Slashdot Mirror
Hollywood's Growing Obsession With Philip K. Dick
bowman9991 writes "Even after Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, Impostor, and Next, it appears Hollywood's lust for movies based on Philip K. Dick material continues. The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Terence Stamp, is the latest, and features some classic Dick themes, including the fragile nature of reality and a fight against a world controlled and manipulated by powerful unseen entities. When Congressman David Norris meets the love of his life after a political defeat, he must peel back the layers of reality to discover why a mysterious group is so desperate to make sure they never meet again. He is up against the agents of fate itself — the men of The Adjustment Bureau. The Adjustment Bureau adaptation follows news that Terry Gilliam will adapt Dick's novel The World Jones Made, that Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and Ubik are being adapted, and that a remake of Total Recall is being developed by the ironically named Original Films Studio."
"Time Out of Joint" Purchased by Warner Bros.
"Valis", "Radio Free Albemuth", and "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said" Purchased by independent producer John Alan Simon
properties under option: "Adjustment Team" - Short Story, "Ubik" - Novel, "King of the Elves - Short Story
After reading more than a few of PKD's books and short stories really I'm surprised that Hollywood isn't more obsessed with PKD than they are now. In my opinion, the Science Fiction genre is tired and overdone in very predictable ways. PKD's works are often further out there. I realize that A Scanner Darkly was probably not the most well received movie but I would predict that Dick's use of a sort of confusion/resolution while tackling the standard moral/ethical dilemmas that are the hallmark of SciFi would be an easy option to keep movies "fresh." Of course, I've been wondering the same thing about Stanislaw Lem for quite some time. Aside from Solaris he seems to be relegated to fringe movies like Ari Folman's adaptation of Lem's The Futurological Congress .
Recently I finished Chuck Palahniuk's Rant and went searching online for more details as I was generally confused about who was a Historian and who was not at the end of the novel. What I found was that he's making it into a trilogy and that the rights to his books as movies are generally bought right after he finishes a book. He says:
We’ve had a bunch of negotiations for Rant. It’s going to be the first of three books on the same sort of theme and the movie production people want to see at least outlines on the next two books in the series because nobody wants to buy the rights of the first of three and not be able to control the rights to the second and third books. So I really have to sell Rant as a three-book package. So once I’m able to present those people with a product outline for the next two books, then we’ll sell.
So I'm guessing that Fight Club was such a huge money maker and gained mainstream respect that some of his more gritty novels are now premium movie material? Or perhaps he's not too picky on the size of the sum when his story is about to made into a movie?
There's not a lot of data out there on how much these rights sell for I guess so you can't say whether or not PKD's Trust is just underrating them as pulp scifi and selling them low cost. Combine that possibility with the fact that he's had some huge movies come from his books and I think Hollywood is finally beginning to understand. With Dick you finally have the technology to represent his dreams on screen along with a dearth of stories along with a public tired of your predictable plots along with the possibility that PKD's trust wants PKD to be appreciated on the silver screen. Lord knows that if I was a member of PKD's family I would love to see the young people of today enjoy his works as much as the young people of yesterday did.
My work here is dung.
Slashdot's gotten NSFW.
The Adjustment Bureau adaptation follows news that Terry Gilliam will adapt Dick's novel The World Jones Made
Woo, Terry Gilliam's in charge? Then we can look forward to a movie 10 years late, substantially overbudget, yet still looks half-done.
Hollywood has made money off of his material, so they're eager to go back to the well. The good news, thus far at least, is that the material they're using is actually well-written.
Nothing out of the ordinary here, IMO.
Sent from your iPad.
That's the one I really want to see ! It could become a classic movie, if done correctly.
How about some hard sci-fi on the big screen, for a effing change? Honestly, aliens that copulate with black hookers and live in a ghetto, or Dance with the Volves on another Planet just didn't do it, for me. Neither did Total Recall, for that matter. Take some of Stephen Baxter's opus - hopefully not even Hollywood can screw up that!
For me, the epitome of sci-fi filmography was The Andromeda Strain (the original one, of course). Plenty of creativity, yet pretty hard sci-fi (coupled with believable acting/good directing) and no flying thumbs from the bottom of a reactor.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Phillip K Dick, mostly wrote short stories. Some of these movies are very loosely based upon those stories, I don't understand why they are not just writing scripts without association. The only thing I could come up with is they think it has some marketing value.
