"You Lie Down With Pigs, You Come Up Smellin' Like Garbage"

Famed scifi writer Harlan Ellison, 84, died yesterday.  One of his best known and best received works was A Boy and His Dog.    It was made into a 1975 movie of the same name.

One of his least celebrated and worst-received works was his script, co-written with others, for the 1966 timeless turkey and one of my all-time favorite films, The Oscar.  For some damned reason, this film has yet to get an official DVD release.

In this interview clip, Ellison talks about how he was concerned this film, his first feature film for which he wrote a screenplay, was the end of his career:




More:

The son of a dentist, Ellison was born May 27, 1934, in Cleveland, a town he described as being “very anti-Semitic.” While growing up, he was regularly beaten up by his classmates. And, he observed in the documentary, “When you’ve been made an outsider, you are always angry.”

At 13, he ran away from home and joined a carnival. Although he was found in Kansas City, Mo., three months later and returned home, he ran away again several months later to Canada, where he worked in a lumber camp. As a teenager, he also worked on tuna boats out of Galveston, Texas, and driving a truck carrying nitroglycerin on a construction job in North Carolina.

“And all that time, if I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about, ‘Gee, I could write that down like this…,’ “ he said in the documentary. “I picked up the writer’s true education on the road.”

Thrown out of Ohio State University for telling off a writing professor who said he had no talent, Ellison moved to New York City in 1955 and soon began selling short stories for a penny a word.