In a recent article on MTV's movie blog, Paul Giamatti discussed the upcoming PKD bio-pic The Owl in Daylight. Giamatti reportedly said:“There’s a guy writing a script right now”
I wonder if that guy is still Tony Grisoni.
Giamatti continues:
“The idea is to take one of his last stories and put him as a character in the story. A lot of his stories were about reality getting bent around, so we’re trying to do that.”
I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'getting bent around' but I think I get what you're saying.
Besides doing a minimum of research (literally, the article links to wikipedia's synopsis of The Owl in Daylight), the writers (they refer to themselves as 'we' and the scary thing is I think they're implying that MTV.com is a 'royal we') manage to make a statement by asking a question:
"We’ve long been a fan of the author, but what’s with the sudden fascination into his life?"
Giamatti responds:
“Well he was mentally ill in a lot of ways and he had lots of problems; he was married many times, was paranoid about a lot of things,” Giamatti explained. “Strange guy. He had a very interesting, complicated life.”
I think these last comments say the most about the approach they're taking with this project. What do you think?
9 comments:
"'There's a guy writing a script right now'"
Well...I wonder. I bet the production is shut down, due to the strike. I hope so. Otherwise give Harlan Ellison a call and I'm sure he'll be glad to fall on them like a ton of bricks.
BTW: Great site, it is a place I visit every day!
I'm afraid at this point I have to say 'Oh dear'. Not about Giamatti's involvement, just the MTV bit. It looks like it could be a stoner / sci-fi farce.
Philip K Dick was paranoid "in lots of ways". But then, he had good reason to be. As many of his friends from the 1960s say,
Philip talked about a lot of weird conspiratorial stuff, but by the late 1970s his friends knew that much of it was true, and Philip had been right all along. The government was keeping files on plenty of people and agents had infiltrated the peace movement and were posing as drug freaks.
As they say, "just because you're paranoid, does not mean they're not after you."
Just treat Philip with the respect and intelligence he deserves and most fans will be happy.
Respect? This is MTV we're talking about, here! ;-)
i hate the paranoid angle. Why must he be pigeon-holed as paranoid. There's more! There's more!
As in Only Apparently Real, where there's the following exchange between PKD and Paul Williams :
PKD : (after a lengthy ramble about why he isn't paranoid) Please don't call me paranoid.
Williams : Why not?
PKD : Because it makes me paranoid...
I heard from a reliable source that the new Phillp K. Dick Bio with Paul Giamatti has been halted due to copyright infringement!
Does anyone have more info on this?
So as of Feb. 21 has anyone got any
tidbits on this project?
I originally thought of Philip J. Hoffman as good for the role of PKD
but Giamatti is the best pick yet.
I just found out about this thing
as I am not much surfing these days, and I am fascinated.
I read 'the dark haired girl' last year very slowly and got some wild
images of Phil with the trenchcoat
on holding a bible at the airport.
I always regretted not really reading his material until the late
eighties. I had owned 'Clans of the Alphane moon' in 1979 but 'things get in the way'..and
the next thing you know it's ten years later and THEN you start to read the stuff that really grabs you, the stuff that grabbed John Lennon etc.
I lived near Anaheim in Ca. around
the time of his death, I was raised
around there and was relocated to Az. in 1973 and was back in Ca. during '80-'82 doing the aimless artist thing riding my motorcycle around L.A. -1982 was the summer
in L.A. that was late and chilly
because of that Mexican volcano
(or was it Mt. St.Helens?) which
clouded the atmosphere for months..
instead of endless summer it was endless bummer.
But I digress...He would have been
an astounding person to meet.
Having a strong familiarity with his surroundings at the time before
he passed and a current visual in my head of him the person from reading much about him and his works the past few years has recently given me some ideas for
theatre / film enactments of him
as he was.
Oh well...
I like the premise of mixing his bio with fiction, as this is how reality existed for PKD (for him the pink light he saw was just as real for him as anything else). But then again, I agree with the posters concerns about Giamatti's final comments. Sure, some of what PKD wrote 'bent reality' a little bit. But other things he wrote were to get people to question reality in the first place. In other words, are we the ones that need to be bent around reality?
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