A lit fuse, p.23
A Lit Fuse, page 23
AOL responded that they had removed the stories once they were made aware of the posting and admitted that their complaint address, given to the U. S. Copyright Office, was out of date. Moreover, they said that they only hosted the site for a fraction of a second and were therefore exempt under special copyright laws passed by Congress to protect “immediate and transitory” content. Ellison charged that this still wasn’t fast enough.
Robertson settled for $3,600. Remarq (which by then had been acquired by Critical Path, Inc.) also settled but for undisclosed terms. In March 2002, Ellison lost his first round in U. S. District Court, by which time he had spent some $300,000 of his own money, including his retirement fund. Fans and colleagues sent him donations to help out when he appealed to the Ninth U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2003, and that’s when things started to take off. Several software firms filed amicus briefs supporting his claims, and four of the five major record labels (the notable exception being AOL/Time Warner’s Music Group) joined in. AT&T and a group of tech companies joined to oppose him.
Although he initially sued AOL for $488 million, he admitted in his deposition that he would settle for repayment of his expenses plus what his supporters donated plus an extra twenty dollars for each of them. “I really see myself as standing there on the goddamn barricade with a cudgel in my hand,” he told Anna Wilde Matthews of The Wall Street Journal. “We are up against inimical forces. We are up against City Hall.”177 A settlement was reached on May 20, 2004, an announcement was made on June 10, and on June 19 he received his check from AOL. (He is forbidden to discuss further details.) On July 16 he distributed $83,000 to repay everyone who had supported his legal expenses plus the extra twenty dollars apiece that he’d promised them. He proudly keeps the check framed on his wall. He’d also had to sell some of his art collection to make ends meet during the cash drain.
“I think he’s scrupulously honest in his handling of business, and his personality is delightful and unique,” says fellow author Daniel Pinkwater, who was a beneficiary of Ellison’s largesse. Sometime ago Pinkwater, the prolific author of young adult books, got a call from animator Ralph Bakshi. “ ‘I’m calling you because Harlan Ellison said you’re the only one who could help me,’ ” Pinkwater says Bakshi told him. “I was taken aback and flattered that Harlan Ellison should know me, so I was off my guard and wound up working for Bakshi, and we all know what that’s like. Harlan has since denied the whole thing. I was paid [by Bakshi] fifty percent of what I was owed and got an agreement that he would never call me any more.” From Ellison’s point of view, he was simply trying to give a hand to a fellow writer. From Pinkwater’s, the hand was attached to the brilliant but excitable Ralph Bakshi.
“You get a reputation as a litigious guy to prevent people from stealing from you,” says fellow writer, Mark Evanier. “I’m sure there are people in the world who have thought about bootlegging his work who have said, ‘Oh, no, let’s not steal from him, he goes after people.’ It’s like putting a burglar alarm on your house so they’ll go next door and burgle the house that doesn’t have one. I think he’s quite wise. He’s probably one of the least bootlegged authors of his stature on the internet because of this.”
Lawsuits notwithstanding, Ellison has other ways of defending his turf. The most celebrated, operatic example of this in a crowded Ellison canon is the time he mailed his publisher a dead gopher. The dispute was over a contract provision that forbids cigarette and liquor ads from being stitched into his paperback books, the penalty for which is immediate reversion of the rights to Ellison and the destruction of all the breaching copies.178 When Signet Books of New American Library ignored the contract and included the offending ads in the August 1974 first printing of Ellison Wonderland, Ellison demanded satisfaction. His publisher insisted that there was nothing they could do about it.
“I’m not going to sue them,” Ellison advised his lawyer. “I am going to make their life a living hell, and I promise you, when I get done with the sons of bitches, they will beg me to take the rights back.”
Realizing that the people on the lower levels of Signet were just “good Germans” (his term), Ellison decided to make the company’s comptroller address the problem. He wrote the publisher’s comptroller, Ezra Isen, and was not given the courtesy of a reply. A follow-up telegram yielded the same non-result. So he began what he calls Phase One.
