like fine, fine furniture
posted at 11:01 am by brandon in child, my work“Roland Emmerich wanted to buy my book Mephisto and Onyx to do a movie, and he came to the house. First of all, he’s nine and a half feet tall, which immediately annoys me, because at five foot five, nine foot five people piss me off. So, I made him sit down…. He’s a very nice guy. He has a German accent, and he talks like a valley girl… and I don’t mean to be making fun of him, but this is really the reason I didn’t let him do the movie. He said, [adopts a heavy German brogue] ‘Well, when I made Stargate, you see, like, it was, like, it was, I had to, like, like, I had to get a movie that was really, would go back in time but, like, it was….’ And I said to him, ‘Excuse me, excu—” and he doesn’t listen. He’s still talking! And the person that was with him said, ‘Roland, Roland, Harlan’s trying to say something.’ And [Roland] said, ‘What? Like, what? Like, like, what is it?’ And I said, ‘If you say ‘like’ once more, I will nail your head to this coffee table.'”
— the brilliant Harlan Ellison, discussing the “return” of sci-fi with Tom Snyder in 1996
