Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Here are four moneymaking films, top of the rank, best by far, lauded and applauded by the Wad. And they ask for nothing finer, nothing richer. And it's not that the auteurs set out to make empty, useless films: this is the best they can do!

  With greater freedom, superlative technology, exchequer-breaking budgets, neither Spielberg nor Lucas, nor any of the clone-children they have taken under their wings, from Arkush to Zemeckis, can match by one-millionth the achievements of Willis O'Brien, Val Lewton, James Whale or Fritz Lang. They preen and posture and talk about technique in the short takes one sees on the cable movie channels, but in truth they are the whistling pallbearers of the corpse of cinematic fantasy.

  The art-form has reached its untimely end. All is ashes and Porky's from this time forward.

  How tragic that many of you will have attended the wake and never know that the eyes staring back at you are those of the living dead.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/January 1986

  INSTALLMENT 14 ½:

  In Which The Unheard-Of Is Heard, Kind Of

  In the November 1985 issue of a magazine called Starlog there appears the first half of an interview with your humble essayist, given to a very nice young man named Lee Goldberg. Mostly, it concerns my work for the past year on The Twilight Zone.

  Mr. Goldberg began his introductory notes about me with the following sentence: "No one will ever accuse Harlan Ellison of keeping his mouth shut."

  There is a widespread belief that columnists such as myself or Budrys or Erma Bombeck or John Simon or Robert Evans always have a ready opinion on anything that occurs anywhere in the world at any time, past, present or future.

  That is because we have deadlines.

  We are expected to find a new crusade every time we put pen to paper. We are expected to plumb the depths of every isolated incident, and we are expected to track the path of every emerging trend. And for our sins of regularity in print (or in my case, semi-regularity) we are rewarded with the encomiums Big Mouth, Know-It-All and Vicious Critic.

  If one of us raves about a film, say for instance Dune, not only is it instantly forgotten that we praised something, but we are pilloried for not following the party line that Dune was awful.

  (This is much like my situation as regards fiction. Because I once wrote a story in which—for good and sufficient plot reasons—a young woman is killed and eaten by a dog, I am stereotyped by casual readers of my work as one who writes nothing but stories of violence and cannibalism. When I wrote three pages of an X-Men "jam" comic book, proceeds of which went to feed starving children in Ethiopia, a reviewer in Amazing Heroes wrote, "Harlan Ellison who, perhaps surprisingly, wrote the most upbeat and positive of the Entity-induced nightmares." Not surprising, perhaps, to those who have read, say, "Jeffty Is Five" or "Paladin of the Lost Hour" or "With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole," or any of the hundreds of other stories I've written in which friendship, courage, kindness and true love are the themes. But you get what I'm trying to say, don't you?)

  And if we rationally and painstakingly savage a film we think is ka-ka, like f'rinstance Back to the Future, we get letters such as this one from Forrest J Ackerman:

  "Do you suppose you're the only person on Earth who didn't like/love Back to the Future? Or can you name me five others? Or don't you give a damn how many cinemicrocephalons there are in the world?"

  To which I replied: "Forry, with affection for you personally, I will let Anatole France respond to your question. 'If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.'"

  And so the general feeling is that we are Big Mouth, Know-It-All and Vicious Critic. Because we are required to meet the deadlines by which the magazines in which we appear live and die. When you turn to our columns, there we are, opening our big mouths. Because that is what we're being paid to do. And so the Lee Goldbergs of the world say, "No one will ever accuse Harlan Ellison of keeping his mouth shut."

  But, in weary truth, there are times when some of us don't have anything to say. Times when we haven't seen any films that require analysis. Times when we start an essay on why it is that most sf writers cannot write television scripts, or on why after ten years of publicly denouncing tv I went to work for The Twilight Zone, or . . . well, whatever. But we have those deadlines, so we do it.

  And all those who cannot wait to pounce on the latest essay as yet another example of the Big Mouth Know-It-All Vicious Critic shooting off his bazoo nod sagely and say, "Doesn't he ever shut his mouth?"

  For all of those kindly folks, and for those of you who know what it is not to have any particular opinion burning in you from time to time, I offer this installment, for which I am asking the editors of this magazine to pay me only one dollar:

  I haven't anything to say this time. Maybe next time. Maybe not.

  Mr. Goldberg: the millennium is at hand.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / February 1986

  INSTALLMENT 15:

  In Which A Gourmet Feast Is Prepared Of Words A Mere Two Months Old

  I have no idea who "A. Kindsvater" is, but s/he was represented by a quote at the top of a page of a 1982 memo book sent to me four years ago around Christmastime by a roofing repair company I'd engaged to locate a leak under the Robert Silverberg Memorial Cactus and Succulent Roof Garden here at Ellison Wonderland; oh I guess that'd be back around 1979; and they keep sending me these nifty genuine imitation-leather plastic-cover memo & date reminder booklets, little pocket-size jobbies, with birthstones and which-wedding-anniversary-is-the-13th (traditionally lace, but more contemporaneously, textiles and furs are looked on as appropriate), and a place to write in all the appointments you'd have gotten to on time if you'd thought far enough ahead to carry the little genuine imitation-leather plastic-cover memo & date reminder booklet with you, but you didn't think that far ahead and so the booklet lay in a drawer, unused for four years, until a few weeks ago when I tossed it out, along with the reminder booklets from 1983, 1984 and 1985; but not before I went through them and pulled out a few of those obscure quotations that serve as running heads every week. And that's where I discovered this quote by the dreaded "A. Kindsvater" whomever. Which quote was as follows:

  "The probability of someone watching you is proportionate to the stupidity of your action."

