Philip K.Dick in Hollywood 2002

 

Subject: PKD in Time
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 12:26:30 GMT
From: "Mike" <user245@xxxxx.hotmail.comxxxxx>
Organization: AT&T Broadband
Newsgroups: alt.books.phil-k-dick

Very short pre-Minority report press brief:
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020624/pkd.html

Philip K. Dick
His dark vision of the future is now

BY RICHARD CORLISS
Posted Sunday, June 16, 2002; 1:22 a.m. EST

Verne and Vonnegut, Borges and Burgess, Lessing and LeGuin-they all wrote
science fiction that was taken seriously during their lives. Philip K.
Dick's work, no less serious or searching, was confined to the ghetto of SF
(that's the short form, folks-never, ever sci-fi). He stalked through
earthly life, through five wives, a drug addiction and a nervous breakdown,
seeing his SF novels published in tatty Ace paperbacks, his other fiction
regularly rejected. When he died, in 1982, at 53, mainstream readers didn't
know Phil Dick.

It would be lovely to invent an alternative reality in which Dick somehow
survived to see the flourishing of his reputation: cover-story tributes in
the New York Times Book Review and the New Republic; the opera made from his
novel Valis; the issuing of old novels (some published for the first time)
in spiffy editions; a generation of readers avid for his teeming, dystopic
visions. "What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century," wrote
Maus author Art Spiegelman, "Philip K. Dick is to the second half.

"His work has also inspired six movies-the first, Blade Runner (from his novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), released just after his death.
Total Recall (from the story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale")
followed in 1990, then the French Barjo (from Confessions of a Crap Artist)
and Screamers (from "Second Variety"). This year, two more: the O.K.
Impostor and now Minority Report.

Would Dick be pleased with these films? In 1980 he told an interviewer, "You
would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile
painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood." And for all the
postmortem respect accorded Dick's work, no movie yet has been both fully
faithful to his ideas and successful on its own terms. The two best-Blade
Runner, with its "more human than human" androids, and Minority Report-use
Dick as a launching pad for their own propulsive flights of fantasy.
What's missing? The philosophy he dreamed of. Behind the plots of empathetic
androids and cybertorpedoes, two questions obsessed Dick: What is real? and
What is human? He also asked, What's next? "I think, as the Bible says, we
all go to a common place," he said in a 1972 speech. "But it is not the
grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future." It is in his
future, our present-in readers' minds and on the huge mindscreen of the
movies-that Phil Dick lives.

---

Subject: PKD in LATimes, 19 June, 2002
Date: 19 Jun 2002 23:53:59 GMT
From: rmjon23@aol.combonwa (RMJon23)
Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Newsgroups: alt.books.phil-k-dick

http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Search-X!ArticleDetail-63277,00.html
Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Casting a Timeless Shadow
Steven Spielberg's 'Minority Report' is only the latest film based on the work
of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick

By BILL DESOWITZ,

Special to The Times It has been 20 years since the seminal sci-fi film "Blade Runner" first
burst on the scene with its cyberpunk prophecy of a dehumanized 21st century.
The dark and dank depiction of L.A. as a technological wonder and existential
wasteland--part noir and part sci-fi--may owe its aesthetic to director Ridley
Scott, but its vision is that of the late author Philip K. Dick.

It was Dick who was responsible for the thrust of this much imitated
paranoid parable: What is reality? And what does it mean to be human? It's no
wonder, then, that Dick's fingerprints are all over our science-fiction
culture: "The X-Files," "The Matrix," "A.I.," "Eyes Wide Shut," "Vanilla Sky,"
"The Truman Show," "Waking Life," "Gattaca," "12 Monkeys" and the upcoming
"Simone," about a computer-generated actress, all have been influenced by
Dick's sensibility.

And that's not counting the other adaptations of Dick's works: "Total
Recall" (Arnold Schwarzenegger goes to a travel agency for a virtual vacation
and leaves with a destructive memory implant), "Screamers" (Peter Weller fights
a war with a self-replicating killing machine), "The Imposter" (Gary Sinise may
or may not be an android suicide bomber) and now "Minority Report," which opens
Friday. "Minority Report's" director Steven Spielberg and its star, Tom Cruise,
have fallen under Dick's spell with this yarn--loosely based on a Dick short
story that was adapted by screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen--about a
pre-crime unit in Washington, D.C., that utilizes precognitive mutants to catch
and convict murderers before they commit their crimes. Cruise plays the hotshot
cop that becomes the pursued pursuer when the "Pre-Cogs" target him.
"I don't think I tried to adapt [Dick] with 'Minority Report'--I just took
his brilliant premise and ran with it," offers Spielberg. "The template sort of
became self-determination versus destiny. And that's what interested me the
most: If there is something in the stars, can you reconfigure them to either
survive or write your own ending?"

Spielberg is well aware that the Dick zeitgeist has permeated the sci-fi
genre since "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall" (1992). Which is why he purposely
avoided referencing the two films again to avoid any obvious comparisons,
though he knows "Blade Runner" like the back of his hand. "Where I thought
'Blade Runner' succeeded brilliantly was in its style and its look. I thought
Ridley did the most brilliant job of his career with its lighting ... there
really wasn't much of a story to tell."

