Whenever I feel frustrated,
at a low ebb with my own writing and in need of some inspiration, I turn to
Harlan Ellison’s movie reviews. Reading them always re-invigorates me and
reminds me why I started writing about film in the first place – a passion for
movies. One of the pivotal books of film criticism that inspired me was Harlan Ellison’s Watching, a collection
of reviews culled mostly from his stint at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during the 1980s. Before I was able
to purchase a copy for myself, I must’ve checked it out the local library
countless times. Having grown up on fantasy and SF films and television shows
during the ‘80s, his book tapped a rich vein of genre fare that I loved dearly.
Much to my surprise, horror and bemusement, he had no problem skewering as well
as praising movies with equal amounts of passion that came as a shock after
being weaned on issues of Starlog as
a child. The now defunct magazine championed SF and fantasy with an uncritical
eye save for a brief experiment with guest critics reviewing movies that did
not last long. With Ellison, here was someone unafraid to savage movies I
considered sacred, but in doing so he made think about them differently.
Sometimes I agreed with his opinion, sometimes I didn’t. But let’s be honest;
who agrees completely with their favorite critic?
Among his many achievements
and hats he wears, Ellison has published a vast work of over 1,700 short
stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, and essays. He’s been nominated and won
all kinds of awards, chief among them the genre staples like the Hugo, Nebula,
Bram Stoker and Edgar. Ellison is an outspoken critic of fantasy, horror and SF
from the perspective of an insider. His self-proclaimed role in life is “to be
a burr under the saddle,” and was famously described by author Robert Bloch as
“the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water.”
In the rather lengthy
introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Watching,
the veteran writer lays out his personal philosophy of film criticism. He feels
that a critic should review films based on their “background, knowledge,
sophistication and – most of all – affection.” Any decent film critic in his
eyes should meet a minimal standard of cinematic knowledge. To this end, a
critic “should love film. Should adore just going to the movies the way a
kid adores going to the movies.
Bearing with, a large measure of innocence; a large measure of I’ll sit here, you just do it to me.” Accordingly, a critic should
also be willing to “savage that which is inept, dishonest,
historically-corrupt, pretentious or simply meanspirited. That which demeans the
art form. That which lies to the trusting audience.”
The inherent problem with
writing film reviews, as Ellison sees it, is that “one is limited. The
word-pictures can only do so much,” lest they risk “robbing the movie-lover of
the frisson of joyful discovery.”
After all, “the critic can only go huzzah and huzzah so many times before it
becomes white noise. The critic is limited in vocabulary, because beyond a
certain point it becomes dangerous and boring, and then dangerously
counterproductive. Dangerous, because nothing
can live up to such panegyrics; boring, because what can one say after one says
don’t miss it?” This holds true for
negative reviews as the “short memory of the reader comes to expect savagery
and fulmination. Forgotten are all the palliating equivocations, all the
positive comments, all the rave reviews. Only the violence retains the color of
passion in a reader’s memory.” What inspired me was his statement that simple
reviews “serve no worthwhile purpose,” and that an in-depth essay, “illuminates
the special treasures a specific film proffers.”
As he pointed out in a
two-part interview with Starlog
magazine back in 1985, most periodicals, that covered genre fare at the time,
had little to no critical faculties:
“I am always suspicious of
whores. Starlog, Fantastic Films, almost all the magazines with the exception of Cinefantastique are flacks for the
industry. They live off the free hand-outs and they can’t really say bad
things. How honest can a magazine like that be? How penetrating can it be? So,
you do articles on special effects and visits to movie sets. You’ve brought up
an audience of kids who cannot tell good from bad.”
In the same interview, he
infamously called Back to the Future
(1985), “a piece of shit,” which did not endear him to Starlog’s readership. He called it “a rip-off, a steal from Bob
Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love to
begin with. It is absolutely mindless, empty-headed, manipulative and it’s a
sitcom.” Ellison was unafraid to skewer sacred cows like Star Wars (in an entertaining takedown entitled, “Luke Skywalker Is
A Nerd and Darth Vader Sucks Runny Eggs”) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), calling the latter, “a seriously
flawed film. It fails the first order or storytelling: to tell a story.” And
yet, he tempers this by saying, “the psychedelic segments are visually some of
the most exciting stuff ever put on celluloid; in a way it’s what cinema is all
about, really.”
Sometimes, Ellison used his
insider status within the industry to shed light on why a film was the way it
was, like with Dune (1984). He
briefly takes us through the failed attempts by the likes of Alejandro
Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott, and then explains why David Lynch’s version was
doomed to fail through studio interference. Ellison was of the opinion that
Lynch's film was set up to fail even before it was released in theaters. In
October of 1984, he was approached by USA
Today to write a visiting critic's review of Dune. The film was due to be released on December 14th, 1984.
