Man in the High Castle Headed to SYFY

Big news. everyone: the adaptation of Dick's Man in the High Castle has moved from the BBC where it was originally to air to the channel of schlock, SYFY. Is this a demotion? Hard to say, but the good news is they've got a talented writer from The X-Files, Frank Spotnitz, working on the project. Ridley Scott is still attached in some capacity, I think. Here's what we know: they're gonna give the mini-series four hours, and, as of yet, there is no air date. Most articles (this one at the NYT is the best) recycle a Isa Dick-Hackett quote from the original project. If anything, this ought to wake up a few Philip K Dick Article Writing Machines.

Hampton Fancher to Pen Blade Runner Sequel Script - FTW!

Rumors circulated amongst the intertoobz today that Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher is in talks to write a Blade Runner sequel to be directed by Ridley Scott. I know, my knees just buckled a little bit, too. Don't get your heart set on this - you know Hollywood.

Here's the quote: "The three-time Oscar-nominated Scott and his “Blade Runner” collaborator Fancher originally conceived of their 1982 classic as the first in a series of films incorporating the themes and characters featured in Philip K. Dick‘s groundbreaking novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?“, from which “Blade Runner” was adapted. Circumstances, however, took Scott into other directions and the project never advanced."

Put that in your Voight Kampf and test it!

New and Improved Philip K Dick Article Machine?

Picture: From Radio Free Albemuth

The Guardian has a surprisingly good article on adapting science fiction to the silver screen, and focuses closely on 2001 and Blade Runner. Go read the article. We'll wait....

I guess it's not precisely a PKD article, hence the machine is still probably in mothballs somewhere. But it is remarkably insightful and on target i'n'it? I love the first line:

"If science fiction is a genre of ideas, is there any wonder Hollywood doesn't get it?"

Beyond that, if there is a kind of universal element of parody in science fiction, the people being ridiculed are the ones who favor looks over substance, surface over depth, cover over book, in other words, Hollywood types in all their siliconed shallowness. Science Fiction, especially PKD's, is counter-cultural. I suppose that's not true of Asimov, but he'll be my exception that proves the rule until you all school me in the comments section. Anyway, this counter-culture is antithetical to and incompatible with Hollywood's desire to package culture for mass consumption.

Another reason Science Fiction and Hollywood mix like Vulcans and Romulans has to do with another issue repeatedly addressed in PKD's fiction: the various meanings of success. In the article, Damien Walter claims that the two best sci-fi movies are 2001 and Blade Runner. I won't argue unduly with the assertion, but certainly these are not the most financially successful science fiction movies. According to this hastily located chart, neither of these films is even in the top ten in terms of biggest grossing SF movies. Christ, Avatar is number three! Hollywood judges success in very different terms than the average movie goer. And as movies get more expensive to produce, directors and producers will naturally take fewer risks.

Maybe when we can produce big budget Hollywood effects at home on our desktop computers, our tastes will change. Maybe people will begin to make movies in their basements and they will judge success in terms of whether people like the film, rather than how much money it makes.

Walter writes:

"Many of the Philip K Dick adaptions to hit our screens following Blade Runner have dragged those hopes lower still. A slew of star vehicles and forgettable summer blockbusters including Total Recall, Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck and Next replaced PKD's dark and complex vision of the future with formulaic Hollywood action movie plots."

Amen! But he lists all the crummy PKD adaptations, and leaves out the good one. I wonder if he had a paragraph about A Scanner Darkly that maybe an editor cut out. I think that it's a great movie and one of my favorite PKD adaptations, and certainly it keeps the important ideas from the book, in fact it's very faithful. Interestingly, when I talk to people who don't like it, they almost always mention the roto-scoping. If that aesthetic decision turned people off is that a case of favoring aesthetics over the story's ideas?

Walter also notes that the BBC's history with SF adaptations is a little dodgy. Let's hope Ridley has an incredibly hands-on role with this project.

Lastly, what this article makes me think about is Radio Free Albemuth. From what I saw this was a good movie that retained all of the ideas from the novel. The film avoids all the big-budget action like the plague, and actually, as a result, develops quite a bit of tension from the simple drama of human interaction - kinda like PKD's books.

Weekly News Roundup

Lacking sufficient time these days to properly post about each of the exciting new Dickian developments, I have reluctantly promised myself that I will at least update the blog once a week. In these posts I will try to serve up all the news that's fit to print, and hopefully sometime in the near future I can write up some longer posts on some of the stuff I've been thinking about.

