Harlan Ellison: How I Snookered Hollywood

So Budd comes with a couple of other people, and I say, “Oh listen, my wife is sitting here, would you take her to lunch?” So one of the guys took Billie up Vine Street to the Brown Derby and took her to lunch while we went to Beverly Hills.

Now we get to Beverly Hills and we get up to the office, and they call all the agents into the room, because here’s the big novelist Harlan Ellison, and Malcolm has said this guy is bright, up-and-coming … this is shortly after one of my books got a Dorothy Parker review, so I was entering into one of my 15-minute periods of fame, which have occurred over the years. And they begin talking to me about doing scripts, about getting me jobs.

Now, one of the reasons I was out here, and so they already knew about this, was that Alfred Hitchcock had bought my book, “Memos From Purgatory,” and I was going to write that as a script, but I needed money immediately. So I said Yes, I’d like to dip my toe in. As I said, I had never seen a script in my life. They proceed to send someone to pay our hotel bill, and they moved us to the Travelodge across from the Mormon Tabernacle on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was very nice.

The two guys who represented me were Stuart Robinson, who became the Stuart Robinson Agency when he went out on his own; and Marty Shapiro, who joined up with Mark Lichtman and became my agent for the last 40 years. I’ve never had another agent in this town after GAC.

So Stu Robinson with whom I became very, very tight -- I let him in on what was really going on, and he thought it was hilarious how I had snookered them into doing for me what they would have done for, I don’t know, Kurt Weill or Christopher Isherwood back in the day. And they never asked me for the money to pay them back for the cost of the motel or the meals or any other goddamn thing.

And Stu got me an episode of “Ripcord.” And I wrote this episode of “Ripcord” while I was writing the Alfred Hitchcock script.

The Hitchcock script I handed in later, but the “Ripcord” that I did was called “Where Do the Elephants Go to Die?” And that was how I got into the business.
 

1 | 2