“In those days, the Post Office delivered everything [including postage due]. I mailed him 213 bricks, each one very neatly wrapped in brown butcher’s paper: ‘Ezra Isen, deliver by hand, do not crush, fragile.’ No return address. At the end of the third week, I sent a very small note on Donny Osmond stationery, and it said, ‘Would you like to release my book, or do you want me to mail you the rest of the shithouse?’ ” Ellison’s Signet editor, Olga Vazeris, called him to ask what was going on, and he told her.
When Phase One failed, he moved to Phase Two: asking a friend of his, who was a Lithuanian hit man, to throw a scare into Isen as he left work. “Imagine this apparition walking beside you with his arm around you saying, ‘Your son’s name is Michael, your daughter’s name is Stephanie, she goes to the Cadwallader School on Long Island, and if you come home and find her forehead nailed to the living room wall, you will know that you should let Harlan Ellison have his book back.’ ”
Phase Three involved writing the comptroller — who he learned had a heart condition — a grisly letter describing in detail what Serita Ellison, who had just died of a similar heart condition, had to endure before she passed. This, according to Vazeris, shook him but not enough to capitulate. So Ellison escalated to Phase Four involving a gopher that he had picked off in his back yard with a .22.
“I put it in a little box along with Theodore Cogswell’s famous recipe for boiled gopher stew and I mailed it off to Ezra Isen. Fourth class mail. I’m told that by the time it hit the Chicago shunting station, it was ripe. We are talking mondo puke-o. I get a call from my editor, Olga Vazeris, that is so inarticulate, so crazed, she can’t even speak. ‘Why Why Why? We had to have the mailroom fumigated!’ She said, ‘Ezra Isen went in for open heart surgery this morning!’ I said, ‘I hope he lives.’ She said, ‘Why, so you can keep on tormenting him?’ I said, ‘No, he’s gotta have the strength to release my book.’ ‘Don’t you ever give up?’ she said. I said, ‘That’s the message!’ ”
After Ezra Isen had his coronary bypass and came out of the hospital, he released the book to Ellison.179 Signet also had to destroy the entire first printing of 65,475 copies and eat the cost. A second run, several weeks later, ran sans ads.
He also went to the mattresses in 1976 with Macmillan Publishing Company over their sale of unsold copies of Alone Against Tomorrow: A Ten-Year Survey (1971) to Marlboro as a promotional giveaway. Not only did the publisher ignore a contract clause giving Ellison the option to buy such copies at cost (he has never allowed his work to be remaindered), he demanded that they collect them back from Marlboro and sell them to him at the same cheap price the cigarette company had paid. They did.180
The most significant breach of contract, ethics, and spirit that sent Cordwainer Bird aloft was The Starlost. The multi-part 1973 television series has been called the worst science fiction show of all time. Numerous other entries have challenged its position since then, but the chasm between intentions and results brands The Starlost as a major disappointment. And the worst part is that Ellison saw it coming.
The doomed odyssey began in February 1973 when Ellison was engaged by Twentieth Century Fox to create a mini-series that would be produced on tape in partnership with the BBC in London, where it would be shot. Robert Kline, head of West Coast taped syndicated shows, pitched Ellison on the concept of The Fugitive in outer space.181 Ellison balked at such a retread and offered Kline an eight-episode, original idea about a thousand mile long ark linking hundreds of self-contained biospheres fleeing from a doomed Earth half a millennium in the future. Its mission is to find another habitable world and populate it, but a hundred years after the flight begins, a mysterious “accident” kills the crew and isolates all the biospheres so no two societies have any contact with one another. Eventually an outcast hero discovers the secret, learns the history of Earth, and has to build a team to rescue the wandering spacecraft in order to save humankind. He called it The Starlost. Keir Dullea (David and Lisa, 2001: A Space Odyssey) was poised to star.
