of god that day.
- I don't know if you sit down and discuss that
when you get married, "we're going to behave this way,"
or if it just evolves,
but I think the short version is that Harlan and Susan
know each other and they get each other,
and more than almost anybody I've ever seen,
and it's amazing to watch.
It's inspiring.
It gives me faith in the human heart.
- To Nick without strings.
- Awesome.
- No, no, no, no, no.
Awesome would be Grand Canyon.
- Oh, okay.
- Awesome is the greater Magellanic Cloud.
A cheese quesadilla and my signature are not awesome.
Would you use the word properly?
Your mother brought you up right.
You went to college. - Yes, all right.
- You're an intellectual, you read a book a week, or more.
- So, sufficient?
- Sufficient, adequate, mundane.
- The only time I ever heard him not talk,
not answer a question,
was down in Florida and there was a panel,
and they asked four big writers on stage:
How will posterity treat you?
And do you think about it a lot?
And he just passed, he didn't answer.
And then later, in private,
he said that he thinks about it constantly.
He's interested about what his legacy,
his literary legacy will be.
And I think the very serious writers
feel that way, and he does.
He just doesn't talk about it.
So I think his work will last.
But we never know, do we?
Otherwise, we'd all be in the literature section
of this bookstore.
- I remember Steve McQueen saying to me,
we were sitting out on the patio of his house
up in the high desert, long time ago,
of course it was a long time ago
'cause he's been dead a number of years,
and Steve said, "I have this recurring dream
"where I'm wakened in the dead of night
"by this pounding on the door.
"And when I go downstairs, there's a guy standing there,
"and he said, 'It was all a mistake.
"'You weren't supposed to get any of this,
"'not the wife, not the house, not the career,
"'not the cars, not the motorcycle, none of it.
"'It belongs to the guy next door.
"'And we've come to take it all away from you.'"
And I've heard this from other writers.
But when you're a writer, you work for what you get.
You actually, you...
Foot pounds of energy are expended to produce each story.
So, you should by rights, like a farmer,
feel proud of that field of corn.
Or like a bricklayer, you should feel proud
of that well-laid line of bricks.
But, for some reason,
I suppose because we feel that the talent
is only something that we carry around with us,
that it hag rides us,
we as human beings, however many I include in this group,
are simply not worthy of the approbation.
- Action!
- Why are you talking tuchus?
Why are you talking tuchus?
What are you a pervert?
This is a child we are talking about.
I don't know why--
- Yeah, so what? - Not to mention,
you're an ugly man as well.
- Well, I don't know, but I can still do it.
- Yeah! - Yeah, yeah.
- Work with that. - Ken Kramer
and Mr. Harlan Ellison!
- Yes, okay!
- Oy! - Oy!
- Oy. - Oy vey!
Can I go home now, mother?
- Well played.
- They'll cut us out.
We'll be cut out.
There's a fundamentalist minister, marvelous, marvelous guy,
who is doing this huge, for his doctorate in theology,
on me and on my fiction.
And he says that I "have an atheist message
"of righteousness that fundamentalist Christians
"should not be ignoring, but then I say the same thing."
The story of mine that was picked
for the best American short stories is called
The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.
And it's my atheist tract,
and its says the universe is neither malign nor benign.
It doesn't even know we're here.
See, first of all, I've got to tell you.
I was raised a Jew.
I am an atheist.
I'm not an agnostic, not one of those wusses that says,
"Well, maybe," you know?
If there were a god, by now, she'd have hit me
with a bolt of lightning in the ass, long since.
So I am an atheist.
I'm a card carrying, fully bound,
right out there atheist, okay?
Okay.
And I know most of you are too,
but you don't want to cop to it
because you're afraid everybody else's gonna say,
"Don't you believe in the Second Coming?"
I don't even believe in first fucking coming.
I find nothing more ridiculous and annoying
than some guy who runs a hundred yards,
runs a kick off back 105 yards from the end zone
and drops to his knees and thanks God.
Well, that's foolish.
God didn't do it, he did it,
because if God did that for him,
you mean God was against the other team?