  Kindsvater—about whom I know absolutely nothing, yet whom I choose to capture in my imagination as having devised that truism at the moment s/he was caught by the Man on the Street's minicam as s/he was having perverted sex with a Rocky Mountain oyster in the show window of Bloomingdale's—certainly knew whereof s/he spoke, because no sooner do I write a column in which I explain in detail why there will never again be a worthwhile sf movie, than I see what is not only the greatest sf film ever made but is, in my infallible view, easily one of the ten greatest films of all time.

  (This list of 10, which I change in a shamelessly duplicitous fashion to suit the occasion, variously includes La Strada, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, M, Viva La Muerte, Providence and Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and Paths of Glory and about thirty others; but you get the idea.)

  Kindsvater had it absolutely pegged because I know all of you read that column, only two months ago, and have been sharpening your yellow fangs waiting for me to poke my little head up out of the molehill of opinion wherein I reside; waiting with blowguns to lips for me to register any sort of ameliorative revisionism; waiting to make me eat my words, force-fed through the medium of your ever-vigilant, ever-contentious, ever-maliciously nitpicking letters to the Noble Fermans who edit and publish this magazine.

  Well, if I have to masticate my manuscripture, I'll do it in as flamboyantly gourmandising a manner as was my original pronouncement. I herewith eat my words. The belief that sf is dead as a serviceable genre for motion pictures—stated baldly and without equivocation in my January installment—was a precise and correct view of the universe except for one thing; I hadn't seen Brazil (20th Century Fox/Universal
). I eat my words, but the maître d' is Terry Gilliam. And okay I made an ass of myself in print for the very first time in my life, but I can live with it because, though I may look like a dip, I'm still better off than you, because I've seen what is surely the greatest sf film of all time (and one of the ten greatest films ever made), and you never will. Nyaah nyaah!

  But enough levity. It is enough that your faithful essayist has learned humility through adversity. Let it suffice that unbridled arrogance has been brought to its knees by contradicting evidence so inescapably overwhelming that all that remains to me is the act of contrition in which I drive to this tattoo artist's place I know in Venice (California, not Italy), and have the guy inscribe on my tongue the following, from Montaigne:

  "To be cured of ignorance one must first confess it."

  Brazil was the talk of London when I was there last summer. The reviews had been strange. Mixed reviews, if truth be told. Reviews that ranged from querulously timid admissions by lesser reviewers that they hadn't understood one frame of this singularly disturbing film, to sheer panegyrics by usually flint-hearted critics in which the word "masterpiece" appeared so often it became suspect.

  Moorcock went wild over it. Lisa Tuttle couldn't stop raving about it. One after another English or Scottish fan, upon first meeting, almost before saying, "Glad to meet you," radiated messianic fervor and asked, "Have you seen Brazil yet?" Well, no, I hadn't; because it had come and gone so fast in the U.K.

  Distributed internationally by 20th (and in the U.S. and Canada by Universal), the film had been shown in England in its original 2-hour 22-minute version, and however well or badly it did at the box office, it left in its wake the kind of awed comment usually reserved for books that turn out to be, fifty years later, contenders for literary immortality.

  I was curious, naturally, but took it all the way we usually do when we hear how sensational some upcoming film is supposed to be. Like you, I've been burned too many times in the past few years. So I didn't go too far out of my way to find a suburban theater where Brazil might still be viewed.

  I knew that Brazil was the latest directorial effort of the lone American member of the Monty Python troupe, Terry Gilliam. Having seen Gilliam's three previous films—Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), Jabberwocky (1977), and Time Bandits (1981)—I hadn't been wildly impressed with his abilities as regards the first two, but had gone absolutely bugfuck over Time Bandits, which remains one of my all-time favorite movies (though not one of the 10 greatest films of all time, like Lawrence of Arabia, The Thief of Bagdad [1939], All About Eve, Metropolis, Throne of Blood, Viva Zapata or Singin' in the Rain). I was anxious to see if the talent and inventiveness directorially displayed in Time Bandits had progressed to Brazil in as startling a quantum leap as it had shown between Jabberwocky and Time Bandits. And when I learned that Gilliam and Charles McKeown had been joined in the writing of the original screenplay by no less a master of wordplay than dramatist Tom Stoppard, my interest was truly piqued.

  The cast sounded wonderful, too. Jonathan Pryce and Robert De Niro and Ian Holm and Bob Hoskins and Michael Palin, among many recognizable American and British names. But of the plot there was little said. No one could really explain to me what Brazil was about.