Dick's stories are perfect for film adaptation because they tend to be short - either short stories or novellas. His longest novels are still very short compared to most of what gets published today in the sci-fi genre. Short stories are easier to adapt to film - you generally have to cut a lot out of a novel to make it fit into a two hour movie, but short stories translate to a script more easily. Dick's stories also tend to have the kind of plot twists and the potential for action sequences that Hollywood favors, and he's well known and has a fairly big cult following. There are tons and tons of good sci-fi short stories out there, but very few of their authors are as well known as PKD. Combine all that together and they're a natural choice for adaptation.
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
... along with a dearth of stories
That should read "along with a wealth of stories."
Terry Gilliam is one of the most fantastic individuals in the history of film.
If you're a geek, you know him as a founding member of Monty Python (Patsy in The Holy Grail or Cardinal "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition" Fang). If you're into film, he's done some fantastic dystopian sci-fi films (Brazil, 12 Monkeys). Talk about breadth of talent.
If anyone has what it takes to do Dick well, it's Gilliam (another random piece of trivia: Gilliam was originally chosen by the author to adapt/direct the Harry Potter books. The studios didn't like Rowling's idea and it never happened.)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Yeah, the Andromeda Strain was awesome! It was also the debut of the great (and sadly late) Michael Crichton on the silver screen, and he has written many entertaining books and movie scripts after that.
I loved the sets they used in the original, the same hallway painted in different colors to indicate another level inside the contained structure... There was definitely some good acting, and the suspense was heightened by the awesome soundtrack... And they left the origin of the strain kinda in the middle (although the new movie had a mildly interesting sci-fi-ish plot with a wormhole from the future... it felt a little too much Star Trek).
Also missed Screamers, based loosely on the short story "Second Variety".
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
because of this. I find the occasional used Dick in stores and the occasional omnibus, but I don't often find PKD at a reasonable price.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I would love to see a properly and accurately done Night's Dawn Trilogy, unfortunately they would probably turn it into another abortion like the LOTR movies, or the planned rape of The Wheel of TIme that they have been talking about turning into a set of movies.
Orwell was an optimist.
Kinda says something about my love life when all I see of TFS title is Obsession, Growing and Dick.
Hollywood is obsessed with secret, powerful, out-of-control, quasi-government agencies because Hollywood is a secret, powerful, out-of-control, quasi-government organization. They are obsessed with destroying the finances and lives of thousands of random people in order to obtain and retain control of the cultural and emotional mental frameworks of most people in the developed world.
This fascination with the themes of Phillip K. Dick is only a reflection of their own neurotic narcissism.
(sorry I just couldn't miss this opportunity)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Not because the movie was spectacular. But because of what many (most/all) missed.
When the technicians are putting Quaid under for the vacation implant with the 'secret agent' option - one of the techs chuckles "Mars with a blue sky"
I guess I'll have to read Phillip K Dick's book to see if that was the intention.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
... will they be done in 3D?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
And even enjoyable in a somewhat psychedelic sort of way but Hollywood never quite seems to get it. I've always thought of Dick as a cross between Vonnegut and Bradbury with a tiny bit of Hunter S. Thompson thrown in. Charlie Kaufman could probably write a good script for a Phil Dick movie - he'd get it.
The problem with hard sci-fi is that it appeals to a niche audience only. This used to be ok, but nowadays studios want films to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Which, incidentally, is also why so many films that could have been amazing end up being pretty terrible. It doesn't help that sci-fi is generally expensive to produce, why spend all that money when the much cheaper standard-relationship-comedy-sequel ends up earning more?
Not to say I wouldn't love to see more sci-fi or cyberpunk films. I'm not sure how you'd compress the Xeelee Sequence into a 2 hour movie (even if it's just a part of it), but I'd kill to see Takeshi Kovacs on the big screen.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
It would be nice if you paid for a screen adaption, that you got the books too.
Much more that can only be experienced in the books.
PKD is classic.
The best . . . and hardest to do well . . . in my humble opinion.
Valis would be interesting too.
Entertainment: Hollywood's Growing Obsession With Philip K. Dick
Would have been a much funnier headline without first and middle names.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
In my opinion, the Science Fiction genre is tired and overdone in very predictable ways.
That's because Gollyweird rarely makes a true science fiction.
