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."

Comments

This obsession is too late ...

[slugmass]

to stop the horror that is "Twilight." A literary adaptation in the sense that teenage Facebook postings are learned discourse.

Of course.

[Fantastic Lad]

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