Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 1

Harlan Ellison's Watching.

by Harlan Ellison.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

So many years. Memory has mislaid the moments of help and wisdom in which those who ought to be thanked here contributed to the doing of the work. A studio publicist who went out of her way to sneak me into a screening intended only for exhibitors. A scenarist who supplied me with privileged background information on why a film went wrong. A copyeditor who caught a serious error and stalled the magazine till I could write revised pages and get them airfreighted overnight to beat the deadline. The friends who understood why I had to cancel out of dinner at the last minute so I could catch a screening and write the review before morning. The editors who caught the flak when I savaged one of the studios that advertised in the magazine. My staff, who put up with the unshaven maniac in a bathrobe who waits for their arrival five days a week. So many of them through so many years. The moments are gone, and only the work remains. I hope they know who they are, and that somewhichway they see this note. They deserve more, but all I've got at the moment is thank you.

And even among that special group, there are some who have been of special importance in the preparation of this book. Edward and Audrey Ferman of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Curtis Lee Hanson, now a successful film director, who was my editor at Cinema. Art Kunkin of the Freep. And Brian Kirby, who stood in the editorial wind at a couple of newspapers whose names only a few of us remember. Bill Warren. Tim and Chuck. Norman Goldfind. The writers and staff of the Writers Guild of America, west . . . who make it supportable to work in an industry systemically incapable of respecting the written word or those who slave to produce it. Kathy and Sarah and Sharon, and Michael & Nikki. Gil Lamont, who does more than I can thank him for. And my wife, Susan, the beloved Electric Baby. Did I remember to say thank you?

With friendship, for.

BETTE FAST and HOWARD FAST.

because one simply must have.

heroes & icons, mustn't one.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

George Orwell.

ON SUNDAY 23 JULY 2006, in the Los Angeles Times, the iconic long-time film critic of venerable Time magazine, Mr. Richard Schickel, wrote a book review that began thus . . .

Oh, boyoboy, said I. And I called Richard, with whom I had shared s.p.a.ce on a number of occasions. On Monday 24 July 2006; and I cozzened him into giving me permission to use the foregoing-Oh, boyoboy did he get it right-and as you lumber on through these pages, every now and then come back here and let it refresh itself. d.a.m.n skippy!

-Harlan Ellison.

3 Nov 2007.

PREFACE.

by Leonard Maltin.

As the late, great Jimmy Durante used to say in mock disgust during his rambunctious act, "Everyone's a critic!"

Where films are concerned, the immortal Schnozzola was right: movies are a democratic art form, and every person who watches a picture, from the President of the United States to the guy who hauls away your garbage, has an opinion about them. As someone who makes his living voicing his feelings on the subject, I know that people cling vigorously to their opinions. They're all too willing to share them and they aren't receptive to anyone who tries to change their minds. I long ago stopped trying, though when I teach I try to get my students to expand their opinions beyond the summarizing statements "I loved it" or "It sucked."

Often I'm asked how I go about reviewing a film. The questioner a.s.sumes that I have a strict procedure, but in truth I don't. I try to be, as much as possible, a member of the audience. How I feel as I walk out of the theater or screening room determines the tone of my review, and over many years' time I've learned to trust my gut feelings.

Harlan Ellison apparently works the same way, but he has a great advantage over me, having spent much of his life accessing his stream of consciousness and channeling it through his fingers to a typewriter. (Yes, a typewriter . . . not a computer.) This enables us to know exactly how he felt while watching a film; there is immediacy and an almost tactile connection to the experience as he describes it.

Like any artist, he makes this seem perfectly natural, almost easy. I can a.s.sure you that it is not. I spent many years trying to find my critical "voice." Years ago, one of my bosses prodded and hectored me to give him exactly what Ellison does: a raw, unvarnished opinion, without that reserve that many reviewers cultivate. Another question that often comes up is what requirements are necessary to become a film critic.

Years ago, the feisty dramatist-turned-critic Harold Clurman answered this query by stating simply, "To be a critic you must have . . . a job." In other words, if someone will give you a gig writing reviews, then POOF! You're a critic. As unlikely as it may sound, this was true for many decades in the newspaper and magazine world-where, it was once said, the local ballet performance was often covered by the person who happened to be in the office when the free pa.s.ses arrived-and definitely the case in radio and television. Since "everybody" goes to the movies, editors and publishers a.s.sume that "anybody" who could write could write movie reviews.

This has always upset me. Do you think an editor or television news producer would a.s.sign someone inexperienced to cover sports? ("Hey, I've watched baseball my whole life-I can write about that!") Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely. Yet in years past, publications as august as The New York Times and The New Yorker have pulled people off their regular beat-or out of the blue-to work as reviewers. Fortunately, they haven't lasted long.

