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At any rate, some friends and I went to see a sort of documentary/promo piece for Harlan Ellison tonight. It was a potentially not quite final cut and of course it was a book event in Los Angeles. I was all fretting, when we arrived with only three minutes to spare, that it might be sold out. Oh yeah, book event in sunny Southern Cali. It was only about a quarter full, but the audience struck me as quite devout, despite Ellison heckling us all during the Q&A portion, comparing our relative silence to a boring Jackson Pollack painting or something. I don’t recall the exact analogy, but, even though it did not quite work for the situation, it still sounded fairly entertaining the way Ellison said it.
The movie had a lot of delightfully well-delivered lines and a few bright spots. Writer Neil Gaiman describes a telephone answering machine message where Ellison told Gaiman he was a dead man, that his house would be burned down, salt would be poured on the radioactive remains, etc. and finishes saying “call me” and Gaiman tells the story with surprisingly humorous delivery. Actor Robin Williams wanders in and out of the flick and of course it is no surprise that he brings the funny. The biopic begins with Robin Williams asking Harlan Ellison a series of true/false questions. Each question features an outrageous incident which the author then confirms is true, sometimes with footnotes. Finally, Robin Williams asks Harlans Ellison if it is true that he slept with 500 women and bragged about it. Ellison replies that this is false. Wait a beat. Then he caveats that he actually slept with 700 women.
Ellison describes the way Warner Bros asked him to let them use an interview with him in the behind the scenes DVD for a science fiction show. Ellison asked them to pay him. They got peeved. He tried to get them to at least send him the DVD he is on and they told him to buy it and finally sent him the wrong DVD, by, uhm, accident no doubt. (The saavy director points out during the Q&A that he thinks it is cute that Ellison can believe that was an accident.) Ellison explains he needs to get paid for his work, even if the work is an interview with him for a DVD extra, and he doesn’t take a piss without getting paid for it. I am personally sick to death of people who want to make money off of other people’s entertainment value and are hostile to the notion of even comping anyone, much less compensating them. It was nice to hear Ellison describe making the lives of those who exploit in this fashion just a little bit harder. I couldn’t help but think, though, that he probably could have written something cool in the time he spent fighting over a single copy of a DVD. And, of course, if most people are happy to be interviewed for BTS extras for free, then the going rate de facto is zip.
I was interested in the subject matter and I’m glad I went to see it, but overall the movie bummed me out. Here was someone I once worshipped and he just seemed so old and so discontent and so shticky. How can I have someone be a role model, if the path they took looks like it leads to a bad place? Although it is impressive that director Erik Nelson was able to put the project together at all, given its famously cantankerous subject, I kept wanting to re-light the interviews he did with Harlan Ellison. I felt like some of the disturbing and tragic way the author came across was probably the result of lighting choices and I was curious how he would come across in the Q&A portion. The Q&A kicked off early with an intoxicated gentleman from the audience interrupting to say he also liked the part about yelling at people at Warner Bros on the phone. I actually couldn’t make out precisely what he was saying about the movie giant, however, because Ellison was yelling at him because he incorrectly thought he was someone who posted mean things about a friend of his on the internet. Then other audience members asked Ellison about his dead father, about mortality and legacy, about what to do when your artistic dreams are really not panning out, and some other cheery topics. Even if I hadn’t been bummed already, that took the gloom a little farther.
There is a signing across the street at a pseudo-bookstore, after the Q&A. I have resolved that I will take a flattering picture of Ellison when I shoot him with the one of my companions who brought a book to be signed. My friend with the book and I and another pal wait for the fourth member of our party to come out of the theatre. Bizarrely, Ellison stops to chat with my friend. They have never met before and it is a really cool moment when my friend tells him that the first time he ever saw the word fuck in a book was Ellison’s short story “A Boy and His Dog.” It seems like Ellison is perhaps going to sign the actual edition of the specific book in question, which my friend has brought along, but he repeats my friend’s name and tells him he has to head across the street. Then he steps kind of into my personal space, looks at my other companion, then stares directly into my eyes and also bids farewell to something along the lines of “people he does not know at all.”
