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I was sort of commuting between Chicago and New York at the time with my almost ex-wife and her fourteen year-old son from her previous marriage. They said, “We’re going to the one-hour format next season, and we’re going to want this script fairly quickly.” So I said, okay, I would come out. I had never done a teleplay in my when I accepted the gig. So they sent back word: “Yes, it’s okay, have you ever written any scripts?”Īnd I, of course, lied in my teeth and said, “Oh, many.” So, I was preparing to divorce my second wife at the time – it was kind of a strange situation – and she said, “As long as you’re going to divorce me, at least take me to California where it’s warm.” Which seemed like an odd thing to say, but it made a bizarre sort of sense, so I said okay, and I accepted this offer to buy Memos, but only on the condition that I could write the script. I got a call from the Hitchcock office that they wanted to option Memos From Purgatory. It was either recommended to them or they stumbled across it. I guess it was Norman Lloyd or Joan Harrison, I never have been sure which, but it was one or the other, read the book.

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How did your book, which was a work of (mostly) non-fiction, end up on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ? It was an odd fit for that series and I didn’t know until you told me that it was actually your first script for television. Harlan, who died on Thursday at the age of 84, has recounted parts of his cross-country odyssey in several essays and interviews, but I think this version may contain a few details not recorded elsewhere. That portion of the interview was such a lively digression that I set it aside with the hope of someday asking him to rewrite it as a foreword to one of two relevant books I was working on – a plan complicated somewhat by the fact that I still haven’t finished either manuscript.

Over the course of a ninety-minute conversation Harlan ended up telling me the tale of his ill-starred trek to Los Angeles to follow “Purgatory” into purgatory. It could have gone the other way, given how unenthusiastically he suffered fools, but when I called Ellison from my dorm room that afternoon, I caught him in a generous, expansive mood. By the time it aired, in the no-one’s-watching Christmas week slot of 1964, Ellison had already done storied battle with the likes of Spelling, Irwin Allen, and the Control Voice (which mispronounced the word “Sumerian” in his narration for “Demon With a Glass Hand,” a flub that Ellison was still mad about decades later). Starring a young James Caan as a thinly disguised, flatteringly buff version of Ellison, “Memo From Purgatory” was the science fiction writer’s first television sale, even though it sat on the Hitchcock shelf for a couple of years (due to protracted rewrites or network squeamishness or both Ellison’s memory was atypically vague, and the production records are inaccessible, although he was right for once about this one, which took on a West Side Story phoniness in the execution). Ellison, one of the twentieth century’s greatest complainers, thought “Knife in the Darkness” was badly directed.Įarly in my career I interviewed Ellison about one of his early works, an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on his 1961 book Memos From Purgatory. “It was an examination of urban violence versus western violence, and urban violence wins every time,” the series’ producer, Christopher Knopf, told me. And there is Cimarron Strip ’s “Knife in the Darkness,” a bold genre hybrid that followed Jack the Ripper to the American frontier.

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There is the harrowing addiction story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” which Ellison wrote for his friend Zalman King’s ambitious series The Young Lawyers (and which, because it overlapped with the truculent scribe’s short-lived TV column for The Los Angeles Free Press, became one of the best-documented cases of network neutering in an especially timorous era). If you want a truly pure exercise in pop, sexy and slick, put on “Who Killed Alex Debbs?,” a riff on Playboy Club glamour that opens with the Hugh Hefner character’s corpse stuffed in a gilded cage. There’s the quartet of gleefully horned-up Burke’s Law whodunits, all of which call out or lean into or send up the lust and misogyny that became Aaron Spelling’s golden ticket. There are the acknowledged classics for The Outer Limits and Star Trek, yes, and the combative stints on The Starlost and the eighties Twilight Zone. Harlan Ellison wrote some of my favorite television episodes, and hopefully some of yours.

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