The Screengrab : harlan ellison

Starlog Magazine’s Final Frontier

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

After 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog magazine has ceased to exist as a print publication. “Official word of Starlog's demise came in a posting last week on the Starlog.com site, buried five paragraphs deep in an update informing readers that Starlog.com had relaunched in beta as part of a ‘massive digital initiative’ and touting the fact that a ‘Digital store,’ to launch next month, will feature digital editions of the entire Starlog catalog,” SciFi Wire reports. “The last print issue available for the time being is #374,while issue #375 will be available exclusively as a digital edition on the network in the very near future.”

I’m not going to claim that I’ve kept up with Starlog lately – I’m guessing the last issue I read had some hot scoop on the secrets of Return of the Jedi – but this announcement still bums me out a bit. I remember purchasing the very first issue of Starlog in 1976 (or, more likely, hounding my mother into buying it for me), the one you see pictured here. At the time I didn’t care anything about “David Bowie’s new sci-fi movie” or whether “The Changes” would help Space:1999; I was all about that Star Trek episode guide. Decades before the existence of Television Without Pity, I nearly grinded that issue into dust, checking off the episodes I’d seen and giving them my own special star ratings. With no IMDb, Ain’t it Cool News or Morning Deal Report to be found, it was only through each new issue of Starlog that I learned of such tantalizing upcoming fare as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and the first Superman movie. The magazine was probably my first introduction to film criticism, through reviews by David Gerrold (who dared to find fault in The Empire Strikes Back, as I recall) and Harlan Ellison (whose Starlog reviews are collected in Harlan Ellison’s Watching.)

Anyway, the Twitter generation has no use for icky print and paper, so another long-running publication bites the dust. Still, there is some good news – once they put the entire digital archive online, we’ll all be able to have a good laugh at young Andrew Osborne’s letter decrying the sexual content of Saturn 3. See, there’s always a silver lining.

Harlan Ellison vs. Star Trek, Paramount, et al - Round XXVI

Peter Smith — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Screengrab contributor Faisal Qureshi reports on a brewing lawsuit. — ed.

I'm sure a lot of people have been enjoying the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek trailer with Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang rebooting the franchise after Paramount sucked it dry so many years ago. Now comes news that Harlan Ellison is suing Paramount for money he says they owe him for writing the classic 1967 Star Trek episode, "City on the Edge of Forever." For those unfamilar, the episode follows the adventures of Kirk and Spock as they travel to 1930s Earth, after a deranged McCoy inadvertently changes the past and prevents the the Federation from ever existing. To complicate matters, Kirk falls for social worker Edith Keeler (played quite well by Joan Collins), but Spock discovers that Keeler needs to die to restore the timeline.

Fans generally consider the episode to be the best of the series, but the production wasn't a pleasant experience for Ellison. His account of the whole mess also claimed that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had consistently lied to the public about the author's contribution. Yesterday evening, Ellison announced that he was going to sue Paramount. This is no idle threat given this is also the man who took successful legal action against James Cameron, ABC (for plagarism) and more recently, AOL. To quote from the scathing press release:

"To quote Gandhi: 'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.' ...And please make sure to remember, at the moment some studio mouthpiece calls me a mooch, and says I'm only pursuing this legal retribution to get into their 'deep pockets,' tell'm Ellison snarled back, 'F---in'-A damn skippy!' I'm no hypocrite. It ain't about the 'principle,' friend, its about the MONEY! Pay me! Am I doing this for other writers, for Mom (still dead), and apple pie? Hell no! I'm doing it for the thirty-five-year-long disrespect and the money!

"The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who 'have more important things to worry about,' who'll have their assistant get back to you, who don't actually read or create, who merely 'take' meetings, and shuffle papers — much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams — they refuse even to notice. . . until you jam a federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you've made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars. . . from OUR labors. . . just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters."

Even more importantly, Ellison is suing his own labour union, the WGA, for failing to take his complaints seriously. Given the last high-profile case involving Paramount's accounting practices was 1990's Art Buchwald vs. Paramount (the book about the case, Fatal Subtraction, also gave the WGA a kicking for their perceived lack of support), one wonders how far this case will go before Paramount or Harlan throws in the towel. Given his history within the court room, Ellison probably won't be the one to fold.

