Slashdot Mirror
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.).
They should make a movie out of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep".
Anyone second the motion?
http://jesus.everdense.com/
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.
it's been rumored for years that A Scanner Darkly has been in production - by the same team that did GATTACA. i've been looking quite forward to it, but seems to have gone the way of chris cunningham doing Neuromancer... vaporware...
Much as Wired writers like to sensationalize everything nowadays, it is too much of a stretch to attribute all 'false realities' stories to Dick. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have explored doubt of their external realities. They are certainly NOT Dick's themes.
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.
Phillip K. Dick has been one of my favorite authors for a long time now. My mind bends along the same tunnels he trodded. The pink light, the red curtains, the overlapping of realities.
I hope that we can some day see his notes on the Owl in Daylight (the novel he never finished/or pretty much even began) because from what exists in his thought patterns in What if our world is their Heaven? -- it was to be a classic work.
Valis is required reading, but it must come to someone at the right time. If at the wrong time they may never touch it again. Ubik would make a fantastic film, as would A Scanner Darkly.
I had read awhile back that Richard Linklater was interested in doing an animated Scanner Darkly, and I think that would have worked out really well. Still, Soderberg would be able to pick up on the needed subtleties in that novel. George Clooney as Bob Arctor could definitley work out well.
The Man in the High Castle also would make a great movie. Hollywood needs to focus on his novels. His short stories just barely scratched the surface of what he was trying to reveal. Perhaps that is why they have been used mostly to date, because they are more skeletal and can be mutated into a product easily.
d. Taylor Singletary,
reality technician techra.el
If you like adolescent fantasies that operate on the emotional level of Saturday morning cartoons and pretend to be almost pseudo-intellectual, yes, it does speak for itself.
...see relationships as being more complex than just pairing with a sex partner.
Translation: Commando rox0red Total Recall.
some of us would have appreciated seeing the other possible version metioned
Um..
Probably those of us who look for something deeper in life than firefights
Well..
You lost me.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
The Man in the High Castle also would make a great movie. Hollywood needs to focus on his novels. His short stories just barely scratched the surface of what he was trying to reveal. Perhaps that is why they have been used mostly to date, because they are more skeletal and can be mutated into a product easily.
This is true of not only PKD, but of all novels in general. It's much easier to take a short story and pad it out to a feature length movie, than to take an existing novel-length story, cut out everything that won't work visually (remember, movies are about showing, not telling), and then try and bandage what's left into a cohesive plot. Also consider that much of the richness of the novel will be lost, as we don't have the available screen time to follow everybody's POV, or to track multiple storylines and/or subplots. Pretty much as a rule, writers try and find a central theme in a novel, pick out a few characters and main events, keep the time and setting (sometimes - sometimes not in the event of The 13th Floor), and write everything else from scratch.
Novella-sized stories, written in a cinematic style are easiest to translate to screen time, but even then, film being the collaborative medium it is, you got a lot of cooks, and a potentially spoiled broth...
David Lynch has a movie called Lost Highway that deals with multiple/parallel realities. I actually didn't understand it, does anyone here know what I'm talking about? I've watched it about 5 times and can't figure it out!
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."
a good, fictitious, interview interview with Philip K Dick
.
. hmmm
I don't know how PKD felt about Total Recall, but according to the documentary On The Edge Of Blade Runner:
...it was left to me to go in with a few of my key people and [Dick] and his friend go down and sit in the screening room and uh ...and he said very little and I said, "Roll it." And it went dark. The ten minutes of optical takes ran, the lights came up, Philip turned around, looked me right in the eyes and he says, "How is this possible? I don't understand this." He says, "This feels exactly like what I had in my head when I was writing it. How does this happen?" At that moment it was probably the best moment in my career because I said (making fist), "We nailed it."
Philip K. Dick was reasonably unhappy. Katie Haber gave me a call and said, "put together the best of the best in a reel," and
- David Dryer, Visual Effects Supervisor ("Blade Runner")
My
Limekiller
I recently ran across two articles about the strong links between creativity and insanity, and thought them relevant to any discussion of PKD -- his methamphetamine abuse left him more or less permanently schizophrenic, but the quality of his work did not suffer: quite the contrary.
Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Doesn't this just ring true? We see politicians create anti-spam bills that will create more spam, help Medicare bills that will gut Medicare, Clean Air Acts designed to allow our air to get dirtier, acts to "save" the forests by cutting down the trees. We see propaganda from foreign news sources, and, sadly, from our own. We see commercials that say one thing while we know reality is the opposite. We "see" things on football fields and behind baseball diamonds that are not actually at the stadiums. We see Times Square electronically made over in order to insert a billboard that is not there in real life. We see Wall Street promising to get tough on corporate crime, while analysts give buy ratings to SCO.
We live a PKD existence! That's why his story themes resonate so strongly with us. We recognize it. Every day.
GO to the chart at the bottom of the article. The movies BLADE RUNNER (1982), SCREAMERS (1996), IMPOSTOR (2002), MINORITY REPORT (2002) had a total gross of over $170,000,000.
PKD got paid under $2,000 for all these combined. That's a 0.001% slice of the gross!
In defence of Total Recall 2070, that "movie" is just the first two episodes of the series welded together. I thought it was a bit cheesy at first, but continued watching anyway. It turned out that the series itself is really good as a whole, one of the best SciFi series I've seen. It has virtually nothing to do with the Arnie film, apart from the fact that there is a company called Rekall. It deals with some really interesting ideas to do with mind control, religion, androids, drug use, and all kinds of stuff in later episodes. It's a shame it got killed after one season, but at least the end ties up quite nicely.
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!
Dick has been quoted as saying "I love Blade Runner; it has nothing to do with my story, but it's a great movie." The director's cut certainly took the mindbending part correctly.
We'll Rember it for you Wholesale (Total Recall) ended with a joke. The Mars trip was never in doubt. As different from the source as any Paul Verhoeven film.
Minority Report took things in the right direction for the first 2/3rds. But that stupid "echo murder" crap leading upto the happy ending bit it.
Paycheck is a sacriledge. The short story didn't have action, it was a man thinking his way out of tense situations in a police state as he tries to unravel the mystery of his past from a few bizarre clues. John Woo hasn't made single good flick in the US.
Through a Scanner Darkly is a dark movie about drug abuse, insanity, and a cartell conspiracy involving a Synanon like organization. No way in hell is that going to be produced correctly.
The King of The Elves is about an old farmer who kills his friend of decades because some elves show him that he's the king of ogres. You never are sure at the end whether the elves were real or not. Now way is that going to survive Disney.
They might make something out of Time Out of Joint.
Haven't seen Screamers but I hear it's an okay adaption of "The Second Variety".
Oh yeah, my point. Good stuff is getting washed with mud. That article sucked.
I've long held an interest of reading accounts of what (extraordinary) schizophrenics go through in their own worlds in their own words. IMO PKD's Valis and Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are seminal works in this peculiar field. So far, his writings that have been turned into film really just skim upon his twisted view of reality.
Valis has creativity that makes you gasp (well, me anyway): there's a great discourse between Dr. Stone and Horselover Fat that should be mandatory instruction for anyone working in mental health. Horselover Fat is the alter-ego of Philip K Dick. You'd have to read the book to find out why he's such an odd name...
Affleck: "To anybody who's ever thought, Did that happen or did I dream it? - you'd have to have a PhD in philosophy to get too deep into this, but it has to do with wanting to validate our own first-person experience."
This is what writers like Dick are up against -- an audience (and even actors in movies based on his works!) that thinks a doctorate is needed to look beneath the veneer. But then, if the Hollywood versions bring more readers to the original works...
