Paul Giamatti, a longtime fan of PKD and voice of the Scanner Darkly audio book, updates comingsoon.net on The Owl in Daylight:
"Paul Giamatti talked to us about the Philip K. Dick biopic that he's been attached to with an update on that project. "His daughters are probably going to help produce it, and there's a guy writing it right now as far as I know. I'd love to do it, if they still want me to do it when it comes around and it's all done, I'd absolutely love to do it. Definitely. We'll see what the guy comes up with."
As far as I know this is the same stage the production was in back in April when they planned to shoot in Spring of 2008. It looks like they're taking their time with the production.
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As far as I know this is the same stage the production was in back in April... It looks like they're taking their time with the production.
That's Hollywood for you. They take their time. I don't see it as any cause for alarm ... more than any other, anyhow...
Anne Dick told me in a recent e-mail that she was about to be visited by screenwriter Tony Grisoni, that was a couple of weeks back. If he writes fast, he might deliver a first draft within a couple of months, but it could still be a year or more before they start shooting, presuming they have funding in place.
I wrote about a dozen drafts of a PKD biopic in 2000-2002 and the producer and I had a hell of a time trying to find a through line that took in PKD's incredibly packed life, five wives, all that fiction writing, his struggles to be published and then taken seriously, his visions, his relationship with the FBI, the conspiracies and often contradictory accounts of his life from friends and wives.
Good luck to Tony Grisoni. Hope he finds a way through.
Can't wait to see it. But I just hope it's not too quirky, or weird. PKD's life deserves to be exposed to the largest audience possible, and while I liked A Scanner Darkly, I think the animation seriously limited its audience.
Personally I think there's probably about five or six good movies that could made from PKD's life. His alternate life as Thomas, fleeing Christian persecution in Ancient Rome alone would make an excellent movie.
Anyone ever seen the French film based on Dick's Confessions Of A Crap Artist? That could be called something of a biopic, even though it was fiction, as it covered a period of his life, 1959 to 1964, when he lived with Anne Dick in Point Reyes and wrote more than a dozen novels, including Palmer Eldritch.
'Philip K Dick - The Series'
Darryl - what the heck happened to that PKD biography of yours that was supposed to get published a couple of years ago?
Chris,
It's being finished right now. Hopefully it will see a release in 2008. I'll post a more detailed piece on what happened, and why it was delayed, in a while, but I ended up having to scrap most of a draft because I tried to deconstruct too much of his life and work.
It was an extremely bad time, and crushing to realize so close to the end that it wasn't working.
Most people who knew PKD have a different version of who he was. It became confusing and boring to read trying to cut a direct path through all of the contradictions and reality streams he existed in.
The biography as the story of a writer's life, his failures and successes, is a much more interesting read.
Also, I realized two year that PKD was also a sort of historian of 20th century America. The events of his era fill his books, directly or indirectly.
The story of his life is also the story of great social change, unrest and world-jarring political events in the US, from the Great Depression, through post-war suburban paradise to the decade of assassinations, youth revolt and the Vietnam War to the height of the Cold War. Working all of that into the biography meant a lot of reading of American history. The biography is now much richer because of these changes and makes far more sense than it did before.
Hopefully my publisher will allow excerpts from the biography to be published on this blog closer to the release date.
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