Ellison Wonderland
ELLISON WONDERLAND
I recently photographed the late Harlan Ellison's house, Ellison Wonderland.
He was a prolific writer; by his own account, 1,800 pieces: stories,
novellas, scripts, and essays. Ellison was mostly known for science fiction
- or speculative fiction, as he preferred. His house was nearly as famous as
he was, with collections decades in the making, curated and iterated to
within an inch of every surface, including floors and ceilings.
The collections run from horror to The Wizard of Oz to Disney from the 1930s
to Art Deco, and include innumerable prints, movie posters, figures, tiny
trains and toy soldiers, glasses, Toby Jugs. The house contains 250,000
books. A room on the roof, The Keep, a library that can be seen from the
street, holds only a percentage. He liked color. A lot. He commissioned
and helped design sculptures and functional objects, such as interior doors
and a chess table. A series of massive gargoyles on the front of the house
represent presidents Nixon, Johnson, and members of their cabinets that he
commissioned in the 1970s, now protected by razor wire installed after one
of them was stolen. The front of the house also features a wall of "Aztec"
bas-reliefs; when I asked what they meant, I was told they are "Alien
Aztec", so interpretation was open.
His political, cultural, and professional opinions were unrestrained and
frequently covered. He spoke (and digressed) in fully-formed paragraphs, the
collections curated in the same fashion. He bought the place in the early
1960s with his first paychecks from television work and lived there, along
with his late wife, Susan, who died in 2020, for the rest of his life.
The executor of his estate, Joe Straczynski, is a writer, screenwriter, and
show creator (Babylon 5), which Ellison worked on. I was given virtually
free rein to document the house inside and out. I spent three days there,
but could have worked for three weeks and still not covered it all. I also
shot video: It's here, under Video Reels.