Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

re: Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

Erik Nelson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:52:39 GMT

Phil --

As for the above, I am CERTAIN that Harlan did not know these are UNMODERATED comments, and that his kind personal note, written in this space, but believed to pass through your hands BEFORE any posting, would automatically BE posted on your site -- without your interception.

Hence his, ah, displeasure -- and feeling that once again he got screwed on the Internet.

Which he was not, not HERE at least.

If I am correct in this assumption, as I sure I am, you can frame and laminate the last, and wear this world class vitrol as a badge of honor -- and know that Harlan, the Harlan that many of us know and love -- is the guy who wrote the post PREVIOUS to the, ahem, last "feces-for-brains" reference, who, by the way, thanks in part to your article, may finally be closer to reaching the "Acceptance" part of the Kubler-Ross curve on "The Oscar"

Though, do you really carry an arachnoid carapace? Yikes.

Erik

re: Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

HARLAN ELLISON — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:43:11 GMT

Exactly what component of

PERSONAL TO PHIL NUGENT

PLEASE DO NOT POST

was so incomprehensible to you, you pus-sucking imbecile, that you POSTED IT ANYWAY? Web-infatuated Slugs such as you ought to be taken out behind the woodshed, trussed up on a meathook turned into the wall, stripped to your arachnoid carapace and be beaten across the belly with an aluminum ballbat till your piss runs red. Visitors to this obstinately amateurish site should be advised you are not trustworthy. You are also stupid.

Go ahead, feces-for-brains, post THAT encomium.

Not at all amused, Harlan Ellison

re: Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

Harlan Ellison — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:16:25 GMT

THIS IS PERSONAL TO PHIL NUGENT!!!!

PLEASE DO NOT NOT NOT POST!!!!

Mr. Nugent:

I feverishly hope you understand that all of this is received by me with a smile and goodwill. Your attention and odd affection for the film is charming and salutary. Do not for an instant even remotely consider that my snout is outta joint. Youse is a good guy--as is my pal and producer Erik Nelson--and I hope all of my curmudgeonly comeback has put a smile on YOUR phizz as well.

Sincerely, and respectfully, thanks again,

Yr. Pal, Harlan

re: Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

Erik Nelson — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 04:14:33 GMT

OK, “Harlan”, if that in fact is your REAL name, you are one dude who cannot take a bank shot insincerely sincere compliment.....

Understood, in this case. Lest I take one more Beckham like kick at the cripple....

... the great Clifford Odets served up dialog in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and THE BIG KNIFE that many serious filmistas quote to this day. I seem to recall some of that dialog from SWEET SMELL being quoted as a runner through the equally great DINER. The, dare I say, greater Harlan Ellison served up the same rich portions of turigidossitude -- AND brilliance -- in “The Oscar”. Mr. Odets got lucky with his casting and directors.

You, and all agree, drew a different card, let alone a clumsy rewrite.

Mr. Odets, who, lest we forget, wound up begging to be allowed a rewrite on an Elvis movie (a good friend has the letter to Hal Wallis!), is now considered a screenwriting genius. You, on the other hand, have to bear mooks like Mr. Nugent and Mr. Nelson’s misguided devotion for your (admittedly) crippled offspring. In the words of fellow admirer Ronald Moore, "it's the words, stupid".

And they draw numchucks like us to its flame.

In this case, I am proud to be, in the words of Col. Bat Guano, a “prevert”. I grieve daily (OK, not daily, but on rare occasion) at the movies you COULD and SHOULD have written had THE OSCAR turned out differently, and closer to your original design.

But, you know, some of that stuff you wrote instead does have its merits.

Someone oughta do a documentary on you, and it.

But, in the words of another great American writer....

You don’t pull on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit on the wind...

AND, you do NOT get into a debate on the submerged merits of THE OSCAR, not with Superman hisself.

And not here, for chrissakes.

One from column “A”, one from column “B”.

You get eggroll either way.

Yr. Loyal Pal,

Erik

P.S For the love of God, Phil, and we have never met. let this end HERE!!!

re: Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

HARLAN ELLISON ADDED A P.S. — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 03:21:38 GMT

Oh ... yeah ... I forgot one interesting aspect of my wrist-slashingly depressive relationship to THE OSCAR:

I wrote the script for Steve McQueen and Peter Falk. Both were early in their blazing careers, I knew they were 100% dead-on perfect for Frankie and Hymie ...

And they gave me Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett.