I look sadly after him and glumly mention that he never remembers me. I’ve met Harlan Ellison around half a dozen times over the years, yet he always oddly aggressively claims to have no recollection of me, despite our first meeting being very memorable, at least for me.
We go across to the bookstore and it is called Every Picture Tells A Story. The store’s niche is visually-oriented books, so a lot of their merchandise is collectible volumes and prints and beautifully-produced children’s books. If I were decorating a house, it might be a bitchin’ store, but it kind of freaks me out as a bookstore. They have many beautifully printed art books and limited edition prints and incredibly glossy children’s books. These are the sort of items an interior decorator would buy to give a room a certain flavor. The store has a good selection of books for appearance, but it does not appear to have much in the way of books for reading.
I look around for a new Ellison book to buy. Even though I have read no Ellison for a decade now, there are none. I own everything they have by him, except for a couple of art books and these are interesting mostly for their collectible value. I start thinking about the headspace I was in when I first discovered Ellison’s dark writing. We wait in line so my one friend can get his symbolically significant book autographed by Harlan Ellison. The line is good-sized for a book signing, but it is not so giant that it needs to take particularly long. I even think we might still make it to the Cabinet of Curiosities show in Silverlake later in the evening. Ellison chats extensively with most of the people in the line, all the while complaining about how stupid it is for anyone to want a signature in a book, that it is basically defacing the book. I semi-agree, but I’m hanging out with my friends and that is cool. Plus I’ve promised to take a photo of my one friend with the great author. There is a poster for Charlotte’s Web and we start talking about that and I mention how much the book upset me as a child. Then I start really thinking about how bad Charlotte’s Web made me feel as a little kid. Then I point out that certain kinds of nostalgia give me a stomach ache.
We are finally almost at the front of the line, but Ellison takes forfreakingever with the trio in front of us. He signs multiple books and does photos with them all and even answers questions about whether he really hates doing signings. Finally, Ellison goes to sign my friend’s book. I take out my camera and hold it by my side. Ellison tells the room that devices like digital cameras cost you. I point out that I’m pretty sure my camera has paid for itself. He looks nonplussed. My friend asks the great writer for tips on overcoming writer’s block. Ellison tells him that he personally never ever sends email or goes on the internet, although he is at pains to point out that there are five sites devoted to him, and there is only one he sometimes goes on. Ellison goes on to advise my friend that lower tech is the way to go. I realize that Ellison believes he writes speculative fiction and not science fiction, but, as an SF fan who discovered his work in the SF&F section of the bookstore, I find it dismal that he would limit his ability to benefit from technology and human progress. Ellison uses only a manual typewriter. He shows us a DVD a fan brought him of all the interviews he did with a beloved and now deceased interviewer. Ellison points out that he will never watch the DVD. I think, from what he said in the Q&A, that he prefers to watch Betamax, but I can only listen in horrified fascination. Then he shows us a flyer for a gallery show he says a fan gave him tonight saying he might like the art, but that he will throw the flyer out and never look at that inconsequential web site on it. I kind of think he says the site in question is Salon.com, but I don’t read the flyer and I’m not sure. One of my other companions, a successful cameraman, taps my arm to give him my camera, so he can get photos of us talking to Ellison. I shake him off because I don’t think Ellison likes being papparazzied.
So I ask the author if we can get a picture and prepare to turn my camera on. Ellison says, “no.” I look at him, sort of waiting for the rest of the sentence. I have a $20 bill stuck into the top of the cell phone pocket in my purse, on the theory that, if he doesn’t take a piss without getting paid for it, he might not take a photo either. But all he does is raise his voice and ask me what part of no I don’t understand. I start to walk away pretty bummed. I know, I know, Harlan Ellison can be a dick to fans and also the sky looks blue sometimes. But, in my fannish heart, I want him to be a righteous warrior, rather than a petty bully who justifies meanness as honesty.