Ellison figured that he had plenty of time to do a review of the film seeing as
how he was on amicable terms with both Universal Studios (who was distributing
the film) and Frank Herbert. And then something happened within Universal
Studios:
"It was widely rumored
in the gossip underground that Frank Price, Chairman of MCA/Universal's Motion
Picture Group, and one of the most powerful men in the industry, had screened
the film in one or another of its final workups, and had declared – vehemently
enough and publicly enough for the words quickly to have seeped under the door
of the viewing room and formed a miasma over the entire Universal lot – 'This
film is a dog. It's gonna drop dead. We're going to take a bath on it.
Nobody'll understand it!' (Now those aren't the exact words, because I wasn't
there. But the sense is dead accurate. Half a dozen separate verifications from
within the MCA organization.)."
Paranoia swept through
Universal and screenings were canceled or rescheduled with rumors fueling the
fire. Ellison mentions a meeting between the film's producer, Dino De
Laurentiis, and the owner of a big chain of multiplex theaters that did not go
well. This repeated itself at another screening in New York City. As a result,
Universal got very nervous and said that there would be no screenings of any
kind for anyone until the release date of December 14th. Ellison goes on to
recount a screening for the film that he tried to attend on the November 30th
but was not allowed entry after speaking to Frank Wright, National Publicity
Director for MCA at the time. Even after telling Wright that he was not going
to pan the film and getting USA Today's
West Coast entertainment editor, Jack Matthews, to talk to Wright, Ellison was
still denied access to the screening. Ellison recalls, "But if that was
what happened to a reviewer from something as important to Universal as USA Today, do you begin to understand
how, before the film ever opened, the critical film community was made to feel
nervous, negative and nasty about Dune?"
Two days before Dune opened in wide
release, Ellison saw the film and ironically gave the motion picture one of its
few positive reviews.
Throughout his tenure as a
film critic, Ellison championed the underdog, going to bat for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) when Universal Studios did
its best to marginalize the film by cutting their own version with a happy
ending, which, as you can imagine, didn’t sit well with Ellison: “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.” Ellison went on to call Brazil,
“heart-stopping. It is brilliant beyond the meaning of the word.”
Much to my delight, he
championed favorites of mine, like Big
Trouble in Little China (1986), describing it as “a film that combines
Indiana Jones-swashbuckle, Oriental goofery, special effects magic,
contemporary hoodlum-kitsch,
pell-mell action to the exclusion of logic but who gives a damn, good old down
home Yankee racism, parody, satire, the art of the jongleur, and some of the funniest lines spoken by any actor this
year to produce a cheerfully blathering live-action cartoon that will give you
release from the real pressures of your basically dreary lives.”
However, much to my dismay,
he missed the boat on some of my favorite films, like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984), which he called, “An
unintelligible farrago of inaudible sound mix, bad whitefolks, MTV video
acting, blatant but hotly denied ripoff of the Doc Savage crew and oeuvre
spiced with swipes from Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, a plot that
probably makes sense only in Minkowski Space, six funny lines, four clever
sight gags, and billions of dollars’ worth of promotional hype such as Big
Brother-style rallies at sf conventions.” Ouch. However, I’m willing to forgive
him for such transgressions, because even his takedowns are entertaining.
In his opening dedication,
Ellison says that “one simply must
have heroes & icons, mustn’t one.” He is one of my heroes whose quality of
writing I aspire to but know, deep down, I’ll never achieve. That’s what makes
him so unique – that brilliant mix of intensely personal opinion and vast
knowledge of how films work and don’t work. However, it doesn’t stop me from trying.
I appreciate the brutal honesty in his writing and his willingness to go
deliciously over-the-top to make his point. He just doesn’t like a film, he loves it, and on the flip side, he just
doesn’t dislike a film, he hates it.
Most of all, his willingness to go into detail about why a film worked or didn’t
is what inspired me the most and is why I prefer to go into the backstories of
how a film came together (or didn’t) because sometimes that story is just as
interesting as the finished product. Sometimes it provides insight into what we
see on the big screen. Most of all, Ellison’s writing reminds me that the best
criticism comes out of a passion for movies – the sheer love of watching
something for the first time or revisiting an old favorite again.
SOURCES
Goldberg, Lee. “Harlan
Ellison – Next Stop: The Twilight Zone.”
Starlog. November 1985.
Goldberg, Lee. “Harlan
Ellison – ‘Call me a Science Fiction Writer-I’ll Tear Out Your Liver!’” Starlog.
December 1985.
Posts
