Brain Movies Volume Five: The Original Teleplays of Harlan Ellison

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.