Harlan Ellison's Watching (2 page)

Saying that Ellison is passionate is like calling Cameron Diaz sexy. If he likes a movie, or an individual, he calls forth a string of the most astonishing superlatives. If he is put off—or to be more accurate, pissed off—then the unfortunate subject is in for a chain of invective that would send the strongest man reeling and the rest of us reaching for our Webster's Unabridged.

As for knowledge, I can't think of anyone else offhand who, in the course of reviewing
The Witches of Eastwick
, would not only discuss novelist John Updike, in the context of noted authors whose works have been adapted for the screen, but also make a point of mentioning René Clair's 1942 comedy
I Married a Witch
, citing not only its stars, Fredric March and Veronica Lake, but costars Cecil Kellaway and Robert Benchley, and of course screenwriters Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly. He isn't showing off; he's calling upon his encyclopedic knowledge of literature and movies. Why shouldn't such knowledge be put to good use?

Given all of this, calling Harlan a "film critic" seems too limiting. I prefer to think of him as an essayist, one of a special breed worth cherishing at a time when good writing is scarce, and fewer people are reading newspapers and magazines than ever before.

Not bound by the conventions of reviewing, he expresses his feelings in ways most critics wouldn't—or couldn't. (He may be able to write that "Ali MacGraw can't act for shit," in a review of
The Getaway
, but I'd be hesitant to use that particular form of expression.)

Ellison brings something else to his pieces, aside from his dizzying command of the language: he has actually been engaged in the movie and television business. I don't think this is a necessity, any more than a restaurant critic has to have the ability to cook a sumptuous meal, but there's no denying that Ellison's experiences in The Business color his writing. He has no compunction about dropping names, but then they're names of people he's actually known, worked alongside, insulted, been insulted by, or dealt with in some manner.

These references and anecdotes would be considered inappropriate in an ordinary review, but they're part of that unique Ellison stream-of-consciousness I referred to earlier. If you're curious to know what Harlan thinks about a movie or a movie trend, you're going to get more than you may have bargained for. . . but in for a penny, in for a pound. He's going to take you on a ride, and that means he isn't putting his thoughts about a film into capsule form.

One final question people always ask folks like me: "Do you read other critics' work?" Yes, I do, but not to find out what the writer thought about a film. I've already made up my mind, so if I decide to read a review it's not to discern the critic's opinion, but rather to see what I can learn . . . or simply to enjoy a well-written article.

I don't know how valuable it is to learn Harlan Ellison's opinion of this film or that, but I do know that reading an Ellison essay is going to be provocative, infuriating, hilarious, or often a combination of the above. It is never time wasted.

Certainly he is dogmatic. What's more, he doesn't care if you agree with him or not . . . because of his absolute certainty that he's right.

Normally, I wouldn't read a review by someone so hidebound in his opinions, but Ellison approaches the subject of movies with such fervor—and a deep well of knowledge—that one has to give him his due even if one has the temerity to disagree with his conclusions.

In my lexicon, the ultimate sin in moviemaking is being dull. For this occasion I will expand that definition to include writing
about
movies. Let me assure you, Harlan Ellison is never dull.

Leonard Maltin
July 2007

It takes but the reading of a single review in this collection to be aware that this is not your normal critic at work—nor, for that matter, your normal person.

Listen to Mr. Ellison as he writes of seeing
Joe
: "At the end of the film, it took my director friend, Max Katz, and his lady, Karen, to help me up the aisle. I could not focus. I was trembling like a man with malaria. There was a large potted tree on the sidewalk outside the theater. I managed to get to it, and sat there, unable to communicate, for twenty minutes. I was no good for two days thereafter."

But did he like the movie?

What sets Harlan Ellison apart from nearly all other reviewers is that he unblushingly exposes his psyche and personal prejudices with every film he views. He watches viscerally, reacts viscerally, writes viscerally. If you have the stomach for it, you will be rewarded. This book is, of course, just one man's opinion. But the man has a uniquely individual voice, a voice that never minces its words.