Most of their shit and it's mostly shit, are really horror movies set in space - they're really a slasher movie but with an alien doing the slashing - Aliens.
Or they're just a rehash of Terrestrial plots and themes in "space" see Star Wars and Star Trek.
And when they actually do make a movie by a SciFi master, they fuck it up.
Now, Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) has the ability to do it. Whether the zipper heads in Hollywood will actually make a true science fiction movie is another story. There is hope, though, considering he got the money to do the Rings Trilogy.
The rare good sci fi, such as Primer hardly gets any promotion.
Yeah, but we'll have to wait until Hamilton is dead, editors like it when they can unleash their full artistic creative power without being bothered by that guy who wrote the story.
"a remake of Total Recall is being developed by the ironically named Original Films Studio."
Wow, mixed feelings at the totally missed opportunity there.
First, Philip K. Dick never wrote a piece called "Total Recall." A few of the major themes from his short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" were grabbed and incorporated into a completely different plot to make the movie "Total Recall," but for the most part, "Total Recall" isn't Phil Dick, and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" was not made into a movie.
So it seems like there is an opportunity here, to make a movie from the story Dick actually wrote.
Instead, though, for no detectable reason they seen to want to remake "Total Recall." I can't see the slightest reason to do this. It was already a fine film-- for what it was, which is an action-effects extravaganza that incorporated some themes from Dick's work into a Hollywood-plotted film-- and I doubt that that film can be remade better.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Blade Runner, Total Recall, the Minority Report, and Paycheck are all decent flicks. Not mind-bending, probably, but sure as hell not Uwe Boll/Sex in the City/Kung Fu Kid. There's loads of tripe in Hollywood, so 'win, place, or show' makes sense to me. They can't all be effigies, and much of this work is a fine way to idle away a couple hours here and there.
What am I missing?
I enjoyed the movies Blade Runner and Minority Report, so I tried reading some of the original short stories. I was disappointed. The writing style is uninspired and the characters are underdeveloped. I think this works for the filmmakers, because they are free to take a premise and fill in the details.
-Dave
...predicting the future is the most powerful superpower of all.
Nic Cage was arguably a superhero in Next because seeing 2 minutes into the future let him outmanouver bad guys and walk through machine gun bursts untouched. Seeing an hour into the future let Tom Cruise and the precogs eliminate murder. And seeing a whole day into the future in Paycheck let Ben Affleck save the world.
Even Dick's novels don't feed the need; Push showed Dakota Fanning the most important of a bunch of psychic heroes because the seers are always a step ahead of you.
Not that Dick was way out there with that; it was the most powerful spice-given power in Dune, and even George Lucas makes it a plot-steering device in Star Wars. Just the ability to see a fraction of a second into the future made 9-year-old Anakin a top race driver.
(Funny coincidence: not long after the recent Star Wars movies came out, BBC did a special "Top Gear" about race driving and the host actually took Michael Schumacher into a bar and demonstrated Schumacher was no better than anybody else at the old trick of "catch the bill before I drop it through your fingers". He has the same physical reaction time as anybody else. Top drivers like Schumacher *anticipate* what's coming next - seeing into the future by the ordinary ability of the brain to model the world - and actually start reacting to things before they happen. Lucas is really pretty smart, just not so hot at dialogue.)
This used to be ok, but nowadays studios want films to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Which, incidentally, is also why so many films that could have been amazing end up being pretty terrible.
Missing the point. The broad audience likes terrible movies. A boy meets girl, with a car chase, as a "screensaver" while the kids text on their cellphones, make out, or eat junk food while baked.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
to stop the horror that is "Twilight." A literary adaptation in the sense that teenage Facebook postings are learned discourse.
hopefully not even Hollywood can screw up that!
You underestimate the power of Hollywood.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Baxter? Are you kidding? He spends 3 pages describing how to take a shit in an Apollo capsule.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I'd rather see Phillip K.'s work than the current list of "Dicks" writing SciFi scripts lately.
If you look at Adjustment Team, we see that it is in the public domain.
As is The Variable Man, The Golden Man, The Last of the Masters, Meddler, Shell Game, The Turning Wheel and possibly a number of other stories.
But obviously this just proves, that without never ending copyright claims, the world will never see great art again.
