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NOTE: The story in question was supposedly written from a couple pages of Lovecraft's notes...[Andrew's clever, bracketed aside: probably, absolutely, emphatically, not]
I'm sure I saw this movie at least once when I was very young, but I honestly don't remember. Well, the library had a copy of the DVD, so I checked it out. Absolutely amazing movie! I love it. Wonderful script.
So...I'm watching it and thinking, I know this story...[insert lightbulb]
Lovecraft! Or, rather, Derleth's story "The Ancestor," marketed by AH as written from two pages of Lovecraft's notes... Anyway, Altered States and "The Ancestor" are almost exactly the same story.
Derleth published it in 1957 in The Survivor and Others, and Arkham has published it four times in other anthologies since, plus it's in a more recent Ballantine anthology.
So I go back to the beginning of the film, incredulous that I could have missed a credit to The Old Gentleman. No, no I didn't miss anything. Apparently, Chayefsky (also wrote the screenplay) is the author.
Hmmm... If Ellison can get royalties from the Terminator franchise for "The Galaxy Hand," then Arkham House definitely deserves some dough from Columbia-Tristar. IMHO.
Nonetheless, if you haven't seen this film, and don't mind old-fashioned, pretentiously-academic dialogue (the movie even sounds like something Lovecraft would have written), check out Altered States. Plus, it's got William Hurt: epic win.
William Hurt seems to be in a continuous altered state.
I don't know if Arkham House really needs the money that badly. They've got quite the franchise already, and unlike Ellison Lovecraft isn't seeing a penny of it unless they've "brought up things that ought to stay dead".