With apologies to “I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream,” The New Beverly Cinema is hosting a Harlan Ellison festival for the next week. I’ll be out of town, but that doesn’t mean you should miss it. I’m posting the schedule above — the festival is mostly made up of Ellison’s favorite films, things he thinks you should watch, lending further credence to his viewpoint that it’s his world and we’re just visitors in it.

Ellison made an early and probably deleterious impact on my writing, which I’ve yet to fully scrub out. Viewing just the trailer for his autobiographical self-produced documentary, below, reminds me why I stopped reading him almost 25 years ago. The only thing less self-indulgent than his writing was his self. (Reason number two was that I got tired of an ongoing feud via printed letters that we had for a couple of years.) (Reason number three was the zealotry of his acolytes; I almost got into a fistfight at a Directors Guild screening about 20 years ago when I had the temerity to venture to the friend of a friend that Ellison is, well, an asshole.)

Judge for yourself:

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