Hmmm... it looks like the site has been slashdotted. I only get to see this page: http://sffmedia.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi
Omnis basim vester nobis compete sunt.
"When Congressman Chuck Norris meets the love of his life after a political defeat..."
Film that one if you can! Deeply, deeply strange.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Not as bad as Andy McNab. A chapter and a half of a guy sitting in a bush, shitting in a plastic bag. Thrilling stuff.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
The Andromeda Strain(movie), was hideously dry as was the standard for hard science fiction. Maybe it's just from a different era, maybe I have ADD, but all the hard sci-fi I've seen is just long drawn out and dull. Perhaps it's Clark's influence. He's a great man, and his ideas are great, but he just can't write characters. And so I think he set the tone for how a hard sci-fi is supposed to be played.
The broad audience likes terrible movies. A boy meets girl, with a car chase,
But in the Soviet.. Hasbro, the car chases the boy!
Probably unfilmable, but it might be fun to see the attempt.
Best Slashdot Co
I have to say that out of all of PKD's books I've read, the one I thought was most adaptable to film was Ubik. Dick apparently thought the same, since he wrote a screenplay version of it.
What happened to good old tits n' ass?
Have you ever seen the movie Sunshine? That was about as hard sci-fi as it gets. The nerdiness unfortunately was just oozing out of that movie, it was almost too much, even for me. The ending was great though.
PKD left behind a giant collection of sci-fi weirdness which can be adapted even by a team of monkeys into something interesting for the screen.
But far more importantly than that. . ,
He's dead. He left behind a corpse.
So now nobody has to pay him, or deal with the threat that he might become more than a Tim Burton, (an idiot machine which can be counted on to produce only what his masters want from him.) PKD, together with being a bit insane, had the unsettling tendency to criticize the world and look into places he was not supposed to look. You simply don't give a lot of money, power and media influence to such people. Media influence is reserved for the Fox talking head types. We know exactly what media influence is worth!
So you prevent new voices from rising, or you work hard to reign in and/or destroy old voices. (I'm fairly convinced these days that Lucas was carefully managed in order to prevent Star Wars from waking anybody up.)
But now that PKD is dead, and his legacy so far behind the current curve of social awareness, the studios can safely mine his data without having to worry about paying the piper, (in either money or souls). -And by "the studios" I of course include the various jackals left in charge of his collected works.
Dead artists and idiot machine writers are far more likely to be celebrated and rewarded in today's media precisely because they don't challenge the status quo.
-FL
unlike predicting it.
The reason is it interferes with our illusion of free will. If you see the future, you see what you'll do, there's no way around it. Dick was well aware of it, and wrote this in fact, but that's not a solution. I'm not sure how Herbert handled this, but I've never seen anyone handling it properly, its to alien. Terry Pratchett went as far as possible in pointing it out in the carpet people, but it still doesn't work. You just can't relate to a character that knows it has no free will, I think.
Time to try a Gil Hamilton story.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
That was about as hard sci-fi as it gets.
Nope. It was a fantasy film with spaceships.
Hard SF is generally populated with plausible science and believable if somewhat limited characters, not magical spacecraft and people who were clearly hand-picked for the most important mission ever out of the leavings of a psychiatric hospital.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
We need a remake of Total Recall because...?
> but nowadays studios want films to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.
So let's make a romantic comedy in a hard sci-fi cyberpunk plot/setting.
I think I've killed a kitten.
Hollywood's Growing Obsession With Dick?
Ummm. Psychology is a science. So is sociology. QED, Phillip K Dick is hard sci-fi.
The guy's talking about hard sf, ffs, not pathetically long space opera full of scenes written with one hand.
. . . Hollywould "gets it". . . LONG after PKD's coolness buzz has faded. That's the way Big Money works. It's the way Big Money has ALWAYS worked. It's really what "cool" was first all about - until they tried to package and market cool to us. Then it was what "punk" was all about. (wash-rinse-repeat).
Change the name, but it will always be the same: The folks who try to tell us that getting rich is all about taking risks, are really the most financially secure (relatively), and therefore the most risk-averse folks on the planet, and therefore, as far as cultural trends go, will always pretty much be positioned way far back on the long-tail as far as coolness goes.
A person with a $400 million trust-fund in the bank risking his own $5 million investing in a film based on a PKD story, in 2010, is NOT anything like "cool". Though, the rank and file hoi polloi market will reward him generously.
