Événement

DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH a film by Erik Nelson

In Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the writer Harlan Ellison is variously described by friends and colleagues as a hurricane, performance art, an alternately impish and furious 11-year-old boy, a cranky old Jew and, most memorably by his buddy Robin Williams, as a skin graft on a leper.

What his enemies like the man to whom he mailed a dead animal, or the one whose pelvis he broke in a heated meeting make of him remains off the record.

Combative, motormouthed, irrepressibly opinionated and indefatigably productive, Mr. Ellison, now 74, is also, of course, one of the 20th centurys most celebrated popular writers: author of nearly 2,000 short stories, acclaimed TV episodes in the 1960s for The Outer Limits (Demon With a Glass Hand) and Star Trek (The City on the Edge of Forever), and a notoriously lousy screenplay (The Oscar).

Directed by Erik Nelson, Dreams recalls the career of a runty young geek who evolved into a world-famous artist and ladies man, civil rights advocate and, from the look of his Xanadu-like Hollywood hideout (aptly nicknamed the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars), a fiercely committed collector and pack rat. Mr. Ellisons written achievement largely takes second stage to his volcanic verbal attitude, of which theres more than enough to overflow an entire outlandish mini-series.