Harlan Ellison Dreams With Sharp Teeth

The enfant terrible of SF just turned 75, and if anything Harlan Ellison seems more energetic, irascible, and interesting than ever. Just caught the documentary all about Ellison on the Sundance Channel the other night, Dreams With Sharp Teeth. It’s hilarious, as you’d expect, but also rather touching, even if it did talk less than I would have hoped about the field of SF and the other greats that were Ellison’s peers once upon a time.

But really there isn’t much room for anything other than Ellison in this documentary, a man with no ‘off switch’ who launches into articulate and scathing rants on any and all subjects at the drop of a hat. As Neil Gaiman says in the documentary, Ellison is an “alternately impish and furious eleven year old boy,” and that’s about as good a description as you can make.

He’s also, of course, a brilliant writer and SF Grandmaster, and the documentary does offer some insights into his relationship to writing and his process. He’s very much a working class writer, and has always gone to great pains to dispel the illusion that writing is anything other than hard work. Writers are like bricklayers or farmers, Ellison says, they do the work one word at a time.

But ultimately it’s Ellison’s larger-than-life persona that is the showcase of the film and, while that is fantastically entertaining, it does overshadow any exploration of the lasting contributions to, and his place in, the field of SF. Still, I suppose the film just reflects the real world in that respect, and it’s only a miner criticism of a must-see documentary — just proof that what I really wanted was an even more in depth look at the lovable bastard that is Harlan Ellison.

Here is Ellison’s now (in)famous rant ‘Pay the Writer,’ which is part of Dreams With Sharp Teeth.