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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.
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.
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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.
But at least it'll have some nifty animation in the middle involving aliens and some effeminate guy saying "you lucky bastard", and maybe a cameo role as a deaf/mute/hunchback type person.
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.
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... 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.
Short stories are OK for movies actually. 2+ hours is actually a short time to squeeze an entire book in.
With many movies you could have a better ending or explanation for things, but it's just not going to fit in 2-3 hours.
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).
Woo, Terry Gilliam's in charge? Then we can look forward to a movie 10 years late,
I waited thirty years to see Lord of the Rings. Patience is a virtue.
substantially overbudget,
Why should I care?
yet still looks half-done.
The Gilliam movies I've seen are Time Bandidts, Twelve Monkeys, and Brazil*. I fail to see how any of those movies "look half done."
* not counting the Monty Python movies, but they didn't "look half done" either, except perhaps Holy Grail, shich was supposed to look like it did.
Free Martian Whores!
Also missed Screamers, based loosely on the short story "Second Variety".
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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.
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... will they be done in 3D?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
Many epic stories need to be a series, either TV or movie. T10K was like ... 6 or 7 movies 3 hours long each? That's how you implement an epic story. Or look at BSG, or more loosely, Enterprise. The problem with TV series is they try to resolve microconflicts in one or two episodes; Enterprise was always a favorite of mine because while there was a small storyline in each episode, there were also 5 other things going on at the same time, on-screen.
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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.
The best . . . and hardest to do well . . . in my humble opinion.
Valis would be interesting too.
"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.
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...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.)
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.
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.
And even enjoyable in a somewhat psychedelic sort of way but Hollywood never quite seems to get it.
You might try the film version of "A Scanner Darkly." Unaccountably, they actually did try to hold to the Phil Dick original, rather than jettisoning the written work to write a different work "based on" the novel.
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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!
Baron Munchausen apparently had huge numbers of things go wrong and in the end mostly due to timing it didn't make it into very many cinemas so didn't make much money. I think that's where he got the bad reputation from.
However if you watch it on video it's so good that you just don't care. Apparently it was only "half done" but it doesn't look it, they still had enough footage and enough story to make a fun movie.
Also since Hollywood is always crying crocodile tears about money in case they'll end up paying tax some day, I'm not entirely sure that the loss was a big as reported or even actually a loss. Remember that on paper Forest Gump made a loss despite not costing a lot to make and being incredibly popular - and that paper loss meant not having to pay a percentage of profits to the writer and not having to pay tax.
Then we can look forward to a movie 10 years late, substantially overbudget, yet still looks half-done.
Well, not everyone can compete with the polished perfection of Michael Bay movies.
sic transit gloria mundi
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.
. . . 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.
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".
I fail to see how any of those movies "look half done."
Really?
The Gilliam movies I've seen are Time Bandidts,
They didn't even hire a real minotaur! And the only reason it starred midgets is because actors were paid by the foot back then.
Twelve Monkeys
Yeah someone really dropped the ball in the animal department. I think there was, at most, one monkey in this movie. This one wasn't even half done!
and Brazil
And there's even less Brazil in Brazil than there were monkeys in Twelve Monkeys.
What a hack!
The enemies of Democracy are
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.