God is that mean-spirited
that he has nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon
than beat the crap out of a bunch of poor football players?
I don't perceive of the universe being run by
that kind of a god.
I go with Mark Twain.
One of the great quotes of my life is Mark Twain,
when I discovered, it's from Letters from the Earth.
And I first read it I said, oh, thank heavens,
there was somebody who thought the way I think.
Osama bin Laden and his crew of degenerate thugs
and Jerry Falwell and his coterie of sicko, pervo, freakos,
with Pat playing the gabby hey sidekick,
all worship the same god.
Not the gentle succoring Jesus
and not the kindly warm-hearted Allah but some third entity,
some horrid and astigmatic sulfur-breathing deity
who batons on hatred and loathing
and the spreading of elitist snake oil,
promising 73 virgins at the pearly gates,
if only you will waste your lives in pointless denigration
of everyone Pat and Osama and Jerry point to
as enemies of the all-powerful God.
The universe doesn't know we're here.
It just doesn't know.
Einstein says God does not shoot craps with the universe,
or does not play dice with the universe.
Yeah, it does.
It's random.
The universe will one day give you
the lottery for $16 million.
The next day, colon cancer.
Universe doesn't know, universe doesn't care.
Universe is just boogieing on along,
having its own self a good time.
There is no rhyme, there's no reason.
There are laws, restrictions, rules, Darwinism,
astrophysics, all of these things are part of the way
the machinery runs, and it's a machine.
"Well, who created the machine?"
I don't give a fuck who created the machine.
I'll never know, you'll never know, no one will ever know.
If Saint Thomas Aquinas couldn't figure it out,
I sure as hell am not gonna be able to,
and neither are any of these pot-licking,
little stump ministers who always have the answer
'cause they get messages from God.
I don't mind people getting messages from God,
sending messages to God.
What I mind is when God answers them.
These kind of people we usually put away in a funny house,
but these guys say, "No, no."
"I have a personal relationship with God,"
I love that phrase.
"Do you have a personal relationship with God?"
Yeah, God comes over on Sunday morning, we have bagel,
lox, cream cheese, we go bowling on Friday nights.
God and I, we're very close.
I think it is presumptuous.
I think it's presumptuous, I think it is silly,
because it makes you believe
that you are less than what you can be.
As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity,
you don't ever have to responsible for your own behavior,
and I think that is the ultimate,
the ultimate mark of humanity.
We were given,
in our toolbox,
tools to build, ethics, courage,
kindness, friendship, ratiocination, the ability to think,
to work problems out logically, dreams, imagination,
things that make us wanna go to the stars,
we wanna make our selves better,
and a quiver of arrows which are mean-spiritedness
and greed and irresponsibility
and the refusal to take responsibility
for anything you do, and coarseness.
And these things they're like rocks.
Instead of using the tools to build,
we pick up these rocks of greed and stupidity,
and throw them at each other.
And I suppose, in some ways,
that's a very Christian attitude.
I suppose, in some ways,
it's a very Judeo-Christian attitude.
But I have very little sympathy for those who do bad things.
I don't care if your mommy locked you in the basement.
Stop doing it.
We know people by their acts.
We know people by their deeds.
And no matter how well coiffed their hair is,
if they're spouting evil
and if they're turning brother against sister,
and man against man, and woman against man,
I think that they deserve to be...
Well, I'm a mild person actually.
I think we should probably just hang them up
on the top half of a Dutch door
and beat them across the belly with an aluminum ball bat
till their piss runs red.
- Every single, what's the word that I am looking for?
Every single blank has to be a confrontation.
- Because that's what life is.
It is a confrontation.
That is what life is composed of,
an endless series of confrontations
with the society in which one lives,
with one's fellow man and woman, and with one's self.
That is what life is all about.
That's why you can never get rid of violence on television
because life is, to a greater or lesser degree, violent.
And the intensity of the confrontation,
the revelations of the human condition
that come out of those confrontations
is what makes enlightening drama, makes art, for us.
We must learn from what we read.