And people just don’t usually forget me, not when they have interacted with me extensively. Plus it seemed weird that he went on and on to the guy in front of us about how he never forgets anyone he meets. So I turn around and point out to him that we have met like six times and even had dinner together and yet he never seems to remember me. He asks me if he tried to get in my pants. I am blindsided by the question, utterly unsmooth, and I stutter, “uhm, yes.” Flabbergasted by the whole interaction, I turn to his wife and point out that it was before they were married. After a bit more interaction, Harlan Ellison tells me that hand-feeding a girl cookies is not the same thing as trying to get in my pants and that the cookies in question were Hydrox rather than Oreos and that he remembers me perfectly and that it is just terrible that I would go around saying a thing like that. Uhm, he was the one who asked me. I certainly didn’t bring it up in front of his wife. That would have been rude. So what does one say to a surreal onslaught like his? Does he remember me or not? Why would he repeatedly tell me he does not remember our meeting, if he remembers it “perfectly”? If he does remember me, why the fuck would he ask me, in front of his wife, whether he tried to sleep with me, when he knows the answer? If he doesn’t remember me, why the fuck would someone that promiscuous ask a woman if he tried to get with her? What if I had turned out to be someone he fucked? Having turned it over in my mind for a while, I really have no idea.
I really think it would have cost him nothing to get his picture taken with my friend, after we had waited hours for it. Not doing so was pointlessly cruel and needlessly stingy.
And, of course, due to the Murphy’s Law of Unsmoothness, someone is shooting video of the whole signing. Due to a bizarre series of coincidences, most of my interactions with Harlan Ellison over the years have had an embarrassing number of witnesses and been recorded on audio and/or video.
Walking away from Every Picture Tells A Story, two things occur to me. The most important is that, for all his talk of just being a man about it and getting down to the brass tacks of writing, I’m not sure Harlan Ellison is really still writing. Did he take his hands off the typewriter keys when Keebler acquired Sunshine Biscuits and discontinued the Hydrox cookie? I think the only teleplay he has done, since the turn of the century, is The Discarded for Masters of Science Fiction and, in the book department, Every Picture Tells A Story appeared to have only new editions of older work. The second thing which occurs to me is that I’ve already written about my first meeting with the great author.
Below, you will find an article which first ran in Blue Blood in print in 1997, after the fourth or fifth time I ran into Harlan Ellison. The then most recently prior meeting was in the VIP area at a White Wolf party at a convention Harlan Ellison and I were both guests at. As it was already a theoretically exclusive gathering, it was the sort of situation where it would be normal to shake the hand of anyone friendly and ask who they were, but Ellison seemed oddly standoffish to me. For the unitiated, White Wolf is a roleplaying game company with a flagship product kind of like Dungeons & Dragons. They had grossed like three or four million bucks that year and were hoping to get into more standard genre book publishing. I could be slightly off on the figures, but these numbers are close. White Wolf paid Harlan Ellison like $200,000 to reprint some of his work. Unfortunately for them, Harlan Ellison found out that writer Michael Moorcock, creator of Elric, got a quarter mill, so he called up the company and pitched a fit. Although I was more into Ellison’s work than Moorcock’s, so I probably would have paid him more in White Wolf’s shoes, I also believe that, when a grown man makes a deal, his word should be his bond. I don’t think it is right to renegotiate because you realize you left some money on the table. And, in all fairness to those who chose to pay Moorcock more, inside sources familiar with the Borealis Legends imprint at White Wolf told me that the Moorcock did better for them in sales.
At the time, I viewed the great author Harlan Ellison as such a giant that I did not imagine anything I did could particularly touch him. Maybe it was really a bummer for him that I put our real life interactions in print. Maybe, the first time he met me, he waited up in his hotel room all night and is still pissed off that I never stopped by. In my mind, I absolutely did not reject him; I was just really young and inexperienced and starstruck. It might be better to have an anecdote where I could say I was such a badass, even then, that I tied Harlan Ellison to the headboard and rode him with my young cunt, like a teenage girl rides a pony, but, alas, it didn’t go down like that. Years after the fact, I figured, if he didn’t even remember me after being reminded, wasn’t even particularly interested in finding out my name, then how much could he possibly care what I had to say. I kind of feel that Ellison’s own words are some of what probably created my view that it would be okay to talk about such things. If the man slept with 700 women and talked about it, how much could it matter if he happened not to hit a 701st and she talked about it?