"
Spaceballs
," he writes, "rivals
L'Avventura
as the single most obstinately boring film of all time. An invincibly tasteless farrago of lame jokes, obvious parodies, telegraphed punchlines, wretched acting, and idiot plot."

He didn't like the movie.

Having made enemies, he cements the enmity in print. Steven Spielberg and Gene Roddenberry are thrashed, and trashed, by Ellison's lash. More than occasionally, he is guilty of overkill; for example, the venom wasted on
Gremlins
. But, again, this is Ellison's Way. Passion governs his every thought and word. He's been like that at least since April 1964, when we first met, on the Paramount lot, both of us writing features. Twenty-five years (at least) at high pitch! I would be exhausted. Harlan isn't. As of April 1989, he remains one of those "who (wear) at their hearts the fire's center."

"Oh, God, the movies," he writes. "For four hours every Saturday afternoon," the movies transported him "away from that miserable lonely charnel house of childhood." The picture show continues to provide joy to Ellison the adult. " . . . the basic tenets of the Ellison Moviegoing Philosophy: (the movie) kept me rapt and happy all the while it danced before me. What the hell more can one ask from a mere shadow-play?"

And the keynote of the Ellison Movie Reviewing Philosophy: "I will, first and always, try to entertain."

He meets his own high standards. Never does he fail to beguile us. To pique us—even when one finds one's self in disagreement with his judgments.

It never occurred to me that
Mickey One
was "the finest American film of the year, and possibly of many years!" Is the "compelling"
Lolly-Madonna XXX
the same one I saw and found to be the opposite of compelling?
Brazil
" . . . one of the greatest motion pictures ever made . . . in the top ten . . . "? (Is criticizing the critic permitted? I've never been a Foreword person before.)

Yet when he and I share a judgment (which I find, to my astonishment and alarm, is almost always), Harlan approaches bull's-eye perspicacity. "
2001
is a visually exciting, self-indulgent exercise . . . no story . . . no plot." And besides that, it's "seriously flawed."

Because of the times, I must get political. When Harlan and I wrote our first movies at Paramount (the titles will remain shameless; Fifth Amendment), the studio was a quiet little village; only a couple of pictures were being made. The lot was a summer playground for two kids, Gregg Hawks and Nick Kirgo, who wandered through dark and empty soundstages while their fathers, Howard and George, labored on a film.

Almost twenty-six years later, Paramount is doing record-making business. But some things, as Harlan points out, remain the same. The writer is still given the shortest shrift available, and since that era of benevolent paternalism, writers have had to strike four times (most recently six long months in 1988) to achieve any semblance of financial or creative progress. As president of the Writers Guild of America, west, I can testify to Harlan's unionist ardor (he's served two terms on the Board of Directors) and his devotion to the cause of his colleagues.

Ellison boldly fights the writer's war. He reminds the reader that every film he reviews began with a blank page (is the truth a cliché?). His essays are celebrations of films and celebrations of screenwriters. When a picture fails, he does not (always) pin the rap on the director, the producer, the actors, the agents, the cinematographers, the studios, the best boy, the gaffer or the gofer. Every film is the writer's responsibility, his blame—and his triumph.

The likes of Harlan Ellison rarely pass this way. Sometimes it is with great relief that I contemplate that fact. Yet, finally I understand that I, like all writers, must respond to his challenge, which is to do the best work we can. That is what these reviews are all about: people doing their best, trying to do their best, not doing their best. You're a hard man, Ellison. Don't ever change.

George Kirgo (March 26, 1926–August 22, 2004), President, Writers Guild of America, west (1987–1991) CBS-TV film critic
Scenarist of
Redline 7000, Spinout, Don't Make Waves, Voices
and television scripts ranging from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
to
Kraft Suspense Theater

 

Of me, the question is often asked.

Humphrey Bogart to John Derek in 1949's
Knock on Any Door
: "Where did you go wrong, kid?"