That wasn't Dick's fault. If anything, there was too much story to tell in
the clever novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" that served as the
basis for "Blade Runner." The title alone is enough to keep you up late at
night trying to ponder its philosophical connotations. Which is precisely what
the always unsettling Dick had in mind.

Dick intentionally tried to get under readers' skins with his
mind-bending, Kafka-esque short stories and novels. Born in Chicago in 1928, he
lived most of his life in California and was a passionate advocate of science
fiction. Dick was addicted to amphetamines as a result of depression he
suffered in the '50s and often wrote under the influence of the drugs. He died
in 1982 of a stroke, just a few months before the opening of "Blade Runner,"
the first film adapted from his work.

Thanks to "Blade Runner," though, which became an instant cult
classic--Harrison Ford plays a desensitized bounty hunter who hunts fugitive
androids (known as replicants in the movie) that act more human than
humans--Dick was suddenly on the mainstream Hollywood map where he has remained
ever since. Currently there are at least two other Dick adaptations in
development, including "A Scanner Darkly," about drug addiction, with "Waking
Life's" Richard Linklater reportedly signed to write and direct.

"Dick stands very high in the [science-fiction] pantheon," says Brian
Aldiss, a Dick admirer and author of the short story from which "A.I." was
based, "Super Toys Last Summer Long." "His early fascination was that he
provided a counterbalance to the triumphalism of the Robert Heinlein kind of
fiction. Phil talked about the bums and derelicts of society. As one of the
bums, I preferred him.

"Dick is noir. He wrote about the early drug culture and the paranoia
gripping the world during the Cold War; those concerns have proved enduring."
According to Paul Williams, a rock journalist and close friend of Dick's
who interviewed him for Rolling Stone magazine in 1974, Dick was an intense,
disturbed yet sweet person with a great sense of humor. "His goal was to pierce
through the veil of what is only apparently real and get at what is real,"
Williams says. "Because he was more and more interested in exploring mystical
experiences he had early in 1974, he wrote more than a million words of notes
compulsively. It scared him. He actually thought he spoke to God."

But in interviews, Dick discussed another profound impact in his life:
reading about the Jehovah's Witnesses who typed the list of names marked for
extermination in a Nazi death camp after they were targeted too. Dick was
struck by what he called the lists "machine-like quality of pathology" and this
interest in the process of dehumanization defined his oeuvre.

"He was definitely a post-modern thinker," says Paul Verhoeven, who
directed "Total Recall" and initially developed "Minority Report" as a sequel
before it eventually wound up with Cruise and Spielberg. "He had this
philosophy that there exists two realities, what we dream and what we
experience as reality, with no interpretation favoring one or the other. This
is what I chose to explore in 'Total Recall,' the feeling that we cannot say
what really is the truth."

The trick with adapting Dick, suggests screenwriter Gary Goldman, who
collaborated on "Total Recall" and an early draft of "Minority Report" with
Verhoeven, is to be as subversive as possible, because that's the essence of
Dick. "The problem with making a Hollywood movie is that it affirms existing
ideals. But Dick's work ... is not a morality tale."

Spielberg made "Minority Report" more his own by focusing on the personal
and the political, with Cruise coming face to face with his haunted past and
the civil rights implications of his pre-crime system. Yet coming on the heels
of "A.I.," "Minority Report" is not as much of a departure for the director as
one would think, despite its creepy undercurrent and visual bombardment.
For instance, the theme of parents losing children and obsessively trying
to reconnect with them is one of Spielberg's strongest threads. "I've done that
a lot, going all the way back to 'Sugarland Express,' " he admits. "The whole
idea of divorce and the disenfranchisement of family is a huge fear of mine.
It's also something that makes me a better father and a better husband in my
own life because I can safeguard that from ever happening by being more
attentive to my family. That's the dye in me that doesn't wash off."

The film's strange, gritty look, an homage to film noir, however,
represents another stylistic breakthrough for Spielberg. "Rather than going for
a black-and-white look, which I did in ['Saving Private] Ryan,' I used a
'bleach bypass' process, which takes all the color out of the face, because
people with rosy cheeks and good complexions tend to undermine the tone of the
scene they're in, forcing filmmakers to use blue and green light, which we hate
to do. So the process gave me that sort of forsaken and barren look, which I
really wanted for this story and had never done in a movie."

"But the template that I used for this movie more than anything else was
'The French Connection.' Very simply, I loved the way Billy [director William
Friedkin] made the most New York film anybody's ever made, in my opinion, and
then threw away New York. It's just environment. And because I was making this
story on the future with these toys, I wanted to spend a lot of money on the
toys and then throw them away. I wanted to use the film as a philosophical
jumping off point to embrace the future for a second, establish the world and
then throw it away and tell the story."

Spielberg found something even more personal in "Minority Report" that
reverberates throughout Dick's work--the fear of losing control: "The big thing
that really sparked me was that if I could know what would really happen
tomorrow, would I want to find out? I went to an astrologist when I was just a
kid at Universal, when I had my first office and my first secretary. It was
around 1969. I foolishly gave her my birth date and all the other information
she needed to do a five-year chart. And everything came true. "I vowed at the end
of that I would never, ever want to know again what was just around the corner.
Ever. Of course, I fear that and the more I fear something, the more I'm attracted to it."