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This Mug's Game We Call Writing: Harlan Ellison Interview, Second Installment: In our latest episode, the award-winning author shares some more thoughts on his lawsuit against AOL
In our latest episode, the award-winning author shares some more thoughts on his lawsuit against AOL
?In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight?: Ellison with gold Green Lanter
Friday, August 05, 2005
By Michael Helke
About the most ridiculous question a writer can be asked is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Harlan Ellison gets it a lot. To this innocent inquiry, he typically responds with evasions like “from a warehouse in Schenectady” or “voodoo rituals.” Nevertheless, he hears it so often that one wonders if he does, in fact, reflect upon it in quieter moments.
For the purpose of this introduction, allow me to wager a guess. Read his essay “Driving in the Spikes: An Essay on Anger and Revenge by a Master of the Form,” collected in The Essential Ellison, and you'll find it all there. Originally published in Los Angeles magazine in 1983, “Spikes” is the Quintessential Ellison essay, interweaving moments of drop-down humor and pure heartbreak. The same place from whence his creativity derives is the same place he gets his obsessive energy.
Ellison grew up in Painesville, Ohio in the '40s. He enjoyed a rich, active imagination, honed by a near-religious devotion to literature, comic books, and radio broadcasts (one of his favorites being “Captain Midnight”: in a 1946 school photo, he can be seen standing at the front of his class proudly displaying his Captain Midnight Secret Squadron Decoder Badge). He needed the consolation: his Judaism made him a target for bullies and a dartboard for bigots. In “Spikes,” Ellison recounts how one summer day, when he came home from camp, he was informed by his father that an anti-Semitic neighbor from up the street had his pet puppy put down. From that moment on, it seems that he decided that he would never let any evil done unto him or his pass without a fight.
It certainly hasn't affected his passion for exacting justice; and justice has always been difficult in coming. In 1980, Ellison sued ABC and Paramount for plagiarizing “Brillo,” a story he co-wrote with Ben Bova, for the TV show FutureCop. The trial, which was held before a jury in federal district court, lasted four weeks. The jury decided in favor of Ellison, awarding him $337,000. At the time, it was the largest sum awarded in a plagiarism case in history. In 1984, he took director James Cameron to court for stealing from “Demon with a Glass Hand,” an Outer Limits episode adapted from his story “Soldier,” for The Terminator. He won that one, too. Within a year, he caught Paramount out on yet another instance of theft, this time an idea of his that became The Other Place, a short-lived fantasy series. This time they settled without resistance.
You would think that the numerous battles he's waged to protect his scripts and stories from “creative input” (a clever way of saying “sabotage”) would siphon energy away from his projects. You wouldn't be entirely wrong. Although the time lost on pursuing satisfaction, be it litigation or putting a director's nutsac in a vice, could have been spent working on any number of books, his output as it stands is nonetheless astonishing: over seventy volumes, comprising novels, graphic novels, novellas, and short story collections -- to say nothing of the numerous awards and nominations. To date, he has won the Hugo award 8 times, the Nebula three times, and awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by P.E.N., the international writer's union (for “An Edge in My Voice,” his columns for Future Life and The L.A. Weekly). If I had a thousand more words to spare, I would cover all his achievements. The reader is directed to check out the biography at his website, Harlan Ellison Webderland .
Between ABC/Paramount and Cameron, Ellison fought another battle, this time against one of his publishers. Back then, paperback publishers were in the practice of supplementing their earnings with ads for cigarettes and alcohol, sewed into their titles' bindings. Ellison eschews both toxins, and did not like the idea of his name attached to ads for same; in fact, he included a clause in his contract forbidding their appearance in his books. Well, the company that reprinted one of his books got around the clause. Ellison demanded that they pulp all of the offending copies, release a new version, and revert the rights to his name. They resisted. Ellison recounts the various stages in this battle in “Spikes”: When various written pleas went unheeded, his friends mailed bricks to the publishing house. When that failed to persuade, he enlisted the aid of “Sandor,” an inept Lithuanian hit man, to scare the beejeezus out of the company's Comptroller. When even that didn't sway them, he exercised the nuclear option. He mailed them a dead gopher -- fourth class. At last they got the message.
One of the three most satisfying sentences in the English language -- after “I told you so” and “See that gorgeous blond? I'm banging him/her” -- is “I win.” No matter what the challenge, be it writing or the fine art of exacting revenge, Harlan Ellison plays to win. Keep that in mind.