2008 Highlight Reel: The Top Twelve Screengrab Posts of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Compiling the weekly highlight reels here at the Screengrab is not such an arduous task, but putting together a year's worth of the finest in film bloggery was a considerably more formidable undertaking. Using a complicated points system akin to the BCS in college football, I have surveyed my fellow Screengrabbers, weighted the page views and reader comments, and come up with the following dirty dozen: the best of the year in Screengrab.

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Love it or hate, it's hard to deny The Dark Knight was the pop culture event of the year. Our man Osborne has some qualms.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Of course, as with any pop culture phenomenon in an election year, The Dark Knight was used to score political points, few of which made any sense to me.

Forgotten Films: The Oscar

Phil neatly dissects one of the all-time great so-bad-it’s-good movies, and apparently gets legendary author (and The Oscar screenwriter) Harlan Ellison to comment. (L.P.)

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne knows that, just as there are only seven kinds of stories, there are only five ways to make the endings of those stories totally blow your mind. (L.P.)

Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl

Leonard brings us the heartwarming tale of film critics engaging in a stimulating exchange of ideas.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul focuses on the single fiction film made by one of the cinema’s all-time greatest documentarians – a movie so bad I wasn’t even aware that it existed. (L.P.)

The View through the View-Master: The Iron Giant

Hayden - or as we call him around Screengrab headquarters, "the breeder" - looks at the Brad Bird classic through the eyes of both child and Childs.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew asks the musical question, "Why so much digital crap, Hollywood?"

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard evaluates the oeuvre of one of our most underrated schlockmeisters, Albert Pyun.

Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Enough with Indy, Rocky and Rambo. It's time for our favorite road warrior to make a comeback.

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil prefers the later, loonier Cruise. Find out why.

Unwatchable: It's Pat

I had to include an Unwatchable on this list, and this one seemed to be a favorite.

(Special thanks to Leonard Pierce for an assist on the comments and to Phil Nugent for diligent research.)

The Rep Report (23--May 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: One of the strangest and most intriguing new filmmaking talents to emerge in recent years, the Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk gets his first complete U.S. retrosepctive, courtesy of the Museum of Modern art, running from April 23 to May 8. Originally typed as a bit of a sickie on the basis of his 2000 film The Isle, with its isolated, watery setting, creepy eroticized atmosphere, and creative use of fishhooks, Kim has continued to turn out deluxe midnight-movie fare (such as Samaritan Girl) while also revealing a more restrained, meditative side in such films as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring and the weird, mute romance 3-Iron. The MOMA show will be of special interest to old fans eager to get a look at some of his movies that haven't gotten much play here before, including his 1996 debut picture Crocodile.

"Creatively Speaking" (April 25-27) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a series, curated by Michelle Materre and co-curated and produced by Neyda Martinez, that seeks to showcase "realistic, universal portrayals of people of color." It includes documentaries about the culture and political activism of South Africa, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a concert honoring what would have been Bob Marley's sixtieth birthday, the African-American activist Robert F. Williams, and the roots and spread of hip hop culture, along with a number of dramatic short films. Each screening will be accompanied by a Q & A session afterwards.

FESTIVAL NEWS: In spring, the film geek's heart turns to thoughts of film festivals, where the hardcore faithful can seal themselves up in dark screening rooms to take refuge from all that sunshine and pollen. The Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was founded in 2003 and is already well-established as perhaps the city's premier yearly film event, kicks off on Wednesday, April 23, and runs through the 29th. This year's week-long bash includes new features from Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Harmony Korine (Mister Lonely), Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World), and the Hoop Dreams, Steve James and Peter Gilbert (At the Death House Door), as well as documentaries on Joy Division, Harlan Ellison (Dreams with Sharp Teeth), and George W. Bush's home away from home, Crawford, Texas. From April 25 through May 8, Pacific Film Archive will be running standout attractions from the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, including Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails, Bela Tarr's The Man from London, Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut in Two, Roy Andersson's You, the Living, and Mock Up on Mu, the latest "pulp serial-cum-political tract" from Bay Area filmmaker and "culture jammer" Craig Baldwin. Across the border, Toronto's fifteenth annual Hot Docs Candaian International Documentary Film Festival begins on Thursday and spends eleven days showcasing the best in nonfiction filmmaking, including more than a hundred new pictures and retrospectives devoted to the work of Richard Leacock and Canada's own Jennifer Baichwal. And New York's youthful-and-still-growing counterweight to the city's fall festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, begins Wednesday and continues through May 4, with a handsome spread of independent and international films sandwiched in between the premieres of Baby Mama and Speed Racer. We'll have more to come on Tribeca as soon as it lands.