  Was it about Brazil?

  Well, no, Brazil doesn't enter into it at all.

  Then where does the title come from?

  Uh, well, you remember that song from the Thirties, "Brazil, where hearts were entertained in June / We stood beneath an amber moon / And softly murmured, 'Some day soon.'" And etcetera. Remember that song?

  Yeah, sure, I remember it very well. It was one of my favorites. I remember a terrific version done by Hazel Scott on the organ in some dimly-recalled film or other. So what's that got to do with this movie?

  Uh, well, it sort of plays over and under, throughout the film.

  Then this is a romance.

  Uh. Yes and no.

  Well, what the hell is it?

  It's, well, it's sort of a 1984-like story, that may make you think of Blade Runner, except it isn't anything like either one of them, although it has some resonances with Lindsay Anderson's O! Lucky Man and A Clockwork Orange, but uh er it isn't very much like either of those, either, and there's elements of a lot of the screwball comedies of the Thirties, with the tough-talking dames in them, and all sorts of non-intrusive hommages to films like Potemkin, and all this big-screen adventure on a par with Dune, but nothing like Dune at all, and then there's all this dream sequence stuff and, uh . . . er . . . oh dear . . .

  Stop! Stop! What you're trying to tell me is that this film is unclassifiable. It's sui generis. It's the kind of film you demean if you try to identify it by saying it's like this or that movie, only more pink. Right?

  That is correct.

  Brazil is heart-stopping. It is brilliant beyond the meaning of the word. I guarantee you have never seen anything even remotely like this film.

  And now here is the bad news.

  Universal's Sid Sheinberg wants the film cut. And cut again. And "re-thinked" to give it a happy ending. As "happy" endings were tacked onto the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Magnificent Ambersons. Or he won't release it in the United States.

  Not because he's an evil man, but because he likes the film, and he wants to see millions of people go to see it. Sheinberg has said, of this piece of genuine cinematic art, breathtaking in every way, "If we had this other ending and I could show you that it would do 100% more business, you'd be a fool not to agree, wouldn't you?"

  Yes, we'd be fools not to agree, if the yardstick were how well a piece of art appealed to the Great Wad, rather than being true to its own creative vision and reaching only those who would weep at its gloriousness. We would be fools were we to suggest that La Gioconda might not be a greater work of art if she had a wordballoon coming out of her mouth, and thereby might reach a wider audience.

  Terry Gilliam has not been allowed to preview the film here in America. Universal stopped two theater arts department showings at CalArts College and USC in October. Then Terry went on the Today Show and talked about it, with De Niro at his side. And all this, after Terry had voluntarily removed eleven minutes from the original version.

  (Don't fret. Terry says those eleven minutes don't feel missing. He voices approval of the minus-eleven version.)

  And so, all smartass aside, I must tell you that I was stunned by Brazil as I have not been stunned by a film in more than twenty years. I saw it by chance, at a very special bootleg screening, in company with half a dozen of the best critics in the country, all of us sworn to secrecy about who and where and how and when.

  But it looks as if you, readers, will be cheated out of this extraordinary experience. Sid Sheinberg has always wanted to be a creator. The frustration of his life is that he is merely one of the canniest and most creative businessmen in the world. So he wants to make Brazil better in the time-honored tradition of businessmen who run the film industry. He wants to piss in it.

  I tell you with cupidity, Brazil is one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. All gags aside, it is in the top ten.

  I have given you twenty or more titles of what I think are great motion pictures, here in this column, because an opinion by a critic means nothing, unless the yardstick is there for you to measure the opinion. If you agree with me that the films I have named in this essay are among the greatest films ever produced, then you may give some small credence to one who eats his words of two months ago, and tells you that Brazil is certainly the finest sf movie ever made . . . and very likely one of the ten greatest films of any kind ever made.

  And if you feel annoyed that you may never be allowed to judge for yourself, then drop a line to Sid Sheinberg at Universal, and tell him you want him to release Terry Gilliam's 2-hour, 11-minute version of Brazil.

  And try to keep a civil tongue in your head.

  I know how you are.

  And Sid's already pissed at me, so you needn'
t bother to tell him that Harlan sent you. Besides, I've got my mouth full at the moment.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / March 1986

  INSTALLMENT 16:

  In Which A Forest Is Analyzed Without Recourse To Any Description Of A Tree

  There are a few things in this life I have not gotten around to doing. I never did get that date with Sally Field, though I went so far as to script a segment of The Flying Nun for just such an opportunity. Never did drop that sugar cube drenched in acid given to me in 1968 by a well-known sf writer, though it lay wrapped in cellophane in the back of my refrigerator until 1980 when it was thrown out with a package of celery that had developed the consistency of Gumby and several Idaho potatoes which had grown such a set of eyes that we had to take the poor things in to have them fitted for contact lenses before they could be dumped. Never got to meet John Gardner, to tell him I admired his work but thought he was a meanspirited man. Still haven't had a homosexual encounter. I've got the shoes, but still haven't gotten around to taking tap dancing lessons.