On Harlan Ellison

After Terminator's production company settled with Ellison, Cameron made his feelings known:

"Harlan Ellison is a parasite who can kiss my ass."

In an excerpt of a story written by David Brennan, Ellison described the unfolding events:

Ellison says the incident started like this: “Before Terminator came out I began to hear from people, 'Gee, there's this script they're going to shoot that reads an awful lot like your script for Soldier.'” The 'Soldier' script that Ellison is referencing is one of two teleplays he wrote for the anthology TV series, The Outer Limits. The second script he wrote for that series was called Demon with a Glass Hand. Ellison continues, ''“Now Soldier had been available on videocassette for many years. Demon with a Glass Hand had won all the awards but Soldier was right there in popularity.” ''

In addition to those casual warnings of similarities from unnamed persons, Ellison also was told by a friend of his,Tracy Torme, that, while visiting the set for The Terminator, he had asked Cameron where he got the story idea. According to Ellison's account of Torme's statement, Cameron replied, “Oh, I ripped off a couple of Harlan Ellison stories.”

Ellison says that he contacted Hemdale when the movie was still in production and asked to see a copy of the script and was surprised when they refused.

The final clue that he might have a case for plagiarism came when Ellison wasn't invited to the press screening for The Terminator. He said, “Now, I get invitations to everything and anything, but for some reason, I never got an invitation to the screening of The Terminator.” According to the science fiction news program Prisoners of Gravity, Ellison was able to sneak into the screening by posing as film critic Leonard Maltin's assistant. Upon first seeing The Terminator, Ellison said, ''“It was not my desire to find a similarity. I was sitting in there thinking, 'Please don't let it be.' But if you took the first three minutes of my Soldier episode and the first three minutes of The Terminator, they are not only similar but exact. By the time I left the theater, I knew I had a case against someone who plagiarized my work.” ''

So, Ellison and his attorneys then contacted Hemdale (the financiers of The Terminator) and Orion (the movie's distributor) to discuss a payment or settlement, with the obvious threat of a lawsuit in case none was offered. And soon after this initial contact, Ellison's complaint received even more support. A Houston criminal defense attorney might have agreed that Ellison seemed to have some grounds for a lawsuit

''“About a week after my attorney contacted Hemdale, I got a call from the editor of Starlog magazine. ....It turned out Cameron had given an interview to Starlog and, after I began inquiring at Hemdale, [The Terminator producer Gale Anne] Hurd sent Starlog a legal demand to see the interview.”'' According to Ellison, Gale Anne Hurd then modified Starlog's article on The Terminator. She omitted a quote from Cameron in the article that read, “'Oh, I took a couple of Outer Limits segments.'” The reason that the Starlog editor had contacted Ellison was to provide him with the original version of the article, the one without Gale Anne Hurd's editing. Said Ellison, ''“At this point we went to Hemdale and to Orion and we said, 'I'm afraid we got him with the smoking gun. Now do you want to do something about this or do you want us to whip your ass in open court? We'd be perfectly happy to do it either way.'”'' Between the account of Tracy Torme and the Starlog interview, the attorneys for Hemdale and Orion quickly realized that they wanted no part of a lawsuit, by Ellison's accounts. “They took one look at this shit and their attorneys said, 'Settle.'”

For more, see: https://www.jamescamerononline.com/Ellison.htm