My friends and I go to a diner named Dolores and it is yummy and the conversation is good. I tell my friends I sometimes wish I were a boy.
And it fucking well was Oreos and not Hydrox.
When I was about seventeen, my friend Keith Kanik brought Harlan Ellison to my college to speak. Ellison did an informal talk with the Science Fiction & Fantasy Club in the afternoon and a more formal speech for the Jewish Lecture Series that night. (It was a total coincidence that Keith was a budget officer for both organizations, we swear.) At the time, my pleasure reading consisted primarily of Harlan Ellison collections of short stories, with the occasional longer work by Harlan Ellison thrown in. So I was excited to see the author speak, but that didn’t keep me from showing up late for the SF Club thing. I think maybe I had a class or something pesky like that. By the time I got there, the only seat free was the one next to Ellison. Lots of my classmates had seated themselves on the floor in order to avoid taking that seat, but I was born without the normal number of intimidated chromosomes.
So I sat down next to Ellison and he immediately started flirtatiously bantering with me and touching himself. (He claimed he wasn’t touching himself; he had a tear in his pants. But I wasn’t buying it.) What I didn’t know, because I had arrived late, was that my little pals were taping this whole exchange. So somewhere there is an audiotape of Harlan Ellison offering to fly me to Florida if I would fuck a flamingo while he watched. (Years later, I wrote to him and offered, but it turns out he was married by then.) As a result of discussing bestiality and such with our honored guest, I was invited to the dinner for Ellison and seated opposite him so he could play footsie with me or whatever. A number of people I liked were at the dinner, but there were also more than a few I didn’t. I shared my little opinions with Ellison on the car ride over. So when introduced to a member of the Wesleyan Clergy, Harlan Ellison goes, “I’ve heard so much about you.” “All good I hope,” says the clergyman with a guffaw. “Actually,” Ellison replies, “I heard you were an asshole.” Technically, I said the man was incompetent and devoid of compassion, but watching his face was still worth it. Harlan Ellison, unlike most celebrities, is exactly the way his readers would want him to be.
After the dinner, we rode over to Ellison’s lecture together after he had picked up some Oreos in order to increase audience participation. (He likes to throw cookies at an audience.) So it is dark and the two of us are in the back of my friend’s car and I’m eating cookies out of Ellison’s hand and he’s whispering in my ear, hot and wet, “I bet you’re kinky, I bet you’re kinky in bed, I bet you’re kinky as Hell . . .” Technically, he was right; he was just a little early. Somewhere there is a videotape of Harlan Ellison calling me a sex object in front of a lecture group, but I thankfully do not have a copy. Today, I would insist on at least some oral sex for a statement like that, but then I was too young even to really respond to the tongue he slipped me at the end of the evening and I skipped going by his room. Hopefully, he doesn’t remember the incident too clearly as I had a different name and hair color at the time.
But for years afterwards, I continued to scour used book store racks for books by Harlan Ellison. I loved his ability to slip in and out of different genres, to weave genres together, and to remain angry and righteous for so many years. At a certain point, I gave up looking, however, because only a few of his books could be found and I had read all of those. Today, all of Harlan Ellison’s works from 1958 to the present are being rereleased in a series of omnibus editions. I dislike the omnibus format because the hardcovers are heavy and I’m likely to have read at least one of the sections in every one. But I believe that Harlan Ellison is one of the best living authors writing in the English language and I think he ought to get paid. Watch for the Edgeworks series finally once again coming to racks for new books.
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Posted by Amelia G
on August 10, 2007. Filed under Blue Blood.
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