Harlan Ellison story dedicated to Ray Bradbury

Harlan Ellison, who turned 80 just a few weeks ago, has a new short story in the online Subterranean Press Magazine. Titled "He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes", the story alludes to both  Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed League" and Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder". The story is also dedicated to the memory of Bradbury. Read the story here.

Harlan is also one of the latest additions to the Archive of American Television's oral history programme, with a video interview conducted in early 2013, covering most of the steps in Ellison's screenwriting career. Interviews in this series are usually continuous and chronological, but for some reason this one has been broken into short, top-and-tailed segments. While this has created some fun sections, it doesn't seem quite as carefully controlled as the rest of the series, and the sense of chronology is sometimes lost - as when Harlan talks about The Twilight Zone from the 1980s in between his comments on the 1960s series Ripcord and The Flying Nun. You can watch the interview here.

Harlan Ellison at 80

I find it impossible to believe, but Harlan Ellison is eighty years old today. And still writing and publishing like crazy (visit www.harlanellisonbooks.com to see his most recent new publications, and www.openroadmedia.com/harlan-ellison for his past works - all still in print).

He and Ray Bradbury were friends for years, and appeared together at many events. Here's a photo from an NBC Tom Snyder show, which I would guess was taken in the late 1970s. (Left to right: Ray Bradbury, Tom Snyder, Harlan Ellison - and an unknown fourth person. Any guesses?)

UPDATE - 1 JUNE 2014 - Several people have suggested that the person on the right is Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame, and that this photo dates is from The Tomorrow Show which aired on August 19, 1974.This sounds highly credible, and I can believe that it's the back of Roddenberry's head that we can see there. Thanks to Brian Sibley, who was the first to point this out!

Thirty years ago, David Gerrold wrote a piece for Starlog magazine in which he attempted to account for the various different ways that people see Harlan Ellison. His explanation for their widely divergent views is simple: it's like the blind man and the elephant. The cartoon accompanying the article put it best, so here is Phil Foglio's "What is an Ellison?" (Click on the image to embiggen.)

Ray Bradbury Library Dedication

Last Monday saw the dedication of the Los Angeles Palms-Rancho Park Library in honour of Ray Bradbury. In attendance for the event were Steven Paul Leiva, three of Ray's daughters (Susan, Bettina and Ramona), Harlan Ellison and George Clayton Johnson.

Also present were many friends and fans of Bradbury (and Harlan and George) with their many cameras, making this one of the best-documented of Bradbury events. I was not present myself (my excuse being that I live on a different continent...) but John King Tarpinian provides a full account of  the day at File 770.

After the formal dedication, Leiva, Ellison and Johnson held a discussion of their memories of Bradbury. Steven spoke of his professional relationship with Ray, which began with their work on the abortive attempt to make a film of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo (a film was eventually made, but without Bradbury's screenplay). Harlan spoke of how he and Ray would argue good-naturedly over their entirely opposing view of how the world is. George spoke of how he was always in awe of Ray's talent and generosity.

The whole discussion is preserved on video, on Harlan's Youtube Channel and also in this recording from Daniel Lambert. Although the Lambert version has a shorter running time, it does include a few additional minutes at the end of the panel which are omitted from the Harlan Channel version.

 Library poster for the event

Harlan with a school group before the discussion panel

The panel discussion was held in a room which had already been dedicated to Bradbury some years ago

Steven Leiva, Harlan Ellison, George Clayton Johnson

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Harlan demonstrates the correct way to sign one's books - after hilariously describing Bradbury's insistence on using a thick marker pen for his book signings

Bradbury, Ellison: Writing for the Screen

Last week I attended the Eaton Science Fiction Conference (which this year was combined with the Science Fiction Research Association conference) in Riverside, California, to present a paper on the screenwriting styles of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison.

The overall conference programme was ridiculously full, with seven simultaneous panels for most of the conference's three days. This is an amazing expansion since my first Eaton in 2008, which just had a single strand of panels.

My paper was part of a panel I had proposed on screenwriting. The paper title was "Screenwriting: Spectacle, Specificity and Speculative Fiction", and my intention was to illuminate the challenge of writing a screenplay for an imagined world, using examples from the scripts of Bradbury and Ellison to show two distinct strategies.

Bradbury tended to write non-technical scripts, resulting in a style of script which looks for all the world like a modern-day "spec script" - although he developed this style as early as the mid-1950s. Ellison, on the other hand, developed his craft in television in the early 1960s, in a time when it was common practice for the scriptwriter to write more or less in a shooting-script format, a style which is generally more prescriptive and more technical in terms of camera directions.

Over time, Bradbury's style became more and more simplified, and his scripts tend to read like very clear short stories. The heavy use of metaphor we often find in his short stories is largely absent, however, as he recognised how important it was to be unambiguous in describing a fantastical world in a screenplay. Ellison, on the other hand, developed a remarkable specificity in his scripts, which makes for some stunning visual concepts which challenge the director and production team to match his vision.

Time permitting, I intend to develop the paper for journal publication.

The other contributors to the panel were Julian Hoxter of San Francisco State University, author of Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters (New York: Continuum, 2011) and Michael Klein of James Madison University. Julian spoke on the emergence of the "spec script" format and its impact on action in blockbuster movies. Michael spoke on the mythos of Frankenstein as it developed in both Shelley's original novel and its first film adaptation. I learned a lot from both presentations, and appreciated both speakers' contribution to the panel.