The Rep Report (April 8--18)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: Anyone who's had the aurally disheartening experience of watching a silent film with one of those canned, rinky-dink organ accompaniments that used to predominate public-television broadcasts should want to tip his hat to the Club Foot Orchestra, the San-Francisco-based ten-piece group that, starting in 1987, has composed and performed a whole string of new scores for various silent classics. On April 12, the Castro Theatre presents three great movies with live music from Club Foot: Buster Keaton's perfect comedy Sherlock Jr. as a special "discount-priced matinee", and an evening double bill of two peerless nightmares from Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated vampire film Nosferatu. It's hard to think of a better way to treat your eyes and ears on a Saturday night.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives gets its goofy on with "American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin" (April 11--18), a retrospective of the work of the onetime Warner Bros. animation director who saw his years working with Bugs, Elmer, and Daffy as a mere apprenticeship for handling Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. In his most distinctive work, Tashlin used his "living cartoons' and color and the Cinemascope screen as tools with which to create a Silly Putty universe. Things kick off with Tashlin's rock and roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, a Mansfield vehicle that includes performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Julie London. Part of the humor now comes from the film's cluelessness about the staying power and the sound of rock; between that and the exaggerated sleaziness of its show business milieu, it's a movie in which Little Richard comes across as practically the most rational person on screen.

NEW YORK: The Fifteenth New York Annual Film Festival opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 9 and runs through the 15th. This year's festival, which includes forty features from across the continent, includes a special focus on the emerging phenomenon on female African filmmakers, including Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, and Zina Saro Wiwa. The festivities will also include receptions honoring Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soynika, to be held at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery, adjacent to the Walter Reade Theater.

And we couldn't let this pass without a salute: tonight, at 7 P.M., the Film Society presents Erik Nelson's documentary profile of our man, Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which includes an original score by another living god, Richard Thompson. Both Nelson and Ellison his own bad self will be in attendance.

SXSW Short Takes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Odds and ends from the first few days of SXSW:

Humboldt County – After being flunked out of medical school by his own father, Peter Hadley (Jeremy Strong) goes for a ride with free spirit Bogart (Fairuza Balk) and ends up in California’s redwood country. There he meets Bogart’s friends and family, all of whom live off the grid and earn their keep by growing and selling marijuana. The debut feature from writer-directors Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky boasts an alluring setting and several strong performances, most notably Brad Dourif as the patriarch of the pot-farming clan. There’s a hole in the center, however: Hadley is an underwritten character and Strong is unable to breathe much life into him.

Older Than America – Director Georgina Lightning stars as Rain, a resident of the Fond du Lac Indian reservation in Minnesota who has been experiencing strange visions. Years earlier, her mother was institutionalized after suffering from similar delusions – or at least, that’s the official story. The truth Rain uncovers is based in reality: the children of the reservation were forced to attend a Catholic boarding school with the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man” – a place where unspeakable abuses took place. The history and setting could have made for a powerful movie, but Older Than America is a bit too clunky. The performances aren’t particularly lively, and the mystical elements don’t mesh well with the real-life horror. As a visiting government geologist, Bradley Cooper too often seems to be in his own separate movie.

Dreams with Sharp Teeth – Erik Nelson’s documentary on author/media personality/all-around cranky guy Harlan Ellison gives you just about what you’d expect, which in this case is not a bad thing. Nelson combines archival footage of Ellison’s TV appearances with newly shot material showing the author at his typewriter (yes, a manual typewriter, kids), reciting his work, and even being fitted with a hideous neck goiter for a role in a science fiction program. Friends and admirers ranging from Robin Williams (in his most bearable screen appearance in years) to Sandman creator Neil Gaiman are on hand to offer their two cents and/or take some cheerful abuse from the film’s subject. While there is an element of shtick (or as Gaiman prefers, “performance art”) to Ellison’s ranting, suffer-no-fools persona, he’s certainly worth watching for 90 minutes as Dreams with Sharp Teeth proves.

