Edinburgh Film Festival: The full Nelson

WITH HIS first feature-length documentary in the can, Erik Nelson tells Aidan Smith why the colourful, unconventional writer Harlan Ellison makes a fitting subject for audiences to chew on

THE connection between country singer Emmylou Harris's conducted tour of Edinburgh's Royal Mile and lions and crocodiles in a ferocious tug-of-war over a baby buffalo may not be immediately apparent. Similarly, the disgruntled worker notorious for torpedoing his snot into the office coffee urn does not appear deserving of a share of the same sentence as a great writer, albeit the greatest writer you've never heard of, albeit the angriest writer in the world.

But Erik Nelson makes no distinction between the good US TV programmes he's produced and the schlock. Because of that, it seems to make sense that the first feature-length documentary he's directed is Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a profile of Harlan Ellison.

Harlan who? Trekkies know him; he scripted the greatest Star Trek episode ever. But aficionados of bad movies know him too. The Oscar, which ended crooner Tony Bennett's acting career, is regularly voted one of the all-time turkeys.

For Ellison, author of 75 books, it's all work. "You don't have to have a Rosebud every time," he reasons from deep inside his study-bunker in the Hollywood Hills before pointing out the quotations on the wall above his battered typewriter. No cultural snob, a practitioner of pulp fiction and fiercely intellectual discourse, he draws inspiration from Michelangelo, Rimbaud... and PJ Proby.

Now 74, five times married, he makes a terrific subject. At Sharp Teeth's outset, his friend Robin Williams attempts to separate myth from fact. Is it true Ellison's attack on a TV executive left the man with a broken pelvis? "Yes." Is it true he once mailed a dead gopher to a publishing house? "Yes, and I made sure I sent it fourth-class, in the summer." And has he really slept with 500 women? "No, 700."

But there's serious intent behind the documentary. Nelson, who previously produced Grizzly Man, says Ellison is a writer to be ranked alongside Hunter S Thompson and, before an audience, with Lenny Bruce. He wants more of us to appreciate this small, funny, confrontational but almost forgotten man of words.

"Once upon a time in America there was such a thing as a public intellectual," says Nelson. "Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and William Buckley would go on talk shows and discuss the culture in brilliant, insightful ways, and so would Harlan. But he's ceased to exist. This country has dumbed down to a staggering degree."

An unhappy adolescence was the making of Ellison. His father died when he was 14 and he was bullied at school. Asked later if he wanted to be buried in his native Cleveland, he would answer: "No, I've already done that." He discovered his talent in the Army and fellow soldiers queued up to have him write home to their sweethearts. "I became their Cyrano," he recalls. Before full-time writing he drove a dynamite truck, although many would contend that for Ellison the two jobs have been the same.

"How do you explain a hurricane?" asks his friend, actor Stu Levin, in Sharp Teeth. Screenwriter Josh Olson, one of many young disciples he inspired to pick up a pen, has a go: "I've always thought of Harlan as like a cocky guitar god. Once I saw Prince playing a Jimmy Page riff one-handed, not looking. I thought: 'That's Harlan.'"

So why's he not more acclaimed? "Death is salivating near my shoulder like a fat boy at a sci-fi convention," wails Ellison in the film. Here's Nelson again: "Harlan is individualistic, opinionated, difficult – bloody difficult. Hollywood's attitude is: 'Yes, we know he's brilliant but we don't want brilliance, we just want it in by Tuesday.' Harlan couldn't – wouldn't – do that. As he says: any Judith Krantz, any Tom Clancy, and things that live in petri dishes can write. The hard part is to keep writing, day after story after year after novel."

Nelson's previous film was about Timothy Treadwell, whose fascination for bears cost him his life – is their a link between Grizzly Man and Sharp Teeth? "Yes, both celebrate brilliant, deranged, obsessed men – American originals who pitted themselves against ferocious environments."

On Nelson's CV, that Emmylou Harris travelogue might qualify as highbrow, while the lions vs crocs YouTube phenomenon which became a documentary is evidence of his opportunism. But he admits of his other TV credits, like Busted On The Job and When Chefs Attack!: "If the Nuremberg media trials ever convene, I'm sure I'll be in the dock trying to defend myself."

If the verdict comes back that he contributed to the dumbed-down culture which did for Harlan Ellison, then Sharp Teeth can be his community service.

• Dreams With Sharp Teeth, Filmhouse, Edinburgh, June 25, 7.40pm; June 27, 5pm
www.edfilmfest.org.uk