I'm just re-reading a French translation book titled "Blade Runner", but from the original "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". It has references to "Blade Runners" in it, I'm beginning to wonder how bastardized the translation is. The rest of the book so far (only read about 30 pages on the way in to work this morning) is far enough away from the movie plot, and I read it about 8 years ago and it certainly seems to resemble DADoES. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Also, the more I read about PK Dick, the more I feel that he was ahead of his time. "Time Out of Joint" which I have also recently read in French (living in Paris means the best book bargains are in the local language... I'd love to pick up cheap English originals) was written in the 1950s IIRC, and yet it's as if it could have been written yesterday. Sure, the occasional reference to technology which sounds a little out of date does happen, but for the mind that's really easy to step over, because everything else just fits. Sure, it is paranoid, but when you question everything you see on TV about politics these days, you ask yourself what influence one guy (Bush, Blair, whatever) really has over the thousands of people who are really employed in making policy. Indeed, the influence those thousands have on the leader figure is what we should be more worried about.
In England, where we only have a population of 60 million, it's perhaps less flagrant than in the US, but somewhere along the line we are all many steps removed from any policy decisions, we mostly get to say yes or no about once every 4 years and most of us don't even vote in local elections. Michael Moore had a point when he said running for election in small-fry local posts is enough to get in sometimes. Don't bother pointing out the holes and contradictions in some of his other lefty liberal stuff though, I'm well aware of those. I digress.
The point with PK Dick's writing, at least that of it which I have read, is that the individual is studied much more than the collective. The paranoia inherent in a lot of the work is because the stuff is so based on an individuals attempt to understand reality. It's almost a solipsistic nightmare sometimes. Art can really start to get somewhere with our current malaise. Because the way we think and interpret is what really matters for us as individual human beings. And our current malaise is just that: faced with an increasing access to all sorts of societies, individuals, and cultures, our biggest problem is first how to situate ourselves. No longer (or rarely) do we live in smaller, closer-knit communities, but rather in almost separate little units - which do not interconnect based on local geography but rather along interest based lines and public gatherings...
When we start automatically watering down a lowest common denominator for mass marketing... we're really pulling away from what Dick's writing does to us, in making us look at our own individual reaction to current society and current social groups. The feeling you have after the cited movies are just reflections in a distorted mirror of the feelings that are conveyed when you read the books.
I know that to have mass appeal, a movie should respect a certain number of things which are the antithesis of what real film art is about, but raising the bar a little would gradually educate the filmgoing public - indeed there are literally millions of us who would really go after a less "clean cut happy ending experience". The global market is there now, you don't have to market to the whole of ABC1 audience in suburban midtown multiplexes.
I wish that some independent film maker could fix up to do a truer adaptation of a PKD short story, and really leave it hanging at the end. Just the other day I saw Intolerable Cruelty, and couldn't help thinking that the happy ending was tacked on in order to pass some kind of Hollywood audience standard. Cut the movie about 10 minutes earlier, where the roles suddenly reverse in favour of the character played by
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Beep.
This book was released in 1995.
This movie was released in 1986.
Hollywood is not ready for this: what if Minority Report ended on the fade to black when Tom Cruise confront his boss and a gunshot is heard ? That would be IMHO a quite dickian ending.
Even worse, Hollywood seems to be right regarding the audience: just look at the comments on the Matrix. We have here movies exploring ideas quite close to Dick's favorites, and a last movie that close nicely the series, leaving many open questions, as most of his novel do. The net result: the audience does not like it. How sad.
Minority Report took things in the right direction for the first 2/3rds. But that stupid "echo murder" crap leading upto the happy ending bit it.
The ending is actually ambiguous. In the middle of the story we hear that the culprits put under the "halo" have pleasant dreams. Everything that happens after Tom Cruise receives his halo can be such a dream! What really happened is your choice as a viewer - there is no actual hint into any direction. I'd say it's as phildickian as it gets!
It seems to me that Philip K. Dick was sort of science fiction's anti-George Lucas. Dick's stories got better as he got older. He wasn't satisfied with looking at the surface of reality, he wanted to dig deeper. He never got rich, so he never had a chance to have his creativity ruined by a lot of money. Hollywood was only starting to catch on to his ideas when he died, so his ego never became a bloated gas-bag, ruined by fame. I think if Phil Dick and George Lucas had ever met in real life, they would have mutually annihilated each other.
...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