Stop Smiling: I spoke with Charles Petit about two years ago, and he told me that the CD litigation, which began in 1994, and all the possible ways that electronic rights could be exploited and abused, should have been paid closer attention by the publishing industry. “However,” he said, “in interviews with publishing industry executives, shortly after we filed Harlan's case [in 2000], we got a lot of [responses, on the order of] 'What the heck are you talking about?'”
Harlan Ellison: Yes. That's common. There is an ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-ground attitude that prevails in New York. You remember that old New Yorker cover that -- I can't remember who did it -- you know the one that shows New York and then the rest of the United States getting smaller and smaller and smaller? [Saul Steinberg.] It's a famous cover in which New York is the center of the universe. They have no idea of things that are going on anywhere else, not only in the country but in the world. I was talking to an art director in New York who is fairly knowledgeable. I mean, she's a very, very bright woman, and she does very good work. I said to her, “You know, you really ought to look into the work of Jack Vettriano. He's in England.” She said, “Who is he?” I couldn't believe it. Vettriano is now so accepted that they did a piece on him, on either 60 Minutes or 20/20, one of those; and I said, “You're so hip. How can you not know Jack Vettriano?” She got very upset. She said, “Well, I can't know everybody.” I said to her, “Yes, you have to know everybody! You're an art director!” If you were a newspaper salesman, well, you have to know everything. But if you're an art director, you at least should know every artist in the world who's of any consequence. That should be your job.
The same goes for writers; the same goes for business. My case was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The front page, for God's sake! And there are people who still don't know anything about it. They have no idea. When you see someone come out of a courthouse on television, and they say, “We wanted to send a message, and we've sent the message, blah blah blah.” Bullshit! You have to keep sending the message because nobody's listening! Most people are dumb as a ditch post! They don't know squat! They don't listen to the news, they don't read the newspaper, they don't keep up with the monthly magazines or the weekly magazines. If you're going to be current, for God's sake, you've got to know what's going on everywhere, in every venue. You've got to be as smart as you possibly can. You've got to be a Renaissance person. You've got to know art and science and business. You've got to know all of these things. I've been amazed at how many people who have, since the lawsuit, tried to do something like it, and Charlie Petit would say, “Are you unaware of the fact that Ellison will sue your ass off? That if he wasn't afraid of AOL or Paramount, or of any of the other people that have messed with his work that he's had to take on, do you really think that he won't come after you?” And they say, “What AOL lawsuit?”
I'm sorry to rave and ramble. It makes you crazy. Because if people don't have the information, then you're dealing with an illiterate opponent. While you can fight ignorance, and while you can fight arrogance, arrogant ignorance is impenetrable! So you start from square one all over again. But we've pretty well succeeded, because if you see a list of writers who have been ripped off, you won't find my name there very often. And the reason you won't find my name there very often is that people know there are consequences. But then I get a reputation for being litigious. Well, I'm not litigious! I have to protect my annuity, and I have to protect my property, and I have to protect my rights. I've had my name trademarked. I'm a registered trademark. People ask, “What does that mean?” I said, “What it means is, the Franklin Mint is not going to put out a Harlan Ellison pewter figurine.”
That's what it means. There's not going to be Ellison diapers and Under-Roos.
The lack of current information that these people suffer is astonishing. Meanwhile, you're talking to one arrogant attorney after another. They come spilling out of these law schools, and they all think they are going to be on Boston Legal next week. They're really very arrogant when they speak to you, because they know that their client has deep pockets, and they can charge as much as they want; and the more trouble that I make, the more money they make! The attorneys for AOL made a fortune! They made an absolute fortune. They were known in the industry -- I mean, I knew nothing about them when I started [with my litigation], but very soon I learned that they're known throughout the country as a sort of an inner Beltway. They wouldn't even talk about settling until after they've billed more than a million dollars themselves. They are the ones who got fat off this thing, even though they lost the case and handled it ineptly.
When this thing started, I tried to get in touch with the head of AOL. Through a mutual friend, I sent the head of AOL a note saying, “Please, I don't want your money. I'm not in this for money. I just want to protect my stuff. Please get in touch with me. Let us work this out.” They never called. We never talked. And they went on and on and on. It was an inertia that was promoted by the attorney. The attorney wanted to get fat off it. And they would never talk settlement. Well, finally, when we won the reversal in the federal district court, they saw the error of their ways. The people at AOL contacted me -- it wasn't the attorney; they wouldn't allow their own attorney -- and contacted me. And that's how we wound up settling this thing. That the principals got together and talked: if this were the case in most of these cases, where it's not someone who's thinking that they're going to get fat and have nothing but venality at heart, these things would just disappear.
