Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ****

Harlan Ellison is both famous (if not infamous) and obscure; it depends on who you ask. Over the past week, whenever I'd mention the documentary, Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth, I'd get one of three reactions: "that's the science fiction writer, right?" Or if they knew a little more: "Oh, that asshole." But most often, it was a blank "who?" All of which suggests that Ellison is the ideal subject for a documentary: important and influential in a realm most viewers know little about, and just enough of a, well, jerk to make for compelling cinema.

One of the last living members of that amazing generation of science-fiction authors whose heyday was the 1960s and 1970s, Harlan Ellison is probably best known as the author of the Star Trek (Original Series) episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." Like many of his contemporaries -- Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury -- he has produced a mind-boggling number of stories, books, and scripts, and has won a proportional number of awards.

But while the film dutifully charts Ellison's career and accomplishments, what's most memorable is the portrait it gives of Ellison's difficult personality. If you can imagine a Hunter S. Thompson or Norman Mailer, but much more prone to angry outbursts and a thousand times more coherent and talented at ranting, you'll have some idea how Ellison comes across.

In fact, one of his longtime friends, interviewed in the documentary, describes him as a 'volcano,' and it's an accurate metaphor: continually fulminating and holding forth against his enemies -- not people, generally, but their stupidity -- his "colorful and variegated invective," as Asimov once put it, is utterly engrossing and amusing from moment to moment, even if a few of his rants are a bit dated (his criticisms of television as a medium, for example, have about two decades of dust on them).

Somehow it's not surprising that he's on his fourth or fifth marriage, or that he has an almost supernatural capacity for nurturing grudges: villains in his stories often bear the names of childhood bullies; and once, after a college professor made the mistake of telling Ellison that he had no future as a writer, Ellison sent that professor a copy of everything he published for the rest of the poor man's life.

However, we're also shown a gentler side of Ellison, and it's easy to see how you might become (and remain) friends with the man despite his flaws. He's given to angry ranting, but he also has a sense of humor about his own absurdities, and he places a high value on the friendships in his life.

The film was over thirty years in the making, as its director, Erik Nelson, began shooting footage in 1981 for a film-school project, and it has a rich texture, blending original footage with archival footage and talking head segments with some of Ellison's friends, both famous (Neil Gaiman, Robin Williams) and less famous. (On that note, one of the DVD extras, "Pizza with Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison," is exactly what it sounds like and it's well worth setting aside forty-five minutes to watch.)

Overall, Dreams with Sharp Teeth is an informative and extremely entertaining documentary about an eccentric and influential writer.