My mom taught me that if you can't say anything nice about the deceased, don't speak at all. So..........

But he did write City On the Edge Of Forever.

Yes, he did. Sorry, Nex. I don't mean to diss your thread or speak ill of the deceased, but I've never ever heard anything positive about him.

I know he was a bit of an a-hole but he was one of the last great SF writers of the 20th century together with Asimov,Clarke,Blish,Vonnegut,Heinlein,Herbert,Aldiss and Dick.

Agreed. My apologies.

His "Dangerous Visions" anthologies in the late 60s almost single-handedly brought the New Wave of science fiction into focus. TOS writers represented in the ground-breaking anthology of all original material included Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, and Norman Spinrad, as well as Ellison himself, and TAS writer Larry Niven.

you either loved him or hated him, or, like me, you loved AND hated him. True artist with all the quirks stirred in. He lived and he lived BIG in his field. RIP

He even agreed himself that he was not the most likeable person(to put it mildly).

My favorite Harlan Ellison story is about the time he had a meeting with production executive Adrian Samesh. The meeting was held in a conference room where a large model of the submarine Seaview from the tv series Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea was displayed. The story goes that when Samesh told Mr. Ellison that writers will just do what they are told, Mr. Ellison allegedly picked up the Seaview and attacked Samesh with it.

Ellison never got the idea that especially when writing for a TV show, it's writing for someone else, not himself. And even if his version of City could have been filmed in the late 60s, I don't think it would have been very good. Not as Star Trek.

That is exactly the vibe I got from Ellison in that interview I posted which also featured Doohan,Deforest and Koenig.But if Ellison was so dismissive of Hollywood why not avoid it all together much like what Philip K Dick did for most of his life.And even Dick at some point understood when they were making Blade Runner that some things had to be changed when compared to his original story.And he went from being a sceptic of Blade Runner being made into a movie into being somewhat enthusiastic about the film when he saw the first scenes at a preview(claiming that Scott had exactly put on the screen the world he imagined and found the experience so immersive predicting that the movie would have a huge impact on movies to come)Dick unfortunately passed away shortly before Blade Runner was released so he never saw the finished product.

So we don't know if he preferred the theatrical version, or the re-edited Director's Cut (which was quite different in the way the scenes were arranged).

That whole difference between theatrical release and the work print was largely due of he producers of BR ,who wanted a voice over by Ford (and the "happy ending drive into the sunset")because they felt people might be confused both Scott and Ford had always hated the voice over and the "happy end "but those issues played when Dick already had died.But from interviews I heard of Dick talking to a good friend on the subject of Blade Runner was that the issues (and those were based on the first draft of the screenplay by Hampton Fancher)Dick had with the movie that it played out like a film noir and Scott's interpretation of the term android(or replicant)was that Dick meant humans who dehumanised to a point where they turned into "auto-reflex machines' (in the case of the Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? Deckard's dehumanisation while "retiring" more human androids)while Scott viewed hem as "Supermen" who lacked these emotions.Although he thought after reading David Peoples'adaptation of the script that the screenplay became something more like the book questioning the whole point of what makes us human.

But the voice-over and ending was always an afterthought (in fact for the ending Scott was allowed by Stanley Kubrick ,thanks to the help of Joe Turkel who had worked with Kubrick on several films,to use leftover helicopter shots for The Shining).But from what I heard in those interviews Dick would probably have favoured the Work-print,the '92 Directors cut or the '05 Final Cut since those versions lay more emphasis on the whole topic of what makes us human plus those versions increasingly hint at the whole theory that Deckard himself is a Nexus.

Well, Ellison was just a contrary person, period.

Well he even admitted himself so..