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Documentaries

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The 2008 SXSW Film Festival kicks off a week from tomorrow, and naturally the Screengrab will be your go-to source for wall-to-wall coverage. We're whetting our appetites by browsing through the trailers for the official selections and making a checklist of can't-miss screenings. Tune in tomorrow for the five most intriguing narrative films; for now, here are the documentaries that have our attention.

Crawford

In 2005, I went to Crawford, Texas for a wedding. This was at the height of "Camp Casey," the makeshift protest community that grew up around Cindy Sheehan and spent the summer heckling the vacationing president. Looking around at the nondescript one-traffic-light town in the ass-end of nowhere, I wondered why Bush would move there on purpose, when he could be spending his considerable leisure time kicking back in Kennebunkport, Maine. Apparently the townspeople of Crawford have wondered the same thing:

Super High Me

They drug test us once a week here at the Screengrab, so I wouldn't know anything about the marijuana or "pot grass" as I believe you kids call it. But apparently comedian Doug Benson knows quite a bit about it; he was named High Times magazine's Stoner of the Year in 2006, and now he's following in the footsteps of Morgan Spurlock by smoking "medical marijuana" for 30 straight days. Sounds like more fun than eating a month's worth of Egg McMuffins. Not that we'd know, of course!

Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Here at the Screengrab, you don't have to tell us that Harlan Ellison still has his edge; we found out firsthand. So we're very much looking forward to this portrait of the world-renowned author, and we're not just saying that to get on his good side! Although we are sort of wondering what Robin Williams is doing in this thing.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

Bigfoot is back, baby! The star of countless cheapo creature features and pseudo-documentaries of the 70s has been spotted in such recent fare as Strange Wilderness, The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang and The Wild Man of Navidad. This documentary from first-time director Jay Delaney follows a pair of amateur Bigfoot hunters whose cryptozoological quest provides "a source of hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town."

Shine a Light

Next to organized crime, rock and roll is Martin Scorsese's favorite subject – and who's to say there's no overlap between the two? An editor on Woodstock, Scorsese made one of the great rock movies of the 70s in The Last Waltz, and presided over the definitive Bob Dylan bio with No Direction Home. Now he shines his light on the Rolling Stones – although if this trailer is any indication, Marty himself is at least a co-star. Ironically enough, early word indicates this is one Scorsese movie that doesn't feature "Gimme Shelter" on the soundtrack.

Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The dreamers and the schemers...the hustlers and the hopefuls...the free-loaders and the phonies...the fakers and the famous...all fighting for the highest possible award! — tag line for The Oscar

It is not yet known just what kind of Academy Awards ceremony we're going to have this year if the writers' strike continues to complicate Hollywood's efforts to switch on the glitz. It could be said that in its long, star-studded history, the Academy hasn't really done all that much for the art of the motion picture, but it did inspire one of the all-time classic surreal trash movies, that one in a gazillion that justifies the often-misused and overtolerant phrase, "so bad it's good." The Oscar may not deserve to actually be called "good" in any sense, but it is a classic, if it's possible to be a classic among shitbombs.

It's certainly been a classic source of embarrassment for a great many famous people, some of them talented. With at least one of them, "talented" is barely an adequate word: this film marks the movie debut — no one who has seen it ever calls it his "acting debut" — of Tony Bennett, the man Frank Sinatra called "the best singer in the business." Bennett is also a famously nice guy, which is why this movie does not come up in his interviews; it would have been like an interviewer saying to Sinatra, "So, sport, what's it feel like to have screwed things up with Ava Gardner?", except that, with Bennett, it would have been the star, rather than the interviewer, who wound up broken and weeping. Bennett doesn't play a man who lusts for the Oscar — that role falls to Stephen Boyd, an actor who was put on this Earth for the single purpose of making Kirk Douglas look subtle. Boyd plays Frankie Fane, a fast-rising hotshot actor who tears a swath of destruction through the people in his life as he charges to the top. No friend or agent commands his loyalty. No woman strikes him as undumpable — this is a guy who's looking for a chance to trade up when he's with Elke Sommer! Bennett plays the one friend who tries hardest to stick by him, a groveling shmuck named Hymie Kelly. Hymie's decent nature prevents him from doing the world a favor by running Frankie over with his car, but he does let loose with his true feelings in voice-over soliloquy.

