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Philip K. Dick's Hollywood Afterlife
HarryLeBlanc writes "Wired has a long thoughtful article about Philip K Dick's posthumous Hollywood career. It has some interesting tidbits in it (imagine Total Recall directed by Cronenburg and starring William Hurt!), and does a good job of covering his Hollywood history (though it overlooks Barjo), and it doesn't gloss over how PKD would have hated what Hollywood has done to much of his work."
the magazine Hermenaut published a long, informative bio of Philip K. Dick that covers in more depth some of the aspects of his life touched on in this article (drug use, paranoia/schizophrenia, his place in writing and pop culture, etc.).
Philip K. Dick was, especially in his later works (Valis, for example) strongly influenced by Gnosticism; the article fails to mention this, but there's an interesting essay exploring some of the connections here, for those interested.
(Unrelated, but still amusing, is this letter that he wrote to the FBI, accusing Stanislaw Lem of being a "composite committee". Fun stuff.)
The people who did the special effects for blade runner played him the begining sequence when it was done and he said it was just how he imagined the future when he wrote do andriods dream of electric sheep so atleast they got one thing right.
I'm pretty sure that is what Blade runner was based on.
A while back there here was a good interview with Tim Powers that shows PKD from a different perspective:
"He was a great guy to hang around. If you just read his biographies, you could get the idea that he was just a doper visionary, a crazy man -- and if you just read the biographies, yes, that's the conclusion you'd come to -- but actually, he was totally sane and just the funniest guy you'd ever hope to met. Also the nicest guy. At a crowded party, if he saw some ill-at-ease person who didn't know anybody just kind of hanging by the punch bowl, he'd go over and strike up a conversation. He was always very unaffectedly interested in what you were doing."
http://www.powells.com/authors/powers.html
Some of the PKD's best work appeared on the radio drama "X Minus 1". It was a Twilight Zone type radio drama which played for many years. There are mp3s of these shows floating around the net, maybe even on Kaaza. Worth the hunt.
The special edition of Blade Runner hint's that Deckard is an android.
That's the only version I've ever seen...I was um...sort of a fetus when it was released.
Hmmm. How come I haven't seen any previews for this? It's a great article, BTW: the table at the end is hilarious. For Minority Report, which grossed $132 million, Dick got $130. That's it. I'll refrain from the obvious "he got dick" joke...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
I just want to thank the author of the article for mentioning the lesser known movies based on PKD's works (Screamers and Imposter) -- I'm a huge PKD fan, and now I've got a few interesting movies to go rent. I recommend reading all of PKD's short stories. They've been collected into a series of four books, and you can read through them all in a few weeks. And those weeks will be really odd, enlightening weeks. They'll mess with your mind, and cleanse your soul. Go to Amazon and search for "Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick".
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Interestingly, PKD was very positive about the screenings he saw of the movie before his death. So faithful adaptation might not even be what the author wanted.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
"The perpetual rain..."
The story takes place over a period of maybe 3 days.
It's not raining when Deckard VK's Rachael at the Tyrell Corporation.
I saw an interview (I think on the Indiana Jones DVDs) which had Harrison Ford saying that he was the one who fought against Deckard being "outed" as a replicant. Apparently he and Scott had a big fight about it. That's why it is in the director's cut and not the normal cut. I kind of wish there was a version on DVD with the original cut, voice over and all. I didn't remember it being that bad. But perhaps watching it as something other than a teenager would change that. (Hell - I just saw Strange Brew and it wasn't nearly as funny as I remembered it as a kid)
Actually, IIRC, the shooting screenplay wasn't directly based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep." Ridley Scott took the then-current screenplay adaptation (like the 12th generation or something) of the story and gave it to another screenwriter. He told that one not to read Philip Dick's short story at all, only to adapt from the screenplay given him. This explains, of course, why there are so many huge changes from the short story.
Such irE
Beep.
This book was released in 1995.
This movie was released in 1986.
...was made long before he died -- on a shoe-string budget -- in France -- and was not based on a particualr story, but on a Dick-esque fantasy of which a PKD look-alike was a key character. "Paris nous appartient" (Paris Belongs to Us) was filmed by Jacques Rivette in the late 50s and finally released in 1960. (This was shot on donated scraps of film, with "volunteer actors" -- on a catch as catch can basis). The film involves a young woman who gets ensnared in the paranoid fantasises (about a worldwide conspiracy) of an American expatriate writer -- named "Phil Kaufman".
As far as I know, Rivette has never explicitly acknowledged that "Paris nou s appartient" was inspired by Dick's stories -- or that "Phil Kaufman" was a fantasized si8mulacra of Dick himself. Nonetheless, Dick's stories were already known to the avant-garde in France by the late 50s, and Rivette has expressed his admiration for P.K. Dick over the years.
No big-budget Hollywood-esque extravaganza has ever caught the essential spirit of PKD's universe (almost clairvoyantly -- the universe of PKD that wasn't fully manifested until his sad last days) as well as this early no-budget film of Jacques Rivette. (Many later Rivette films show more indebtedness to PKD for their tone and atmosphere than to Rivette's Hollywood directorial idols).
MEK
Credo quia impossibilis -- Tertullian