The Internet has purposely gone ahead and made people believe that this technology is the end-all and be-all, and if you aren't in on it, you are a Luddite. They do it in subtle ways. I'll give you a classic example: when computer games and computers started being sold on television, how many commercials did you see in which Dad is sitting there, trying to work some simple thing, like a CD-ROM or a shoot-'em-up game, and he can't do it. He can't figure out how to do it. And along comes his son or his daughter, little John or Jenny, age seven, who says, “Dad, get the fuck out of the way. You're an illiterate asshole. You're yesterday's news. Get out of the way.” And they sit down and bam, bam, bam, they're running it. In other words, ignore your ancestors. Ignore your parents. They don't know how to do it. This is not your father's game. That's the line: “It's not your father's game.” It's not your father's car. It's not your father's magazine. It's not this, it's not that, it's not the other thing. So anything that went before is not only disregarded, it is disrespected. It is thrown aside summarily. We are reversing the kind of culture that brought us to where we are today, which is that that which went before is a signpost for the future. If we can see the horizon, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. When kids are told that theirs is the noblest state of all, and that they know everything, and no one else knows anything, that ignorance is the way to be, your feelings are more important than your intellect, what you have is a generation of selfish little fucks, who think that it's okay to steal because they want it; and trying to convince them otherwise is like trying to talk Goethe to a cage of baboons.
But I don't hate the Internet per se. I'll go to the chat room on my website there'll be somebody who just came in, and they'll ask a question that has been asked a dozen times before, and answered, fully and completely, a dozen times before, and everybody else will jump on this and say, “We talked about this last year. Don't you ever go to the archives?” Well, no, they don't. Because they have no background. On the web, it's all just happened a minute ago. No one's ignorance is ever dispelled. It's just perpetuated. I have nothing against the Internet. I don't want to blow up the Internet. I would like to blow up television. But if I did that, then I wouldn't be able to see Lost.
SS: You undertook this fight at great personal expense.
HE: Yeah. Had I realized what it was going to cost, how much time it was going to be, I probably -- and I say this with reservations, because I'm the kind of idiot who invariably goes after windmills -- I probably would have done it anyway, because that's the way I'm built, but the nice thing about it is -- we didn't make any money; I think I'm about $110,000 in the hole for the four years of the lawsuit -- but the nice thing about it is that we've just finished paying off more than $50,000 to repay everybody who contributed to the KICK Internet Piracy Fund. People who sent in a dollar, or five dollars, or a hundred dollars, or a thousand dollars, or five thousand dollars, we've paid them all back, plus ten dollars extra as, what we call it back in Ohio, where I come from we call it “earnest money,” to prove that you were serious. It took us about seven months to do it. We had to track down a lot of people who had moved. But everybody who sent in money has been repaid, and if they haven't, it's because they haven't asked us for it. When we would get a contribution in, we would write down their name, their address, how much they had given, and we went back down that list and went back and paid everybody.
A funny thing that started happening -- there are two very interesting side notes: one is that people who sent in five dollars, ten dollars, even fifty dollars -- as opposed to people who had sent a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars -- we started hearing from a lot of these people saying, “Ah, we don't want the money back. Forget it. It was a good cause. We sent the money, and we don't need it back.” So we had to send out an advisement to everybody -- I think there were about four thousand of them -- and it had three options. One of them was, “Congratulations on winning. Yes, please, send me back my money and the additional ten dollars earnest money. I could use the money.” The second was, “Yeah, send me back my original money, but you can keep your ten dollars and buy yourself a cheeseburger.” The third was, “Nah, I don't need the money. Go and take a vacation.” People who gave us low amounts of money said, “Ahh, keep the goddamn dollars. We don't need it. And if we send five dollars, certainly don't send us fifteen dollars, because we don't want to make a ten-dollar profit off it.” People who paid us big chunks of money all wanted it back. Some of them were very famous writers. I mean, people had a lot of money. I had to laugh. I mean, I didn't resent it. It didn't bother me. It just made me laugh that the richer the people were, the more people that wanted their money back. Well, that's smart! [laughter] They know what they're doing. We sent every single penny to everybody. I don't know of any other lawsuit where the promise made at the git-go that they would repay any money was actually followed through. When you come to the end and you're still in the hole -- about $130,000 -- you say to yourself, “Well, hell, this is coming out of my pocket, but I said I would do it when we won the case, and we did, so I would pay it back.” Whatever else anyone wants to say about me, as much bad gossip that circulates about me because I sometimes -- I'm active, and when you're active, there's always going to be somebody who thinks what you're doing is wrong -- they cannot say that I'm dishonorable.