Ellison himself has the last word on this topic, from a 1977 column (reprinted on page 118 of this collection): "You must understand: any schmuck who goes to a movie and whose ego gets in the way of good sense, who runs one of those 'cinematic insight' type raps-as shown in example in Woody Allen's new one, Annie Hall-and then has the good fortune to con some editor into accepting such drivel, can be a film critic or reviewer. They do it not out of any deep and abiding love for motion pictures, or even because of an understanding of what it takes to create a film . . . they do it because they can get free screening pa.s.ses to the studio press showings. They are scavengers. Cinematic illiterates who pontificate without a scintilla of talent for moviemaking of their own. I put them in the same social phylum with kiddie-p.o.r.n producers, horse-dopers, and a.s.sholes who use the phrase 'sci-fi.'"

[Sidebar: note the word "rap." One of the pleasures of delving into this collection is that the essays mirror the times in which they were written. It's amazing how much our world has changed over the last forty years, especially in terms of slang and pop culture.]

As far as I'm concerned, a good film critic should have two qualities in equal measure: love and knowledge of movies. If he or she is deficient in either area it isn't going to work.

In the opening chapters of this book, Harlan Ellison establishes his bona fides, and traces his pa.s.sion for movies to his childhood. There may be some individuals who discovered the medium later in life, but most people I know who are movie crazy have been so since they were kids. What's more, the films they saw in their youth, the places they saw them, and the actors who cast a spell over them at that impressionable time of their lives stay with them forever.

(This doesn't mean that the details are always accurate, as Harlan indicates in an extensive footnote about the facts contradicting his memory of when he saw the Max and Dave Fleischer cartoon feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town. But rose-colored memories of boyhood moviegoing are what matter in this context, not the mundane specifics.) Saying that Ellison is pa.s.sionate is like calling Cameron Diaz s.e.xy. 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, p.i.s.sed 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 Rene 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 s.h.i.t," 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 a.s.sure you, Harlan Ellison is never dull.

Leonard Maltin.

July 2007.

FOREWORD.

by George Kirgo.

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.

"s.p.a.ceb.a.l.l.s," 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. Pa.s.sion 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, G.o.d, the movies," he writes. "For four hours every Sat.u.r.day 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 h.e.l.l 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 x.x.x 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 t.i.tles 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 cliche?). 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 pa.s.s 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, 1926August 22, 2004), President, Writers Guild of America, west (19871991) 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.

INTRODUCTION.

Crying "Water!" In A Crowded Theater.

PART ONE:.

In Which The Critic Blames It All On A Warped Childhood.

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 a.s.sistant 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 p.o.r.nography, 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 t.i.tled 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 t.i.tle), an animated entomological extravaganza recounting the angst-ridden travels and travails of a gra.s.shopper 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 s.e.xagenarians 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 Pa.s.sover 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.

Nonetheless, with the sensitivity all parents demonstrate when their kids threaten to eat worms or hold their breath till they turn blue, I was schlepped to Cleveland regularly from Painesville and, when my parents went out for the evening, I was put to bed at the residence of The Ancient Jews from h.e.l.l, feigning sleep but lying alert for a sudden dive through a window at the first scent of beaks and feet.

In that neighborhood a mere forty-eight years ago, just seven months before Pearl Harbor, there existed now-lost and barely recalled establishments whose names alone send a thrill through me even today: Coventry Drugs (where I bought my first issue of Street & Smith's Shadow magazine), Uberstine's Drug Store (where one could get three scoops of sherbet, all different flavors, in a cup cone, for 11), Benkowitz's Deli (in the days when the corn rye they used to make a combination corned beef and pastrami was so festooned with caraway seeds that one picked at one's teeth for six weeks thereafter) and . . .

The Heights Theater.

It was one of those small neighborhood cinemas built during the moviegoing explosion of the late Twenties/early Thirties. In retrospect, I know it was a modest house of movies, but it was glorious and gigantic to me at age seven. Out front the display windows held not only one-sheets and lobby cards in full color, but at least four scene cards in black and white from each and every film showing or coming. The ticket booth resembled a private stateroom on Cleopatra's barge, tenanted (as I recall) by a young woman so gorgeous and platinum blonde that merely laying down a dime for a ducat became an act of s.e.xual congress intense enough to send the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart to the eighth and innermost circle of Dante's inferno. The candy counter traded in ambrosia and nectar, Chuckles and Forever Yours, popcorn freshly erupted every half hour and slathered with real b.u.t.ter. The scent of it could have distracted warring armies.

And the seats . . . and the usherettes . . . and the screen . . . and the ceiling mural . . . oh, how I loved that movie house, as I loved the Lyric and the Utopia and the RKO Palace . . .

Going to the movies was all the books in the library at once. It was an event. Even having to go in the company of one's parents was something Halliburton would chronicle. And going alone . . . ! To be permitted to venture forth toward that mystic shrine all alone, pocket jingling with dime for ticket and three nickels for candy and popcorn; to know one could go into the Men's Room and not have to accompany one's mother into the Women's (oh G.o.d the humiliation); to select a seat way down front that produced a headache and neck-strain guaranteed to keep the Mayo Clinic solvent for three generations, a seat so far down front that one's parents would threaten you with having to cut the gra.s.s for a month if one didn't sit back in the middle "where any normal person can see."