We can't keep getting our brains massaged.
We have to have the confrontation
so that when they come to us in real life,
we have some well of information to go to.
Did you wanna do some commercials?
Going past you, motherfucker.
Somebody asked me the other day, said,
"Where do you see yourself in 20 years?"
I said, dead.
And they said, "Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, you're kidding."
And I said, when you're 72, you don't kid about death.
Death, death is right there.
It's sort of hovering near your shoulder
like a salivating fanboy at a Star Trek convention.
It's just out of eyeshot but you know it's there.
- It's a given, within Harlan's worldview,
that life is not easy.
It's also a given that
that's part of the reason why life is worth living.
- I got this good life.
I got great friends.
Great friends who are important people.
That's always nice.
It's always nice, yeah.
It's always nice to know important people.
I'm gonna sell the big easy chair in the living room,
and I'm going to say, this is the chair,
and some of you who've sat in this chair
have been Robert Heinlein,
Maurice Chevalier, the Rolling Stones,
and all the people who've been in this house
who have sat in that chair.
And I'm gonna auction it off,
and then I'm gonna buy a new chair.
- You have to accept
that you have somebody who is partly
one of the greatest writers of the 20th century,
and partly an alternately impish
and furious 11-year-old boy
or possibly nine-year-old boy
or possibly a five-year-old boy.
And it's all part of the same thing.
And, at the same time, a cranky old Jew
who does not just enjoy his cranky old Jew-dom,
he revels in it.
He is building this cranky old Jew-dom
like some people live in castles.
He lives in cranky old Jew world.
And that's true, too, but it's also shtick.
- I live in paradise.
I got a sensational wife.
I got a great house.
I do the work I like to do.
I'm not entitled to beef.
I'm not entitled to complain.
I do, because like all old Jews,
we only know three things in this life:
We know guilt, we know Chinese food,
and we know the location of every pain in our body
and we will tell you about it endlessly.
Is this the last thing I'm gonna have to record?
I'm out after this.
Okay, well, I'm just a hard pill to swallow.
And I'm great for dinner, great stories, very funny,
but if you had to live with me 24/7,
you'd put a gun either in your mouth or my mouth.
And I think that's the way it is with anybody
who lives their life exactly as they wish to see it.
I think it was Hunter Thompson who wrote,
"He knew the dead end loneliness
"of a person who makes his own life."
I've always done that.
I've always been my own person,
and I'm responsible for what I turn out to be.
So, if anybody watches this movie and they say,
"God, what a mook."
Yeah, I can't argue on it, so.
But it's not true,
I never threw anybody down an elevator shaft.
Whenever I lecture at a college, and I do a lot of that,
invariably, there will be one pinhead out in the audience
who feels that my credentials are not sufficient
for me to be ranting and raving
about whatever it is I am raving and/or ranting about.
And he doesn't really know
or she doesn't really know what my background is.
And they'll say to me, "Why aren't you out protesting?"
and no, the fact that I'm 72 years old has no bearing on it.
They'll say, "Why aren't you out doing blah, blah,"
or "Blah, blah," or, "Sucking up them bullets," and all.
And then my answer for years was, I've done it,
and then you realize you must not defend yourself.
And here's what I offer to you
as my way of getting around it.
First, you slump over like this, like a little old man.
And then you say, here is the wisdom of my people
to answer your question.
An old man walks out of the shtetl
on a path along beside the river,
and as he comes around the curve,
he sees lying in the middle of the road, an ant,
a little ant, and he's lying on his back like this
with the arms and the legs in the air going,
"Hachlama, hachlama, hachlama."
And he looks down at this creature and says to the ant,
"What are you doing?"
And the ant says, "I have it on the very best of authority,
"the sky is gonna fall."
And the old man looks at the ant and he says,
"And this is what you think you're gonna do
"to avert this catastrophe?
"You're gonna lie there and go ?"
And the ant looks up and says,
as I say to you, young person in the audience
who has questioned me, the ant says,
"I do what I can do."
Why does everyone look so confused?
- Cut.