A person with $20 in the bank risking $5 (possibly tomorrow's dinner, or the electric bill, or prescription co-pay for his antidepressant meds) on a paperback novel by a new, unknown, unpromoted writer published by an off-brand house (maybe self-published, these days), with fresh ideas that haven't been recycled a dozen thousand times by low-budget mass-market screenwriters - is the definition of cool. That guy will earn the small-scale social respect of his peers by relating his experience in reading the book, in casual conversation. That's how social animals work.
Then, in 15 years, when the trustafarians decide this writer's popularity has safely gained enough critical mass that they can risk .001% (insured) of their net worth on a film, that "cool" person, and his peers will puke when they see the trailer.
Nobody expresses this phenomenon as succinctly as "Indy-rock Pete" in Diesel Sweeties. Which, I think, ceased being cool about 5 minutes before I "discovered" and started reading it. I'm waiting for the Michael Bey version of Diesel Sweeties. 16-bit graphics and all. In 3D Imax, Dolby Surround.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes, he wrote it when French director Jean-Pierre Gorin optioned the book. Dick was thrilled because it was the first time any filmmaker had ever expressed interest in his work, so he wrote the screenplay entirely on his own and sent it to Gorin as a gift. Unfortunately, Gorin had entirely different ideas about what he wanted the film to be, and wanted to make it into a kind of futuristic film noir detective story, so he never gave Dick's script any consideration at all. And of course, Gorin's version was never produced either.
It's too bad, because Dick's script is not only faithful to the original novel, he even added some delightful new scenes for how the characters in the living world communicated with those trapped in half-life (one of which seemed to inspire a scene used in Total Recall).
Sunshine?? SUNSHINE????? As in, "the sun's going out and we're going to re-ignite it" Sunshine? You have no sense of what hard SF is supposed to be. Absolutely none. To start with, it needs to be based on *actual science*, not some Hollywood writer's fever dream with no discernable relationship with actual physics.
J.R.R.Tolkien died in 1973 so thats just over halfway into the post-death years of life+70
Hobbit goes public domain under US law in 2032, and with the new edition in 1966 it may be 2061. Lord of The Rings was published 1954/55 so it runs out 2049 unless the 1966 edition extended it to 2061 again. So, I would say it's 2032 for Hobbit and 2049 for LOTR and then the oldest editions become public domain.
Source
Google's cache, because the site wasn't responding for me.
that's the first thing that pops into my mind whenever I hear his name.
Classic.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Contact, Gattaca, Moon to name a few. Hard-SF isn't pervasive, but there are some good ones.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
A similarly themed episode of Teilgith Zone in the 80's had this theme...other than the convienent ending it was a decent episode, especially because I remember it 25+ years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Minutes
I wish someone would make "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" into a film [without wrecking its message], and release it in US theaters on July 4.
And then I wish that the people who watched it would actually think about what they had seen. And it would be even nicer if the extent of their reaction went past "just thinking about it".
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I always liked Blade Runner, the movie. I've also always loved reading sci fi. Recently, I read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and loved it. My next read is "Ubik".
The last time I checked, a lot of us nerds like to read science fiction, and many of us are actually fans of Dick.
If you expect to only read things you want to read, start your own damn website!
UBIK is by far the clincher for me. I am a PKD fanatic from way back. I've read everything he wrote including magazine articles and his Exegesis. Truly a genius who suffered from psychoses that we can't even imagine...fueled with LSD and whatever else he was on. But seriously, if they try to make UBIK, and try to even stay within the ozone of the original, I will truly be amazed.
This is news about a number of movies that nerds often watch or care about. Blade Runner, aside from being an amazing movie that is relevant even in today's world, is also the most highly sampled movie in Drum N' Bass. I'm also a DnB nerd. How's that for relevance?
Oh.. its not linux. Sorry.
...but I'd kill to see Takeshi Kovacs on the big screen.
I'd drag everyone I know to see "Altered Carbon". But it would be a shame if they did all three novels. "Woken Furies" was kind of weak.
The problem is, most of the adaptations, so far, sucketh mightely. I'm not talking about major changes to the story line -- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (blade runner (the director's cut)) took major liberties with the plot but was still a pretty good flick that remained true to the spirit of the story. Impostor was pretty accurate, although somewhat lackluster. But for the most part, they've just been Welfare for the Stars -- the opportunity to pay a Reeves or Affleck a bazillion dollars to wander around expressionless, mouthing banalities.