The notorious opening of the movie finds him sitting in the audience at the Oscars presentation, waiting to hear Frankie's name called, and setting the audience up for the deluge of flashbacks that will bring the us up to speed, by gargling these lines: "You finally made it, Frankie! Oscar night! And here you sit, on top of a glass mountain called "success." You're one of the chosen five, and the whole town's holding its breath to see who won it. It's been quite a climb, hasn't it, Frankie? Down at the bottom, scuffling for dimes in those smokers, all the way to the top. Magic Hollywood! Ever think about it? I do, friend Frankie, I do..." This, it will turn out, represents the movie's style of dialogue at its mildest and most naturalistic. Bennett, who has spun such magic with the words provided to him by Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn, and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, here had the chance to work with a real peach: Harlan Ellison. The movie's script is credited to Ellison, Russel Rouse (who directed it), and Clarence Greene (who produced), and Ellison's penchant for dialogue that's so florid it's borderline lurid — pulp poetry with a touch of hepcat — is much in evidence. (Hymie tells us that, "Like a junkie shooting pure quicksilver into his veins, Frankie got turned on by the wildest narcotic known to man: success! The parts got bigger and bigger, and Frankie got hungrier and hungrier." When Frankie is tired of being judged, he protests, "Will you stop beating on my ears! I've had it up to here with all this bring-down!")

The story the movie the tells and the movie itself actually have much the same punchline: Frankie, who's burned so many people that it's begun to hurt his career, gets the Oscar nomination, and its potential to provide him with a comeback, because he's been cast as "a man without morals," a role in which he can hardly help but be convincing, and the movie, which promises to rip the lid off Hollywood unreality, is itself a prime specimen of it. Beloved among a select set of aficionados of unintentional comedy, The Oscar is criminally unavailable on DVD, which might be a hint that, even after more than forty years, not everyone out there appreciates the joke. But somebody must hold the broadcast rights. If the WGA shuts down the Oscars telecast, whichever TV network is holding the bag ought to move heaven and earth to get ahold of The Oscar and show it instead. They'd be doing the Lord's work.

SXSW Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The full roster won’t be released until sometime after Super Bowl Sunday, but the preliminary highlights of the 15th annual South by Southwest Film Festival have been announced.

As you read here yesterday, kicking off the 2008 fest on March 7th will be 21, based on the self-explanatory Ben Mezrich book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. It’s probably long past time to keep hoping for Kevin Spacey to return to form, but his role as the professor who masterminds the ring of blackjack geniuses would seem to be his most promising in years. Kate Bosworth co-stars as the world’s sexiest math student.

Other intriguing entries include Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary retrospective on the always prickly and entertaining sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, and Wild Blue Yonder, in which Celia Maysles turns the tables on her famous documentarian father and uncle, Albert and David Maysles.

On the back burner, there’s Michael Radford’s Flawless, in which Demi Moore and Michael Caine team up for a diamond heist, and Run, Fatboy, Run, in which Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg attempts to win a marathon and the respect of his family. It’s directed by David Schwimmer, if you want to start curbing your enthusiasm now.

SXSW runs from March 7th through the 15th, all over Austin, TX.

Bonus Video of the Day: More Harlan Ellison

Peter Smith — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

That last Harlan Ellison clip was so hilarious, we've got to sling you another:

— Peter Smith

Harlan Ellison Explains Why Writers Strike

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Erik Nelson, the producer of Grizzly Man, has now directed a documentary on writer and essayist Harlan Ellison, Dreams With Sharp Teeth. Check out this excerpt of Ellison entertainingly explaining the importance of getting paid for your work and why he doesn't do DVD supplements for free. — Faisal A. Qureshi