Now: try replaying my dialogue as coming out of the mouths of Real Thespic Talents, Steve and Peter, and it sorta derails your (and Erik Nelson's) locomotive chortling, don't it.

Just a humble thought from the Creator. Heaven knows he doesn't want to suggest that two MondayMorningQuarterbacks dropping into the pocket a mere forty-years-plus later are not the ne plus ultra of critical judgment. Go ahead, Nugent, and you, too, Nelson; kick the cripple as he's crawling away.

Sob.

Harlan (You don't have to call me "Mr. Ellison," Phil my tootsie. "Mr. Ellison" was my dad. He died in 1949.)

re: Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

Phil Nugent — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 03:13:41 GMT

Moviemaking is a collaborative medium, and one of the unhappier effects of that is that sometimes, people who worked on a movie may get the credit, or feel that they get the blame, for work that someone else, as they say, "improved" upon. We can only apologize for any misunderstandings that result from the inherent unfairness of this system.

But however much Mr. Ellison may regret the imperfections and even the very existence of "The Oscar", we cannot, in good conscience, apologize for the pleasure this unique film has given us, or for wishing to inform others that it's out there somewhere, and that if they should ever have the chance to take a look at it, they should jump on that sucker like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down to Mother Russia. Seriously. The pleasure that "The Oscar" gives may be of a different order that that offered by, say, "Spider Kiss" or "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," but it remains an unusual and memorable movie, one that retains its fascination after more than forty years, even as most of what came out of Hollywood at the same time has congealed into an indistinguishable mass of inert sludge. We are deeply grateful to Mr. Ellison for sharing his memory of and insight into its creation.

re: Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

Harlan Ellison — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:05:30 GMT

My humble thankyou to Phil Nugent. Yet ...

Hasn't the Statute of Shit Limitation run out on THE OSCAR yet?!? Geezus, guys, I'm 73 now, and ready to be planted.

Doctors at least get to bury THEIR mistakes.

It was my first theatrical feature gig. I was young; fulla parsnips; puffed up like a pouter pigeon with my 15-minutes of Hollywood Fame; and had only a naif's conception of the Hunger To Rewrite that is so much a part of the Auteur-Manque tic that dements directors and producers.

Rouse and Greene were decent enough guys, but they damn skippy weren't Kurosawa or Cronenberg. And they couldn't keep their hands off my (also decent) original script, based on a er, uh, um, well...call it decent so as not to malign the dead ... popular novel by Richard Sale:

I remember it as if it were yesterday, the moment I handed in some freshly conjured pages of that screenplay to my secretary at Paramount, who then took them across the room to Clarence and Russ's secretary, who took them in to Rouse and Greene. In those pages, I had a character saying, "I need you like an extra set of elbows."

An hour later, I heard Rouse/Greene's buzzer through the open door of my office, and their secretary rose, went into their aerie, came out with my pages, sat down and retyped them according to the "corrections," the "input," the "reconfiguring" done by Russell and Clarence, handed the pages across the three foot gap to MY secretary, who took said pages, and stepped into MY office and plopped them passim my otherwise empty InBasket.

I looked at the top page.

OhGod, I thought, kill me now. Rouse and Greene had spent the better part of an hour "improving" my (as Phil Nugent codifies it) "borderline lurid" dialogue. That one line now read as follows:

"I need you like a hole in the head."

Now ... understand something: I take what I do seriously. Always have. "I need you like an extra set of elbows" may not be "Call me Ishmael" or even "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," but as lurid and/or cornball and/or timelessly outdated as it may seem today, it is NOT the cliche mutation those two pretty decent guys "reconfigured." For reconfigured, read: taxidermy. Appendectomy. Clitoral circumcision. Defenestration. A snook of succotash.

I never saw a frame of the film till its premiere. As the movie unreeled, that night, midst the premiere hoopla and the klieg lights, I sank lower and lower in my seat ... as the audience laughed with embarrassment and disbelief. And in the short stretch of that screening, short as a segment of the time I had been alive and have since lived, I knew, with absolute clarity, that my feature-film career was dead. An infarct. A coronary thrombosis. First time at bat, and neither Casey nor Faust could have struck out more ludicrously.

Bad? Shit film? Nugent, YOU may batten on the amusement

("Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved") but even now, ten billion heartbeats later, the agony of that night is not a muon less intense.

So. Thanks for the review, kiddo, but the opinion of the rest of the goddam human race that saw THE OSCAR when it was new, and everyone since, has done beat you to it.

Yr. Pal, Harlan

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