Kline wasn’t interested in Ellison’s take. “That’s not what I have in mind,” he told him. “This was my idea. I thought it was something that the NBC stations and the BBC, which then moved into Canada, could understand when I said I want to do The Fugitive in outer space. That made it a very saleable project, having Keir Dullea coming off 2001 and [being] a good actor. The other was, bring it, because Harlan is brilliant in this area, but one that I could pitch or I think could sell. I then came back to him, and I said, ‘Would you be interested? We’re not gonna do your project.’ ”
As Ellison chronicled with fury in “Somehow, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas, Toto,”182 Fox started selling the series in syndication before they had a contract or even a written précis. (Ellison dictated his idea into a tape recorder because Writers Guild rules kept him from writing without money.) After a three-month wait, Ellison was called back and informed that the series would run an indefinite number of episodes, not the eight he had plotted; that it would be shot in Toronto because the BBC had pulled out and CTV (a Canadian television network) had taken over, and that he needed to write a show “bible” (stylistic and narrative guidelines) immediately. By this time the WGA was on strike, and Ellison, a staunch union man and Board member, refused to write. That’s when the threats began (even, he says, in the middle of the night) and then the bribes, including a hapless starlet sent to his door (he turned her away). Finally it was determined that The Starlost as a Canadian series could avoid the WGA strike prohibitions.
Kline disputes this timeline. “He wanted to be able to say he respected the Writers Guild. But that was a lot of bullshit. He met with me frequently during the strike, and I remember [it] like yesterday, and it was thirty-some odd years ago, when I drove into the lot, he was on the strike line, and he was yelling, screaming — I said, ‘That’s fine’ — and he came over and said, ‘I’ll meet with you tonight at my home at 7:30.’ ”
But this meeting may have been part of a scam that Ellison was planning so he could use the WGA strike as a cover to extract payment without violating union rules by actually writing anything. “He met me at the airport before I was leaving for Canada,” Kline says, “[and] I gave him a check. I then opened up the box where you put the script pages as the Air Canada flight left. It was a title page and second page and nothing more. When I got to Canada, I told them we were stopping payment on the check and I expected his delivery, which would be given to somebody from our legal department the next day.”
Eventually Ellison flew to Toronto, sequestered himself in the Four Seasons hotel, and began interviewing Canadian writers to find one who could script his plotlines. (Kline disputes the interviewing process.) None had series or sf experience, including candidate Norman Klenman. Ellison brought Ben Bova aboard to look after the show’s science aspects and dealt with Canadian producer, Bill Davidson, who oversaw the physical requirements such as the massive sets. Douglas Trumbull had been hired as executive producer to bring with him an invention he had developed that could synchronize two video cameras — one on the actors against a green screen, a second moving in perfect sync against a miniature background. The device would save countless dollars in set construction and allow, for the first time, moving matte shots. When the system proved uncertain on a tight TV schedule, Trumbull departed.183 The next week, Bova quit and, in 1975, published The Starcrossed, his version of the debacle.
Now Ellison’s mother, Serita, enters the picture. By this time, she had relocated to Florida where she lived on Social Security and stipends sent by the Rabnicks (her daughter, Beverly, and Beverly’s husband, Jerold), occasionally augmented by her son. She shared an efficiency apartment on Lincoln Road (before it became trendy) with another woman and amused herself by people-watching at the Fontainebleu, the Doral, and other resort hotels. Ellison visited her when he could, and Bev and Jerold did more often. Lisa, Beverly’s and Jerold’s daughter, believes it was during this period that Beverly’s antipathy toward Harlan intensified. “Harlan maybe came down once in a while, but that was Harlan’s heyday when he was traveling, when he was writing, doing the movie, all that. Bev was a little jealous because Bev was always there and always doing things for [Serita], and [Serita] was always bragging about Harlan — Harlan this and Harlan that. She was proud of him, of course.”