I'd much rather see a little film with unknowns from a director that actually "gets" PKD than yet another lame "blockbuster" with a star-studded cast.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What irritates me is that Hollywood is scripting story after story based on his writings, to the almost total abandonment of the rest of the science fiction field. I would -love- to see something by Theodore Sturgeon or Ursula K LeGuin. (note the 'K')
Also, Mr. Dick's dystopian futures fit too well into the "dark" theme that seems to rule at the box office. Everything must be dark, hopeless and brooding. And it's a fake, forced emotion. Too comic book-like. Enough, already!
Or Eric Nylund's "Signal to Noise", but I don't think that the general audience would go for the future role reversals of the US and China... or maybe they'd learn something from it.
I would love to see a good rendition of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. Especially the last one was, IMO, extremely good and it would be hard to mess it up as its very action orientated and the extoic location would lend itself to special effects which big studios love so much. What would be hard to do right without a good director and actor would be the rage that the man feels. It would require someone like Daniel Craig, who really did the "man seething with rage" bit very well in a Quantum of Solace. I'm also pretty sure that the studios would not go with such a nihilistic message in a movie.
As much as I loved the enormous spaces and times of the Xeelee sequence, I just cannot see anyone making them into a decent film. The characters in Baxter's books are often very flat but that doesn't matter much, as the hard science keeps the reader captivated. Which is something that would simply fall apart in a movie as it's very hard to bring complicated concepts across in a story.
How about some hard sci-fi on the big screen, for a effing change?
Ringworld was optioned about 10 years ago. So far, no sign of a production.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
The broad audience likes terrible movies.
I don't think that's true. Or at least it's a very shallow analysis of which you are equally guilty if you've been watching anything Hollywood is churning out. I'll use a car analogy since this is Slashdot.
20% of people have a Toyota
20% of people have a Honda
20% of people have a GM
20% of people have a Ford
20% of people have some other foreign car.
You can make a move about Toyotas that is really awesome, but only 20% of your audience will be even remotely interested.
Or you can make a movie about Foreign cars that isn't quite as detailed and interesting, but hey, at least now you can target 3x as many people.
Or you can make a movie thats about all cars, is really shallow, and maybe has some random hot chick and some explosion. But 100% of people can understand it and might potentially enjoy it.
Every movie in the theater is from the 2nd and 3rd category. That doesn't mean no one has a car with a brand name on it. It just means there are no movies in the theater about the car you'd really love to see movies about.
See also: Why The Guild isn't on network television, why independent music have experienced a huge uptick in sales now that the internet allows them to market and sell to their niche audiences, and why Hollywood and big-budget movies and prime-time TV are doomed as people segregate out into their respective niches to consume cheap high-quality content instead of big-budget low-quality content.
Hope you enjoyed the terrible mixed car metaphor!
The last thing the world needs is any further promotion of Henleins childish bullshit libertarianism.
Did you go see Moon, last year? No, well that is why they don't make many hard sci-fi. Because even the people who supposedly like it don't go see it.
The book I most liked, was Lies inc. Amazing story, the first PKD that I read as well, when I was about 14. Was not expecting that.
There were two "magic science" parts to Sunshine. The first using mythical "String Theory" to explain why the sun was slightly dimmer than usual.
The second was the bomb used to break the string.
Everything else was hard science, and pretty cool.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
:)
If you want hard sci-fi on the big screen you could certainly do a lot worse than [a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/"]Moon[/a]
While it's a little contrived in places and suffers from that very 1980's "special effects using toys" vibe compared to most modern movies with spectacular CGI, it's charming, well written and phenomenally well played by Sam Rockwell. It definitely appeals to the classic sci-fi geek in me because the technology literally takes an huge back seat to the psychological drama that ensues, and even which is already extant at the beginning of the movie. Of course, the technology becomes a major plot point later in the movie... but that's something for which you'll have to watch the movie. I highly recommend it.
Gahhh... make that Moon
I've been on too many bulletin boards lately trying to post links... :)
Yeah and what about "The Core", that really only broke the second law of thermodynamics, and conservation of angular momentum, and had some impossible plot devices involving the internet and Xena videos, but other than that it was hard SF all the way!
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.