Over the Edge: Stories by Ellison Harlan

Author:Ellison, Harlan [Ellison, Harlan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
ISBN: 9781497604476
Amazon: 1497604478
Goodreads: 21846131
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1957-06-01T08:00:00+00:00

THIS IS THE ONLY RECOGNITION THE MAN WHO MADE ALL THIS POSSIBLE WILL GET! HONOR HIM FOR THIS FIVE SECONDS!

Know this: the greatest actor in the world is helpless working behind a bad script. He can be an Olivier, a Welles, a Barrymore, even a Nimoy…he can make you laugh and cry with the merest inflection of his voice, and with a script that is senseless and banal and imbecilically-written…he is a bum. Conversely, give a bum a brilliant piece of writing, and critics in the Great American Heartland will rave for days about that great show they saw. Not because the actor was such a brilliant talent, but because what he had to do was fresh and insightful and compelling.

And given a fine script linked with an actor as fine as Nimoy, the usually vomitous level of television fare can be raised to something that approaches Art. It happens seldom, because the subsidiary factors are usually all conspiring to send out a product that is as meaningful as beets through a baby’s backside…but when it happens…there is glory there, and grandeur, and a sense of accomplishment, of having done something finer than merely selling living bras or cancer sticks.

There were days when the artist was king. When the painter and the poet were subsidized by lairds and dukes and kings, when the Pope had Michelangelo painting ceilings for him. Those days are past, and in many ways it is a good thing. But rather than continuing to laud all kinds of creators, the quivering jellyfish masses have atrophied their pea-sized brains with lousy confession magazines and gibbering situation comedies and hack cornball bestsellers to the point where they can only support the performing arts in their ardour. The ones who caper most prominently, who bellow the loudest, who appear before them without any collaborative effort on the part of the viewer. And the artists and the writers and the poets struggle to survive.

In the main the struggle is rewarding, not to mention handsomely paid. But the glory a creator needs to sustain him, to make him something more than a peddler of painted fish…ah, that is missing. The masses have heard of Hemingway, and Spillane, and Jacqueline Susann (God save us!) but do they know who wrote LORD JIM or DOMBEY AND SON or THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER? No, they only know that these pages have sprung up like wheat, unwritten, self-ordained. Just as the plot of each Star Trek miraculously appeared in the minds of the actors, and they got together down on the set one Monday morning and started doing it.

The world is a strange place, filled with odd-shaped people. It is often ugly and squamish and stupid. Whether you know it or not, one of the few hopes you have to come through it with your head in place, is by relying on your writers. They preserve history for you. They tell you the truth. The newspapers won’t do that, television won’t do it, only the writers remain eternal…the good ones who care, and have not had their hearts and backs broken.

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