Now in her early eighties, the usually vibrant Serita’s health began failing, and Ellison left The Starlost to rush to her side over objections from his TV show’s already panicked producers. When Serita was deemed out of imminent danger, Ellison returned to Canada to discover that his pilot script, originally titled “Phoenix Without Ashes,” had been rewritten by Klenman into “Voyage of Discovery”; that the producers had spent untold amounts of money building the control bridge of the ship that wasn’t needed until the last episode; and that his bible had been rewritten and ignored. In response, Ellison did the only thing he could do to protect his reputation without losing the money he had earned. He informed Kline that he was removing his name from the show and substituting Cordwainer Bird.
On top of that, the Writers Guild charged Ellison with working during the strike. He took leave of absence from the WGA Board while the matter was adjudicated. He was unanimously cleared and reinstated to the Board that very day. Then he got his revenge. He submitted his original pilot teleplay, “Phoenix Without Ashes,” to the WGA and, on March 21, 1974, was awarded the Guild’s top prize for Best Dramatic Episodic script. Ellison calculates that the debacle of The Starlost cost him $93,000 in lost residuals from removing his name (“That was his choice,” Kline says), a year of his life, and wear and tear on his reputation. The series, of course, was a disaster both critically and with viewers, and it was canceled after one season. (There is some question whether eight, twelve, or sixteen episodes aired nationally.)184
And that was where it stood until the early 2000s when IDW Publishing (Idea and Design Works, LLC) approached Ellison with a plan to bring out both “Phoenix Without Ashes” and “The City on the Edge of Forever” as he had written them rather than as they ended up. In 2010 they published Phoenix Without Ashes as a four-issue graphic novel with artwork by Alan Robinson and a cover by John K. Snyder III. It made the New York Times bestseller list, the first time any of Ellison’s titles had done so. Four years later, IDW released The City on the Edge of Forever as a five-issue graphic novel and also in hardcover (in 2015) with art (based on the Star Trek cast and including numerous Easter eggs) by J. K. Woodward, covers by Juan Ortiz and Paul Shipper, and adaptation by Scott Tipton & David Tipton.
“When we first got the Star Trek license in 2006,” says Chris Ryall, IDW’s Chief Creative Officer, “one of my first calls to Paramount was, ‘Hey, could we ever do the original teleplay?’ and, my God, the language that they threw at me about Harlan and the language that Harlan threw at me about them, there was no way it was ever going to happen. But then, over ten years of getting to know both of them and building trust on both sides, it got to a point where both sides softened and wanted to do it. Certainly Harlan had been very vocal about Gene Roddenberry, so I understood their reticence; even going into it, they said, ‘We’re fine with doing it, but we need to have assurances that Harlan is not going to go out there and keep this campaign alive about Roddenberry as he’s done in past years.’ I talked to Harlan and said we had to be careful, and he said, ‘Look, I said everything I had to say in my own book explaining the situation. I want my work to stand for itself. I want people to compare it to the episode and decide for themselves which was the better version.’ ”
Ryall and Ellison met in typical Ellison fashion: Ellison phoned Ryall out of the blue to compliment him on publishing Peter David’s Fallen Angel and by the way to ask for some back issues. Ryall, who was already a fan, happily complied, and once a friendship was established, they reached an agreement to turn “Phoenix” into a graphic novel followed by “City.”
“When we first presented Harlan with those pages,” Ryall says, “not only did he like them, he started crying. To see him that touched by bringing his original teleplay to life visually after all these years was an amazing thing. We finally were able to give the guy what he had wanted to see all these years.”
In “Somehow, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas, Toto” (1974), Ellison quotes Charles Beaumont’s simile of working in television: “Attaining success in Hollywood is like climbing a gigantic mountain of cow flop in order to pick one perfect rose from the summit, and you find, when you’ve made your hideous climb … you’ve lost your sense of smell.” Ellison regards The Starlost as the Mount Everest of bovine defecation. And yet years later, the bloom may be returning to its summit. In 2014, IDW Publishing began negotiations to produce Ellison’s original “Phoenix Without Ashes” for television as he originally intended.
Perhaps Cordwainer Bird will be able to roost in peace. For now.
