And Back To The Ellison/City Lawsuit...

You're thinking of this thread, which was in the General Trek forum.

 

He sounds like my dad.

 

Why did he get to worked up about the Guardian being used in Crucible? That was one of the handful of times I have actually seen the Guardian used in a GOOD and extremely well written way. If he has any kind of case you would think he would go after some of the dumber stories it has been used in 1st.

 

Because Ellison believes that he, not CBS, owns the Guardian of Forever. Everything else you cite is beside the point. If it's infringement, that's all that matters, not whether or not the infringing use of the Guardian is "good" and "well-written," or if others have infringed on his ownership rights first.

 

Exactly so.

And thanks for finding the other thread.

 

Maybe due to having not heard anything about the lawsuit?

Seriously, I probably should have quoted just the former half. C'est la vie.

 

I think the intent behind the question was, why did he get worked up about that particular usage of the Guardian as opposed to its earlier Trek-lit appearances? I.e. what makes Crucible more objectionable to Ellison than the others?

Personally, I think it's just that it was higher-profile than the others, so either it got his attention whereas he overlooked earlier instances, or else (looking at it more cynically) it got more attention from the public as a whole and thus allowed him to draw more attention to himself by objecting to it. Kinda like how people sue the likes of J.K. Rowling for plagiarism instead of going after someone less famous.

 

Well, he said he found out when a fan of his saw it in the bookstore, and was moved to look closer because of the cover art, and saw it was a spin-off of "City" and was shocked, shocked, when he saw that Ellison was not mentioned in the acknowledgments, copyright page, or even listed as sole author with DRGIII getting his credit in the form of a "Special Thanks To" at the bottom of the title page in very tiny type.

It's possible no one else ever cared enough to write/email him about it. I seem to recall the fan being a bit of a snob in the quoted message.

 

At the time, Christopher, I expressed the idea that Ellison's ire was a "wag the dog" situation and suggested he was trying to deflect the s/f community's attention from the then-recent Connie Willis groping incident.

I've come to a rather different viewpoint, however. While he may genuinely believe that he, not CBS, owns the Guardian, I now believe that pride is the motivating factor in Ellison's quixotic quest.

In short, David R. George managed to do something that Ellison himself could not -- he wrote a novel. (Well, in the case of Crucible, we're talking three novels.)

Ellison has never been a long-form fiction writer. Never. Yes, there's Spider Kiss, from forty-some years ago, but it's not science fiction (it's actually a rock-n-roll novel) and I think it's properly novella length. Ellison has always listed forthcoming novels in his bibliography, often as not expansions of something else he's written, yet they never surface.

So, here with Crucible, we have an author taking something he created, who expanded it into an entire trilogy of novels.

Ellison couldn't have done that. I suspect Ellison knows that. And I believe that's what has raised his ire. The existence of Crucible reminds him daily of his own limitations.

 

I'm not sure that "higher-profile" is how I would put it. Crucible has actually gotten no more "attention from the public as a whole" than any other uses of "City" elements, and probably less than something the New York Times bestseller Imzadi. (Though PAD apparently asked HE permission to use the Guardian, and has said that HE would therefore not being bringing that books into his lawsuit.) But Crucible is both a more substantial product and more dependent on "City" for its very existence than any of the other works, must of which just use the Guardian as a generic time travel method or are minor one-off works of short fiction. Like it says on the cover copy, Crucible is an epic Star Trek trilogy that grows directly out of "City." Ellison could very well regard it as a more meaningful misappropriation of his work than the others that are invariably brought up in threads about this legal action.

I mean this in the nice possible way: that's an interesting short story you've written there, Allyn, but it involves layers of literary assumptions about Ellison's psychology that have no basis in anything. Given the above, Ellison's tendency to aggressive defense of his perceived rights through litigation and his history of (not unjustifiably) regarding himself as ill-treated by Star Trek, do we really need an elaborate theory of this case? You don't need the depth of Hamlet when Timon of Athens will do.

 

That's a pretty interesting theory. Surely the Ellisonites have now marked you for assassination...

 

To the same extent that "the Trekkies" have marked Ellison himself for assassination for daring to speak out about the use of his own work, I suppose.

 

Oh, it's completely unjustifiable. They treated him better than any other writer would've been treated in the same situation. He spent months laboring on a draft and was unable to come up with anything filmable, but they gave him every chance to keep trying, staying patient with him far longer than they would have with a typical author, because they had so much respect for him and his work. Bob Justman even let Ellison sleep in his office and eat leaves off his plant. And when they finally did have no choice but to assign the rewrites to someone who was capable of turning in a logistically feasible, filmable script, they nonetheless allowed Ellison to retain sole credit and thereby get all the money, even though as a rule Roddenberry was never loath to stick his own name on someone else's work. They treated him like royalty, and the so-called "wrongs" he's been screaming and whining about for 42 years are just par for the course in the TV industry, in any collaborative enterprise. Ellison's complaints are about as "justifiable" as someone who applies for a coal-mining job and then complains that his rights were violated because he was required to get his hands dirty.