For now a little of the pressure is off because dedicated Dick-head Cal Godot has taken over philipkdickfans.com from Jason Koornick. The site was languishing, besieged by malware, spammers, and Can-D. Cal has moved the site to new servers, forever banishing the Black Glimmung's malware to the frozen seas of our rapidly degrading memories. So cruise over, register a username and let's get the chat boards going over there. philipkdickfans.com was always a really good resource, one that'll be nice to get back. As you can see when you click over there, Cal is still moving in, but there is a really good interview with PKD from the Harvard Advocate [er, make that the Hartford Advocate] in 1981.

Check out this exchange:

In an interview in 1976, you indicated that VALIS had already been sold to Bantam Books. Yet it didn't appear until early this year. What caused the delay?

"Bantam held it up for awhile because they had a change in editorship. The version that has been published was written in 1978. I guess they had a backlog; they didn't print it right away. But the real origin of the delay was the fact that I did, for the first time in my life, two completely different versions of the same book. The first version appears in the second as the movie they go see. I wasn't satisfied with the first version. I wanted to do a book that was better than my previous novel, A Scanner Darkly, and even after Bantam had purchased VALIS and all that was required was that I type a final draft, I simply was not satisfied that I had done the best book I could do." [Emphasis mine]

He's not talking about Radio Free Albemuth I don't think. It's an interesting remark. Read the whole thing.

Also, our pal, Umberto Rossi is posting over there and the organizer of the Philip K Dick Festival, Mr Lord Running Clam has even penned a review of Too Big Too Fail.

Speaking of the Philip K Dick Festival, there are some new pictures from the fest.

So Radio Free Albemuth premiered in New York. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it, but they also thought capitalism saved the Chilean miners, so I'd go with Gabriel Mckee's review of the film. Mckee writes:

"There's also a strong emphasis placed on the novel's political message. It gives a sinister illustriation of an America gradually transforming into a police state that reminded me of Southland Tales.** In this context, those contacted by the alien satellite from Albemuth become not just religious visionaries, but revolutionaries as well."

The man makes a good point. I really hope I can see a cut of this in the near future - hopefully before the government takeover.

Hopefully a bright light will fire from the sky soon enough with information about when and how this film might make it to a theater near you.

Speaking of Gabriel Mckee, he's pointed out in the comments that his DADOES exhibition is now online.

The Internetz are still buzzing about Ridley Scott producing Man in the High Castle. It is pretty exciting. I want to go back and read the book again, but my memory is that the book is fairly internal. How will that translate to the screen. Will the story still be set in an alt-1960s? We'll just have to wait and see, but somebody at the New Yorker was on about it:

"I read a lot of Dick in my teens and twenties. I’ve still got a row of crumbling PKD paperbacks on my bedroom bookshelf—sixteen of them, seventeen if you double-count one that’s an Ace Double Novel, with two stories upside-down from each other. I haven’t reread any of them for decades, but they seem to occupy a permanent place in my brain, judging from the way they pop up when I’m writing about something unusually weird."

Ridley Scott Set To Produce Man in the High Castle for the BBC

Seldom these days does any Dickian news really knock my socks off. But they were blown off and straight through the wall beneath my desk when the news came over the wires:

Ridley to Return to Work of Sci-Fi icon!

If you read that it'll say that Ridley's gonna do Man in the High Friggin Castle as a mini-series for the BBC. And by 'do' I mean produce, but the article speculates he might end up directing.

So, I'm preparing my passport to fly to England, or whatever it's gonna take to get this film into my eye and earholes as quickly as possible.

Ridley sez:

"I've been a lifelong fan of Philip K Dick," said Scott. "He is the master of creating worlds which not only spark the imagination but offer deeper commentary on the human condition."

Hmmmmm.

The news was also splashed up on philipkdick.com complete with a press release, so this is like way legit and hopefully will be quite good. Some people have been talking about the writer who's been drafted to draft this thing:

"Howard Brenton, the playwright and Spooks writer, is adapting Dick's Hugo award-winning dystopian novel The Man in the High Castle into a four-part BBC1 mini-series."

Two topics for the comments section:

1) What's 'Spooks'?

2) I would like to be the first to exploit the spotted dick, PKD, BBC humor cluster:
"Spotted Dick in England with Man in the High Castle"
Now, I'm sure you can improve upon that hasty punnery.

Oh, and 3) C'mon Ridley, do you really expect us to believe you're a lifelong fan? If that were the case don't you think you would have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before you made a movie of it?

(Slightly tardy tip o' the hat to reader Fran L who was commenting on this before I could even rub the sleep dust out of my eyes!)