"When Harlie Was Dead..."

At age eight four, Harlan Ellison at last died in his sleep, much like William Randolph Hearst, a minor parallel that would move the late fantasist to litigation if the blood still surged in his veins. All snark aside, if you encountered Ellison's science fiction short stories at the right time in adolescence you'd be well served the rest of your life, the man was a strong even strident truth teller in his fiction, not many happy endings, much suspicions as to human motives, greed and cowardice very much on display in all those futuristic or fantastical landscapes. In a genre much given to fan service, cliches, stock characterizations and plain phoniness, he stood out with vigorous readable unflinching prose. His uncompromising advocacy on behalf of writers within and without Hollywood is a legendary thing, indeed writers are ripped off every day from Bangor to Guam, something he fought all thru his career. I agree with Ellison on one point, there has never been a Writer's Guild Strike in Hollywood that wasn't Completely Justified and Likely Overdue. As a scriptwriter he turned in superlative work tightly written and reasoned for everything from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" to "Star Trek", by his own standards he was a success in Hollywood sans compromise, I have no doubt about the essential truth of this given the many shows and producers he feuded with down or else turned down thru the years. The man's capacity for litigation, even successful litigation was storied thing up to his death and beyond. He lost out on some good and bad things thanks to that unyielding attitude, a attempt to bring "Two-Face" to the small screen on "Batman" failed mostly due to an ongoing feud with ABC. On the other hand Ellison thankfully missed out on being one of Irwin Allen's pet scriptwriters mostly because of an alleged altercation during a story conference. Harlan refused to be rewritten or worse plagiarized, indeed he was a harsh critic of the many spurious reasons scripts were rewritten or simply stolen in Hollywood. That having been said, if an Ellison Fan avoid his "Man from UNCLE" "The Do It Yourself Dreadful Affair", you'll be amazed such a slack lugubrious effort was ever written by the one and only Harlan Ellison, moreover on a show where he supposedly got on well with the producers. In his truth telling, in his zeal, in his courage, in his caustic wit, Harlan Ellison resembles no one so much as Samuel Johnson, he looms that big in the realm of fantasy fiction. His volumes of film and television reviews are themselves virtual textbooks on "good criticism, well rendered", he pioneered television criticism at a time when the genre was little more than regurgitating press releases. Harlan Ellison was honest, but he wasn't flawless, the man was a notorious fabulist sometimes to an absurd degree, he once claimed that the intervention of then VP Spiro Agnew had held up publication a collection of his TV columns "The Other Glass Teat". His writings are littered with absurd hyperbole,some of it hilarious some of it frankly inaccurate and misleading and...well...wrong. His literary output peaked in the 1970's just as science fiction into a sudden profitable haven for millionaires, rightly so Ellison criticized this tendency, he pointed out that prior to "Star Wars" the celebrities in science fiction were all writers, now the big names were producers & directors, persons of wealth, whose money was made off of movie ticket sales. Harlan also pointed out, that this cataract of money never really reached the Fritz Liebers or the Robert Silverbergs so now those creatives could enjoy both poverty AND obscurity. This is a criticism of the post Star Wars world I've taken to heart and repeat endlessly....a very insightful observation from the Departed Harlan. So in the end, its always seemed to me, a dreadful irony that Harlan Ellison, the loud, righteous & pugnacious defender of the rights of writers,ended up keeping up to one hundred and fifty science fiction short stories off the market up to the time of his death because he couldn't finish editing the third volume of his notorious collection "The Last Dangerous Visions". Christopher Priest goes into detail about that whole sad ironic situation in his pamphlet "The Book on the Edge of Forever", I'm sure it can found on Amazon or Ebay, I shan't bore you with the details of an already cringeworthy tale. As Herodotus Notes "By Great Thing are The Mighty Undone"and truly "The Last Dangerous Visions" is Harlan Ellison's Waterloo. That having been said, I don't think we've heard the last of Harlan he has a huge bibliography of fiction just waiting to be adapted...sadly by others IF it happens. Like Phillip K. Dick his fiction may finally start seeping into the film zeitgeist bit by bit, one can but hope for honest guardians of Ellisonian truth telling. On the other hand Harlan also had an awesome collection of ex-wives, who knows they may have litigious drives all of themselves...that would be the last irony of a supremely ironic iconoclast. :) "I Have No Mouthpiece And I Must Scream"