 

I stopped posting here on trekbbs last month over various issues having to do with mods being preferential towards certain posters, but when I read this, I just couldn't leave it alone.

Why would his being able to write at ridiculous length be a goal of his? I don't know that any subject matter he has written in fiction that is longer than novel-length anyway, and he has inveigled against various long-forms as being wastes of space much of the time, something I usually agree with him on. The only long-form I know that he was involved with the miniseries format for STARLOST, but clearly that didn't evolve as envisioned.

Certainly Ellison has written stuff that is considered novel length; screenplays are considered by most to be such. Just because there is more air on the page and less verbiage doesn't take away from the art of writing one, or the time and effort.

D'ya think Joseph Conrad got all bent out of shape over folks writing treatises on HEART OF DARKNESS that are longer than his manuscript? Or if he had lived so long, would he have felt his limitations in seeing APOCALYPSE NOW as an expanded version of his vision, something that was beyond his attempting? Would it have raised his ire? No, he'd've probably been working on some other short form piece where content is measured by quality rather than word count.

 

No, nobody who knows how to measure length considers a screenplay the same length as a novel.

 

I think some people are reading too much into this. I don't think Harlan Ellison is jealous of anyone. I would virtually guarantee that he never read any of the Crucible books nor has the slightest interest in doing so. To him its about the bottom line. He feels that he's owed something and when Harlan Ellison feels that the he's owed something I pity the person that stands in his way.
Just for the record, I did read the Crucible trilogy and not only is Crucible: McCoy one of the finest Star Trek novels that I've ever read, but its on my top ten general Sci-Fi list. People should check it out.

 

It's not considered by anybody to be such. Novels are much much much longer (by any definition of the word) than screenplays.

 

Is it necessarily just because of the Guardian, or because that the McCoy novel revolves almost entirely on the events of COTEOF?

 

Not to split hairs, but I suppose you haven't been to the Maibaum archive in Iowa to see the 900 page screenplays written for many of the Bond films before they were broken down into conventional shooting scripts? STARLOG covered this with Richard Maibaum also, during the 1980s.

Ellison himself has said a few times he considers screenplays to be the equivalent of novels, there was some issue about how to list his IROBOT script for the Hugos, and it wound up in another category, one with WATCHMEN, which is another piece of art that would certainly rank as full-length literature to me. That they weren't included in the novel category speaks more to the limitations of those setting up the categories than to the works themselves.

Of course this forum seems to be fairly light on screenwriters ...

 

What shit! Just because something's always been a certain way that doesn't make it right! The entertainment industry's treatment of writers has been notoriously abusive. There's a real resentment towards the creators of filmed works. Especially once the fucking autuer theory migrated over to the United States. Autuer theory made sense when it was directors writing their own flicks but never every directory happened to be a writer. Unfortunately ever goddamn directed wanted to be known as an autuer whether or not they were the actual author of the fucking work. Over and over again the credit for the work if it was successful got heaped onto the director and denied the writer. Yeah the writer got credit if the work was unsuccessful because hey, that's the way it's always been!

Let's go ahead and villainize Ellison for having the balls to stand up for himself in a industry where most writers would just lube up and bend over. Let's hate on Ellison because he refused to spin the Hollywood wheel of abuse that keeps on spinning because writers agree to it because that's how it's always been done.

It's responses like your Christopher that make it clear to the world why the WGA is a fucking joke. Not one writer in that town has the balls to actually call the studios bluff and strike. To withhold their much needed creative services until they're given the power, the respect and the money that is their due. It is patently unfair that the director's get creative credit when their art is purely interpretive. It's unfair that directors get the big money when the people who create everything that they put up on the screen get peanuts.

Guys like Ellison who don't take shit from the studio machine are heroes because they don't accept the way things have always been. I can appreciate a gutsy, tough, bastard like Ellison. His biggest gripe on Trek have never been that his work has been rewritten. It was that Roddenberry constantly took credit for City and implied that Harlan wasn't needed at all. Harlan has done nothing but set the record straight time and again and gotten crucified by those who felt he should have just handed Roddenberry the keys to his asshole and let that fat bastard pump his pulpy load straight up his doughy rear end. It boggles the mind that passivity is tolerated and any resistance to abuse is condemned. Especially by those that claim to be writers. I especially don't understand how a writer who has had no success in the entertainment industry could be anything but appalled that someone who has had success is standing up for his rights. I don't understand that at all.

You attitude almost makes me want to have the word "writer" removed from my custom title and have it replaced with "whore" or "chump" or "pussy" since according to you the words should all be recognized as synonyms.

Then again maybe I should have the word "writer" replaced with the name "Ellison" because that's a name that deserves a lot more respect that any mere job description.