Disenchanted attorney Lee Kraiter travels to the roof of the world, where he discovers the secrets of The Dark Forces in an unfilmed pilot created by Harlan Ellison in 1972. "It steals righteously from Lost Horizon and the marvelous works of H.P. Lovecraft and the caveats of Charles Fort and even the Dr. Strange comics (with a nod to Billy Batson, Captain Marvel, and the old wizard Shazam)," exclaimed Ellison in his NBC-TV pitch. And if Kraiter's magical exploits don't satisfy your crime-fighting desires, checkout Ellison's unproduced Batman outline pitting the dynamic duo against Two-Face. Still not enough? How about an episode of The Rat Patrol guest starring der Führer? Maybe Ellison's original outline for "Crypt" from Logan's Run? Still not satisfied? Why not discover "Who Killed Andy Zygmunt?" in Ellison's third script for Burke's Law? Or, you could plunge back to the beginning of Ellison's tv career with his first-ever teleplay: an installment of the skydiving series Ripcord, Ellison's heartfelt homage to a Hemingway who had just suicided. The scripts in this book were reproduced from Harlan Ellison's file copies. The pages originated on a manual typewriter, hence the idiosyncrasies that set them apart from the sanitized, word-processed pages of today.
About the Author: HARLAN ELLlSON(R) has been characterized by The New York Times Book Review as having "the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind." The Los Angeles Times suggested, "It's long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th century Lewis Carroll." And the Washington Post Book World said simply, "One of the great living American short story writers." He has written or edited 100 books; more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns; two dozen teleplays, for which he received the Writers Guild of America most outstanding teleplay award for solo work an unprecedented 4 times; and a dozen movies. Publishers Weekly called him "Highly Intellectual." (Ellison's response: "Who, Me?"). He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award twice, the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker award 6 times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Nebula award of the Science Fiction Writers of America 4 times, the Hugo (World Convention Achievement award) 8 1/2 times, and received the Silver Pen for Journalism from P.E.N. Not to mention the World Fantasy Award; the British Fantasy Award; the American Mystery Award; plus 2 Audie Awards and 2 Grammy nominations for Spoken Word recordings. He created great fantasies for the 1985 CBS revival of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, traveled with The Rolling Stones; marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery; created roles for Buster Keaton, Wally Cox, Gloria Swanson, and nearly 100 other stars on Burke's Law; ran with a kid gang in Brooklyn's Red Hook to get background for his first novel; covered race riots in Chicago's "back of the yards" with the late James Baldwin; sang with, and dined with, Maurice Chevalier; once stood off the son of the Detroit Mafia kingpin with a Remington XP-l00 pistol-rifle, while wearing nothing but a bath towel; sued Paramount and ABC-TV for plagiarism and won $337,000. His most recent legal victory, in protection of copyright against global Internet piracy of writers' work-a four-year-long litigation against AOL et al.-has resulted in revolutionizing protection of creative properties on the web. (As promised, he repaid hundreds of contributions [totaling $50,000] from the KICK Internet Piracy support fund.) But the bottom line, as voiced by Booklist, is this: "One thing for sure: the man can write." He lives with his wife, Susan, inside The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, in Los Angeles.