 Erik Nelson's biopic Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a film about Harlan Ellison, played last night at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. The one-showing only appearance was preceded by a cocktail party, and followed by a live discussion between Nelson and Ellison, and then a question-and-answer session.
The 93-minute movie opens with Robin Williams asking Ellison "yes-or-no" questions, which lead to brief stories, and then to a full movie. And Williams reappears from time to time as the eager stand-in for we, the audience, admiring the life Ellison has built for himself, and his house, too. The movie took Nelson more than 10 years, filming Ellison when he could, as well as friends talking about him, and also digging out archival footage of a (at times much) younger Harlan Ellison. The focus of the movie talks about his life as a writer of both print fiction and film fiction (one screenplay, several more television scripts); his forays into the editing side of the business; his life as a person who knows who he is and how he's living; his political activism; his influences and family; and his own background. Ellison has developed a reputation as an abrasive, take-no-shit kind of guy, and that comes through quite clearly, but what may be more interesting is that Nelson was also able to elicit a softer side—there are unguarded glimpses of the man touched by old home movies, reflecting (however briefly) on his own mortality, and reminiscing with and about friends.
Neson's style of story-telling can be disjointed at times, but taken as a whole, he's put together a video equivalent of a Harlan Ellison short story collection. There are introductions to each individual tale, there are the wonderul stories themselves, that leave the viewer wanting more (although Nelson, like Ellison, knows when to end a story, before it gets too long), and there is a kind of coherence to the whole, though it isn't broken up into themes or shown as a strictly chronological progression.
I urge you to seek out this movie, though it may be hard to find. The next screening appears to be on 19 April in Los Angeles; more details are here. What you won't get (unless you're lucky enough to find a screening which Ellison and Nelson plan to attend) is the interplay between the two after the movie ends and the lights come up. The audience in New York got to hear, first, Nelson talk about his joy at watching his movie while sitting behind Ellison in the audience. To hear Nelson's version, Ellison reacts each time to the movie as if he weren't the subject. And Ellison said, "I've seen the film maybe a half dozen times, and every time I laugh," he chided the audience for not laughing, but we certainly were. "But I just can not grasp that it's about me." Later he said, "I look at this film as an out-of-body experience. It's not a film about me. It's a film about this funny, crazy fucker, and I'd like to have lunch with this guy." To which Nelson, deadpan, replied "No you wouldn't, Harlan."
Talking about the making of the movie, Ellison said "Nelson was doing the film for twelve years before I realized he was doing a movie about me. He was so under the radar that I never realized he was a serious filmmaker." Even when Nelson borrowed some of Ellison's old home movies, and later returned them dubbed onto newer media, Ellison apparently didn't realize he was the sole subject. In the film, we see Ellison looking at a new dub of a home movie from a family trip to Niagara Falls when he was 9, and on the film, Ellison cries to see his father (who died when he was 14) put his arm on the young Harlan's shoulder. Talking about it in the Q&A session later, he again teared up at the memory. Then he quoted William Faulkner: "No matter what it is a writer is writing about, if it's a man, he's writing about the Search for His Father," in realization that that's what he's been doing; trying to make his father proud.
Nelson echoed a widely held sentiment to Ellison: "It's not just your stories, it's your introductions. We read them, and we've internalized a part of you, and we want to be more like you." Ellison is uncomfortable with such sentiments, and turns them aside as assiduously as he does most compliments, explaining: "I can't handle the compliments. Insults are fine, but if I accept the responsibility of the compliments, I have to take all the responsibility. And then when some whackadoo takes a gun to a crowd, and then, when asked why he did it, he says 'I read Harlan Ellison's stuff, and it told me to,' I'll have to take the blame for that, too, and I don't want it." This sentiment dovetails with his atheism, as expressed in the film: "the universe doesn't care what we do; it doesn't even notice. Ultimately, we're responsible for what we do."
 Asked about his legacy—one of the few questions he ever left unanswered, according to Dan Simmons in the film—he told the audience: "I can't worry about it. I don't take me seriously, but I take the work very seriously," several times in the film, he remarks that writing really is hard work, but then, all good art is hard. "If the stuff lasts, it'll be because people still read, and that's what I worry about." At this point, he mentioned his experiences this weekend at I-Con, a science fiction convention on Long Island, which has grown enormous over the years. Ellison was dismayed by the huge crowds that turned out for the movie and television actors, and by the fact that he, himself, was apparently the only author on programming to attract more than a handful of people (every year I've seen him there, he fills every room he's in, and this year he mentioned that, over the course of three days, he was signing books for more than nine hours). "My concern," he continued, "is not that I've produced work that is worthy of being remembered. I'm worried that only the cockroaches will be left to read it. I don't know what the legacy is; this picture is probably it."
Ellison is tireless in his praise of his wife, Susan, and when asked why he'd trademaked his name, he responded: "Susan thought it was a good idea." She'd been looking through a catalog with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and John Wayne merchandise (all three names trademarked after their owners' deaths). "Why don't we trademark your name now?" He then went on to relate a story of a small publisher that stole one of his books and repackaged it. Citing the registered trademark, Ellison noted that this was a federal crime, threatened the publisher and its business partners, and was able to collect a tidy sum because of it. Of course, the way he told it is much more expansive and entrancing.
Obviously, this review doesn't go into great detail about everything discussed in the movie, but if you've read more than a couple of Ellison's stories, you already have an inkling of just what kind of person could write them, and this movie will answer those questions. If you haven't yet read his fiction, well, forget the movie: go buy a book.
For more of Ellison's thoughts, read any of his stories (and don't forget to read the introductions). In response to another question from the audience, he noted that Joe Stefko of Charnel House Books will soon be bringing out an omnibus edition of Ellison's commentary on television: The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat.
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