Hollywood's Growing Obsession With Philip K. Dick 244
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."
A Few More and Some Musings (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 [twitchfilm.net] The Futurological Congress [slashdot.org].
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 [pinemagazine.com] 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 [philipkdick.com] of stories [philipkdick.com] 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.
Re:I don't Understand (Score:3, Interesting)
free ebook with ticket (Score:2, Interesting)
Much more that can only be experienced in the books.
PKD is classic.
meh ... call me if they do The Three Stigmata (Score:3, Interesting)
The best . . . and hardest to do well . . . in my humble opinion.
Valis would be interesting too.
Re:A Few More and Some Musings (Score:1, Interesting)
I would seriously like them to try and film Valis. You'd need someone like Terry Gilliam for a mindfuck of that proportion.
Re:Some of P. K. Dick's stuff is great, but how ab (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, but we'll have to wait until Hamilton is dead, editors like it when they can unleash their full artistic creative power without being bothered by that guy who wrote the story.
Re:A Few More and Some Musings (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, *most* of the Sherlock stories are public domain. But thanks to bizzare copyrighting, the characters are still under protection. Web, weave, tangled.
Re:Phil Dick Is A Good Writer (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The other theme both PKD and Hollywood love is (Score:4, Interesting)
(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.)
I'm sure he has better physical reaction time, for things related to racing. He probably has programmed reflexes that are related to the feel of the steering wheel that are much faster than either yours or mine.
I'm a fencer and I can see both(better model, better reflexes) working for me, when fencing beginners. I am better at predicting what people will do. My muscles are faster, and finally I can react faster. The final trick comes from not thinking about a move. If you have to do what Schumacher did in the test (observe,analyse,react) it's clear you are going to be about as fast as anyone else. With enough training you can teach your body to have certain reflexes that are much faster, because the action bypasses parts of the brain. (you can exploit this in fencing because if you discover your opponent has a reflex like this you can trigger it and know his reaction)
Re:A Few More and Some Musings (Score:3, Interesting)
Much of Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. Not all [techdirt.com] of the stories are, though (the exception being the latest work from the 1920s). The relevant rule appears to be creation +95 years, which in this case protects longer than death of the author +70 years.
Complicating matters is trademark law. While you can certainly distribute the text of old Sherlock Holmes stories (and Project Gutenberg does), what protections do the trademarks provide with regard to adaptations and the creations of derivative works with the same characters?
Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.