In 2008 he released a documentary he produced and directed, about prolific and controversial author Harlan Ellison, entitled Dreams with Sharp Teeth.[2] Nelson started working on this film in 1981. The film included interviews with many respected collaborators and admirers of Ellison.
Nelson collaborated with Werner Herzog on several films.[3][4][5] He produced Grizzly Man, a film Herzog directed about an eccentric naturalist who wanted to live with grizzly bears. In 2016, Herzog executive produced A Gray State, a film Nelson directed about an eccentric American veteran and aspiring film-maker, David Crowley, who was admired by fans of Alex Jones, whose death triggered conspiracy theories.[6][7]
In 2017, Nelson uncovered and reversioned 15 hours of World War II footage, filmed by respected Hollywood director William Wyler, of the 8th Air Force to create a new documentary entitled The Cold Blue.[8][9] This film premiered at the AFI Film Festival in June 2018, and was the first of the theatrical documentary genre Nelson has referred to as “Big Screen History”.[citation needed] Other films released later that year in this genre included Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" and Todd Miller's "Apollo 11".
In 2020, Nelson completed and theatrically released “Apocalypse '45.” Another example of "Big Screen History", this film documents the final year of the war in the Pacific in 1945, and was released on Discovery+ on May 27, 2021. On October 9th, 2024, Nelson's film, "Daytime Revolution", a feature documentary that revolves around the week in 1972 when John and Yoko Lennon took over the Mike Douglas Show was released in theaters across America.
References
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Erik Nelson (2019-06-03). "Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be". Talkhouse. Retrieved 2020-03-30. Erik Nelson is the director of The Cold Blue, which airs on HBO on June 6, and the 2017 documentary A Gray State. He is the producer of Werner Herzog's award-winning documentaries Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, Into the Abyss and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. His previous work as a director includes the Harlan Ellison documentary, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which premiered at SXSW in 2008.
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David Loftus. "Dreams with Sharp Teeth". DocumentaryFilms.net. Retrieved 2018-09-24. Nelson shot his first footage of Ellison at the typewriter (always an Olympia manual propelled by two fingers – never an electric, let alone a computer) for a March 1981 PBS segment, when the filmmaker was just 24. At the time he had no plans to make a full-length film. Over subsequent decades Nelson continued to film Ellison only now and then, pretty much from the standpoint of a fan, while he pursued his own career.
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Pete Hammond (2011-10-07). "OSCARS: Werner Herzog's Controversial Toronto/Telluride Death Penalty Doc Being Rushed Into Release In November". Deadline. Retrieved 2012-08-02. Erik Nelson, the producer on both films, explains that there was a confluence of events. "Cave is still in theaters and we had no idea it would do as well as it has done," he said. "You're not really supposed to put two films out at the same time by the same director (tell that to Steven Spielberg). On the other hand, what Werner wants, Werner gets. Resistance is futile.
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Ken Eisner (2011-07-27). "Local filmmaker Erik Nelson shares Werner Herzog's grand Cave of Forgotten Dreams". Georgia Straight. Retrieved 2020-03-30. For Herzog, since he switched from crankily poetic fictions to crankily poetic documentaries, that someone is Erik Nelson. A veteran film producer and nonfiction-TV maven, Nelson is a transplanted Angeleno who moved to B.C. just over six years ago—or exactly when George W. Bush was reelected, as he puts it.
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Erik Nelson (2017-11-01). "Collaborating with Ghosts (and Werner Herzog)". Talkhouse. Retrieved 2020-03-30. Erik Nelson explains how his cinematic communing with the dead started with Grizzly Man, and continues with his new film, Gray State.
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Ben Kenigsberg (2017-11-02). "Review: 'A Gray State,' Behind a Filmmaker's Madness". The New York Times. p. C10. Retrieved 2020-03-29. The documentary's director, Erik Nelson (a producer on "Grizzly Man"), explores the disjunction between the charismatic filmmaker-to-be with a penchant for both self-promotion and self-documentation and a man who was, it eventually seems clear, descending into mental illness.
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Dennis Harvey (2017-11-02). "Film Review: 'A Gray State'". Variety magazine. Retrieved 2020-03-30. 'Grizzly Man' producer Nelson (this film is executive produced by that film's helmer, Werner Herzog) weighs the disturbing recent saga of a charismatic military veteran with libertarian leanings who industriously sought to make a 'dystopian future reality movie' portraying America's imminent conquest at the hands of the 'deep state' in service of the 'New World Order.'