Pat O'Brien to Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan, Gabe Dell, Bernard Punsley and Huntz Hall in 1938's
Angels with Dirty Faces
: "Where did you kids go wrong?"

Patricia Neal to Paul Newman in 1963's
Hud
: "Where did you go wrong?"

Gazing on the imperfect handiwork, gibbering assistant Dwight Frye to Herr Doktor Victor F. in 1931's
Frankenstein
: "I don't want to second-guess you, Doc, but do you think it was smart to sew the left hand onto his forehead?"

Having reached middle age and having made the journey having accrued a modest degree of fame, some might say celebrity, others might say noteworthiness or renown (not to mention the guy over there with the placard that says infamy), of me, the question is often asked: "Where did you go wrong, kid?"

I take this opportunity to put the matter to rest. It cannot be blamed on my late mom and dad, Serita and Louis Laverne Ellison. As nice a pair of midwestern parents as one could hope to have had cleaning up after one's adolescence; they did the best they could, having birthed something that might better have starred in a Larry Cohen film. Opprobrium should not be visited on the many bigots, anti-Semites, dunderheads and random whelps who made my youth in Painesville, Ohio seem like the lost chapters of Kierkegaard's
Fear and Trembling or The Sickness Unto Death
. I survived their tender mercies with nothing more debilitating to show for it than a lifelong blood-drenched obsession for revenge. Responsibility should not be laid at the door of evil companions, drug addiction, rampant alcoholism or tertiary syphilis; nor that of mind-polluting pornography, prolonged exposure to strict religious training, the evils of the Big City or snug Jockey shorts. Where I went wrong, how I first flouted the rules, when I turned from the path of righteousness and became the case study before you today, redounds solely to the legendary animators Dave and Max Fleischer, and an obscure feature-length cartoon they made in 1941 titled
Mr. Bug Goes to Town
.

Oh, yes, to be sure, there will be those among you on the jury who will scoff, sneer, and flick fish scales in demonstration of your rejection of this plea. Walk a mile in my snowshoes, I say, before you deal thus harshly with a poor, unfortunate symphoric nyctalopian, come at the dwindling twilight of his life to a state of repentance and hiatus hernia. Ah, you nullifidians, you!

I tell you truly: it was
Mr. Bug Goes to Town
(seen once in a while in the Sunday morning kiddie TV ghetto as
Hoppity Goes to Town
, the British title), an animated entomological extravaganza recounting the angst-ridden travels and travails of a grasshopper and other anthropomorphized insects, that first warped a sweet, theretofore-angelic child. It happened, exactly and precisely, as burned forever in memory, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941. My seventh birthday. Stop building that gibbet for a minute, and I'll tell you.

My grandparents on my mother's side—a pair of kindly sexagenarians only slightly less lovable than Burke & Hare—lived in that then-charming section of Cleveland Heights known as Coventry-Mayfield. (It was called thus, because it was the area where Coventry Road intersected with Mayfield. I mention this, a seemingly obvious dollop of minutiae, only for those of you who have grown to maturity in a time rife with such portmanteau words as Sea-Tac for an airport serving Seattle and Tacoma; Wiltern, a theater at the confluence of Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard; and Flojo, an apartment house owned by Florence and Joseph Ellenbogen; and other blendwords of this sort that form a part of the
lingua non franca
committed in America today.)

Until the age of three or four or five, something like that, I had resided in a state of baby, right there, Coventry-Mayfield. But we had moved thirty miles northeast to the squalid hamlet of Painesville before I hit six, and every week or so visited Gramma Adele and Grampa Harry (who never, as best I recall, ever smiled at me save when they were doling out chicken beaks and feet onto my plate at the Passover seders I was compelled under pain of dismemberment to attend) who still lived on Hampshire Road in Cleveland. I looked on these visits with all the childlike joy one experiences at the prospect of a sigmoidoscopy. As I recall, I adopted a standard response, when alerted to an upcoming hegira to the Grandfolks Rosenthal, that involved threatening to slash my wrists with the rusty pin that backed my Official Lone Ranger pedometer.