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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...