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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.)
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.