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ME 'N' ISSAC AT THE MOVIES
A Brief Memoir Of Citizen Calvin
by Harlan Ellison

My heart bleeds like a rock when I have the dream. I always cry; or if I'm in public, I pretend it's an allergy that's making me get all choked up. This dream. . .I never have it at night, asleep. It always comes to me when I'm off-guard, when I'm awake but my mind is elsewhere. A daydream, a looking-off-through-the-air. . .unmanned, disarmed, fit to be bushwhacked.

In the daydream, the daymare, Issac and I are in a movie theater. We're sitting side-by-side, watching this movie. This movie, this screenplay you have in front of you, the one it took a year of my creative life to write, this movie that Issac liked so much. Issac and I, we're sitting there watching I, Robot.

It's a terrible daydream, and I come out of it shaking my head trying to get the pictures out of the darkness where I play them over and over in the Cinerama dome of my memory. Issac really liked this screenplay a lot, and Warner Bros. studios never made the motion picture, and now Issac is dead and will never see it, and I keep having this awful, damned daydream in which we sit together enjoying what might have been. And it doesn't matter if I have the daydream a hundred times, I cannot keep myself from crying when I wrench out of that theater of memory. Like Issac's dear Janet, Robyn, and Stan, and all the rest of us who won't see him again, it is impossible for me to convey the pain that seems somehow to never go away completely, a pain that we willingly endure because it serves to bring him back at the memory's behest; in my case, there in the movie theater.

After several rewrites of the first draft, I sent the final to Issac early in August 1978. He wrote me on the 18th, "I picked up the completed manuscript a little after 10 PM last night just to glance through it and see what changes you made. I began reading word for word and, with bedtime at 11, I was done at 12:30 AM with Janet reasoning with me that I need my sleep.

"It's terrific, Harlan. I asked you in my letter of 9 March to make it 'the first really adult, complex, worhtwhile science fiction movie ever made' and you've done it. You've put your own frame around four of my stories, kept the stories mine in essence and in much detail, made the frame your very own (with a skill and imagination I could never even dream of matching) and yet kept it in the spirit of I, Robot also. In particular, you kept Susan Calvin my Susan Calvin and that is wonderful."

I quote from that letter - a letter that went on much longer and enthused even more than what I've set down here - even the parts that are embarassingly self-serving, because it is imperative to me that anyone who picks up this book understands that this is not one of those work-for-hire afterthought books that capitalize on Issac's name, or the work he did that made his reputation. This is no succubus expansion of a short story, or a twiddle that springboards from a "treatment" Issac may have sold to some merchandiser. It is a novel-for-the-screen that was written by me, with Issac's seed-quartet of stories and the living shadow of Susan Calvin as sun and rain that brought forth an entirely different creative work. I quote Issac's affection for that new work, because he gave me what I needed to do the job, and he loved me enough to trust me and let me go my way, and I gave him something he admired in return for that love and trust. And I need the reader to know this is truly the end-result of a friendship that lasted more than forty years.

This is the movie that Issac loved. I'll never really sit beside him to see it, except in that troubling daydream; but if it gets made, well, then a piece of Issac will live on. The piece he created called Susan Calvin.

The life of Citizen Calvin. The record of a wonderful year of hard work I spent at the movies with my friend Issac Asimov, who first dreamed of metal men and a remarkable woman.

This one's for you, pal.

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Originally posted by FireflyPassenger:
If it were titled anything else you wouldn't have that much of a problem with it.

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Originally posted by MohrStoutbeard:
Um, duh. That was my whole point. The reason I feel so strongly is because the Will Smith film is exactly what Harlan Ellison was referring to when he talked about "work-for-hire afterthought books that capitalize on Issac's name."

Ellison's script was the movie that Asimov wanted to see on the screen. Doesn't that matter at all? Oh, right, he's dead. Who gives a damn what he thought?

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Originally posted by Tiger:
I didn't know there was a screenplay out there by Harlan Ellison, so now I'm even more pissed that this movie exists.

Where'd you get it? I'd really like to see it.

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