I have read and heard that James Cameron’s Terminator movies are based in part on Harlan Ellison’s short stories “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and “Demon with a Glass Hand”.
Now, I’ve read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. The only connection I can make to The Terminator is that “I Have No Mouth” might have been the inspiration for the concept of Skynet. But that seems tenuous.
I know that “Demon” involves time travel, but I’ve never read it.
So what are the particular similarities between the short stories and the Terminator movies? I know that either Ellison or some other rights-holding agent got Orion Pictures or MGM Video (?) to add a credit to Ellison on some release of The Terminator (not the original cut, though) – but I don’t know what legal grounds Ellison (or a rights-holding agent) had to stand on.
It wasn’t “Demon”; it was Ellison’s “Soldier” that Harlan sued over. Both were Outer Limits episode.
“Soldier” was about a human killing machine from the future. Sound familiar?
Ellison sued after Cameron made public statements that Terminator was based on that story, and there was evidence that Cameron tracked down the tape of the show (well before it was readily available on VCR) when writing Terminator.
Actually, I heard it was the Outer Limits episode Soldier, which was about two time-traveling soldiers, as well as Demon. I had not heard about the other one.
Anyway, I think that at some point Cameron cited those stories as inspirations for Terminator, at which point Ellison said, “Oh, yeah, then you better give me some credit.”
The script for “Soldier,” also included a scene where Qarlo (Michael Ansara) went to a gun shop and took a weapon, which was similar to the scene in “The Terminator.” This scene was never filmed, but the script (and Ellison’s original short story “Soldier From Tomorrow”) have been available in book form for over 35 years.
slight hijack – I’d like to know why Ellison hasn’t sued the makers (and Woody Allen in particular) of the 3-parter movie “New York Stories” (1989), for the apparent plagiarism in Woody’s segment of Ellison’s story “Mom” (1975). In Harlan’s words, his story is “about a Jewish momma’s boy, whose mother has just died, and the ghost comes back to nuhdz him”. And so she follows him around, invading his privacy, scaring off the gentile girls he’s attracted to while constantly trying to set him up with nice Jewish girls… sound familiar?
This reminds me of the time my brother and I finally watched “Soldier.” He’d been a fan of Terminator for awhile and he saw it on cable and saw the acknowledgement to Ellison in the closing credits. He asked me, “Who’s Harlan Ellison?”
“Oh, he wrote ‘City on the Edge of Forever’ for Star Trek and a few episodes of the old Outer Limits and the new Twilight Zone.” (I was referring to the 1985 revival.) “Supposedly, James Cameron ripped off one of his Outer Limits episodes when he wrote Terminator.”
“Oh. Where’d you hear about this?”
“Starlog and Cinefantastique magazines.” (The internet as we now know it didn’t exist then; this was more than 15 years ago.)
Months went by, perhaps a year or more. Then a local station decided to do an Outer Limits marathon and they ended it by running “Soldier” and “Glass Hand” back to back. I told my brother it was on and we watched “Soldier” together.
Even before it was over, we could see the similarities, especially the scenes in the police station involving Ansara and Lloyd Nolan and a very young Tim O’Connor (whom we knew from Buck Rogers), which were so similar to the scenes between Michael Biehn and Paul Winfield (the detective) and Earl Boen (the psychiatrist) in their police station. We thought the FX showing the enemy stuck between the future and the present were very lame, even for a black-and-white show made in 1964, and we thought the future cigarette that lit itself was clever and cool.
Anyway, Harlan definitely deserved the cash and Cameron is an over-rated hack (as a writer). Hell, I think Cameron even used some of the lines Harlan wrote for “Soldier”!
Harlan Ellison is a great, great writer IMO, he’s got imagination, wit, and great technique. “Hitler Painted Roses” is one of my favorite short stories ever.
I believe that Ellison actually claimed that The Terminator stole from both the “Soldier” episode and the “Demon with a Glass Hand” episode of The Outer Limits. Apparently Cameron actually gave interviews in which he said that he was inspired by certain episodes of The Outer Limits. The interesting thing is that when I saw The Outer Limits when it came out, I immediately thought, “Hey, this is similar to an episode of The Outer Limits that I remember.” But it wasn’t one of Ellison’s episodes that I remembered. It was the “The Man Who Was Never Born” episode.
The truth, I think, is that The Terminator steals from everything. For instance, it steals from some Philip K. Dick short stories. It’s still a great movie, but it’s clearly a pastiche of a whole era of science fiction.
Because you can’t copyright a plot or an idea. Since Allen never stated he got the idea from an Ellison story and Ellison couldn’t prove Allen ripped him off, there was no case.
Cameron admitted the theft, so Ellison nailed him. If he hadn’t, Ellision would have had a tougher case (though he still could have won, as he did when he sued the producers of “Holmes and Yoyo” over “Brillo”*).
*Both featured a robot cop. Though the derivation of the title of “Brillo” (for “metal fuzz”) is funnier than the entire H&Y series.
I think it was “Future Cop,” Chuck, not H&Y, though I agree totally with your sentiments re “Brillo.” I recall seeing a couple segments of “Future Cop,” and I mst admit that I was surprised when Ellison and Bova won. There were not nearly the clearly lifted elements there as there was in “Soldier”/“Terminator.”
The reason that Ellison and Bova were able to sue the producers of Future Cop was that they had shown the script for Brillo to the producers. The producers told Ellison and Bova that they weren’t interested in producing Brillo, but then they made the show Future Cop. What this means is that if you’re going to steal an idea that you can claim is too common in the genre to be copyrighted, just go ahead and steal it. Don’t give interviews in which you acknowledge having seen or read a similar book or movie. Don’t let it be known that you’ve looked at a similar screenplay.