So I wound up being like Zorro. Ta-da!
SS: When I spoke with you briefly in 2003, you told me that you had spoken with a head honcho at Microsoft about your case. I remember you had a very succinct rejoinder for him. What was it?
HE: I was invited to be a keynote speaker at an electronic information seminar in Washington D.C. that was sponsored by the U.S. government. In the process of doing it -- it was in McLean, Virginia, where the C.I.A. is -- we were having lunch in the commissary, and somebody came up and said there is such-and-such a guy who is Bill Gates' right-hand man at Microsoft. He's a huge fan of yours and he's got one of your books and he would love to have you autograph it. I said, well, fine, have him come on in, he'll sit and have a cup of coffee with us while we're eating, and I'll be happy to sign the book.
The guy came, and he was a very nice guy. A lovely guy. Charming guy. And he was, in fact, a longtime reader of mine. He gave me his card and said, “If there's anything we can do, I talk to Bill every day. I have his ear every day. If there's anything I can do…” He started talking to me about writing an original story for Microsoft, for the web, and they would pay me some staggering sum of money -- I don't know, $50,000 for a short story -- and I said, “I like the sound of that.”
So when I got into the lawsuit, which was about a year or so later, and he and I had spoken a couple of times. We had exchanged phone calls. We were not bowling buddies or anything, but he was very friendly, very nice, and I liked him. He called me and he said, “Here at Microsoft, we're watching this lawsuit of yours. We think it's very important, because if they can steal your stories, they can steal our platforms.” (Well, I didn't even know what a platform was.) I said, “Oh. Okay.” He said, “Bill and I are watching this very, very, very closely, and we wish you well” and so on and so on.
I said to him -- and I guess it wasn't awfully gracious of me, but I was sinking in debt at the time. We had already spent well over two hundred thousand dollars on legal fees, and I just didn't have that kind of money. It was all coming out of my savings, which I was going to retire on. I said, “Look, I appreciate your calling, and I know you're sincere, but try not to blow any more smoke up my kilt, if you will.” I said, “The good wishes are fine, but I need money.” I said, “Tell Bill I'm delighted that he's concerned about my case, but when he comes back from lunch today, have him turn out his pockets and I'll take his spare change.”
SS: [laughter]
HE: He said, “Yeah, we can do that.” I never heard another word from him.
SS: [recovering]
HE: Yeah, but listen, kiddo, we never got a penny's worth of help from any publisher. Not one single publisher gave us a penny. Writers who make millions and millions of dollars never sent a cent, some of whom have been friends of mine for thirty and forty years, and they have enough money to fucking buy Prussia, and they never sent a cent. Most of the writer's organizations jerked us around. Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) voted out $2000 for [combating] all Internet piracy, a piece of which went to me only because one of my attorneys at the time was Christine Valada, who happened to be the attorney for SFWA. We never got a penny from Mystery Writers. We called them, we circularized them, we sent them all the papers, and each time we had to do this, [we heard] “Oh, we've never heard of this case. Can you send us something on it?” P.E.N. International, that gave me an award in defense of the First Amendment, we called them. I talked to the president of P.E.N., for Christ's sake. I talked to the west coast president. I talked to the general president back east. And each time, they'd say, “Oh, we've never heard of this case. We'd like to see it.” I said, “You have seen this!” I said, “We faxed this stuff to you three times already!” They never put in a penny. They're busy saving a writer in Peru from going to jail, but they couldn't bring themselves to get involved in this case. They pled ignorance. We never got everything from the Author's the Guild, from the Writer's Guild of America. Not one of these organizations so much as lifted a hand to help us. And they'll all benefit from it. Every one of them. Then afterwards, a representative of one or another of these people called and said, “Well, congratulations.” At that point, I was so furious with them that I said, “Fuck you!” You know? “I mean this in the politest, nicest way, but screw you. You didn't lift a hand to help me. And now you're going to call and pretend to give a damn that we won? We won despite you, not because of you or on behalf of you.” I said, “I did if for the writers, not for you people. You're too busy throwing cocktail parties to promote yourselves.
We did this one all on our own. The four thousand people who contributed to the KICK Internet Piracy Fund are the people who deserve all the kudos. Those are the people that understood that theft is wrong. These were people who understood what was right.
They say you can't fight city hall? We burned city hall to the ground. And we danced a jig in the ashes.