Dragoncon '98

I haven't seen many photos showing Ray Bradbury with Harlan Ellison - but here's one that's come my way. It's from DragonCon 1998, and also shows Ray Harryhausen on the left and Julius Schwartz on the right.

Good news and bad news

I've been way to busy to blog just lately, but had to break the silence to comment on two events of this past week.

The good news is that The New Yorker has just published a special science fiction issue. After decades of ignoring the genre, it has now decided that there is something worth investigating. There are items in there from Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin, China Mieville and Margaret Atwood, which in a way suggests a fairly good sensibility about the genre: a couple of classic writers from within, but whose reputations have spread beyond genre boundaries; and a couple of more recent writers who have figured in a lot of debate about those boundaries.

Except...

Then they go and spoil it all, by saying something stupid like "sci-fi".

I haven't actually laid hands on the issue yet, but the table of contents (and some sample content) is available on the New Yorker website. Incidentally, the last time The New Yorker published an item with the byline "Ray Bradbury" was in 1947, when they premiered Bradbury's short story "I See You Never". The story was later selected for Best American Short Stories, and is these days familiar as a tale from The Golden Apples of the Sun.



The second event I want to comment on is the sad news of the passing of the artist Leo Dillon. Leo and his wife and collaborator Diane are best known for their illustrations for children's books and for science fiction and fantasy stories. For Bradbury, they illustrated his children's story Switch on the Night, and a number of other projects. There is a collection of Dillons/Bradbury images at the Art of Leo and Diane Dillon blog.

The Dillons are also, for me, inextricably linked to the work of Harlan Ellison: they illustrated the covers of his books quite extensively, as you can see from this collection of images on the Art of Leo and Diane Dillon blog. Leo's most recent work for an Ellison story was on the Dillons' illustration for Ellison's Nebula Award-winning short story "How Interesting, A Tiny Man":

I had often wondered about how Leo and Diane approached their collaborations, and indeed what motivated them to collaborate in the first place. Some answers are given in the New York Times obituary for Leo, which tells a fascinating story of two artists who started out as rivals, only to later find that their combined talent was greater than the sum of its parts.

Bug Jack Barron

Alongside my interest in Ray Bradbury's screen career, I have been a longtime follower of other fantasists who practice(d) the art of screenwriting. These include Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont... to name just six.

One of Spinrad's best novels is Bug Jack Barron, a work whose style and politics place it firmly in the late 1960s, but whose depiction of media manipulation is remarkably prescient - in some ways paralleling what Bradbury achieved in Fahrenheit 451.

Bug Jack Barron first appeared in Britain's leading science fiction magazine New Worlds, at that time edited by Michael Moorcock. Moorcock has written an excellent article about Spinrad and the novel.

Spinrad was keen to see Bug Jack Barron turned into a film, and wrote a screenplay adaptation of his novel in 1970. This week, for the first time, he has published his screenplay: it is now available as an e-book in the Kindle format. At the time of writing, it is a FREE download. Click here for the US download/purchase page, or click here for the UK page.

(Don't have a Kindle? No problem. You can download a free Kindle read for the PC: details here.)

I once spoke very briefly to Norman about the film, and there was obvious frustration in his voice as he told me of how the film's rights were tied up at Universal Pictures. On his own blog, he has given a bit more detail of how things developed and how he hopes that publishing the screenplay just might help get the property out of Universal's grip.

In the 1980s, Harlan Ellison was at work on another adaptation of the novel, for award-winning director Costa-Gavras. I remember eagerly awaiting the production of this film, which Ellison had spoken of in a number of articles and interviews. Unfortunately, the film was never made.

After I posted about Bug Jack Barron on the Ellison message board (the Art Deco Dining Pavilion), Harlan dropped in to report that his screenplay - described as an original work suggested by Spinrad's novel - will soon be published, from Publishing 180. The Ellison screenplay is entitled None of the Above, and should make fascinating reading, as well as being an excellent companion to Ellison's Brain Movies series of books collecting his best screenplays and teleplays.

Theodore Sturgeon

Ray Bradbury is the focus of my academic research into the relationships between literary text and screenwriting. I've also done a bit of study of the literature and screen works of Harlan Ellison. There are a few other writers whose literary and screen careers I have tracked, although I haven't gone so far as to write or publish anything about them. In this latter category is the late Theodore Sturgeon.

Sturgeon was born a mere two years before Bradbury, and yet he so rapidly established himself as a fantasy and SF writer of quality that he was a significant influence on Bradbury's own early efforts. Like Bradbury, Sturgeon developed a reputation as a stylist. Like Bradbury, Sturgeon wrote short stories, novels and screenplays. His best known screen works were Star Trek episodes, including "Amok Time", the episode that not only took us to the planet Vulcan but showed us the curious mating rituals the Vulcan race must endure. Actually, sex and sexuality were something of a thematic preoccupation of Sturgeon's, showing up in several short stories and his novel Venus Plus X (and elsewhere).

Sturgeon was in the news recently, because his personal papers are finally being brought together into a single collection, which will be housed at Kansas University. This is excellent news for anyone researching into Sturgeon's work.

The most detailed report I have seen on this is here.