Another Dick Biopic!

In the 45th case this year of (at least) two competing movies about the same historical figure being made at the same time, another biopic of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick has been announced, just weeks after news of a similar film surfaced. The first Dick biopic (That just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) was written and will be directed by 1980s one-hit wonder Matthew Wilder, and stars boring Bill Pullman as Dick. Wilder's film, entitled Panasonic, will reportedly be a comedy in which "The lines between reality and perfection blur ... Paranoid conspiracy theories of the highest order, drug-fueled interdimensional shifts, and 1970s pop-culture combine for the mind-bending adventure of the century." Got that?

The new Dick project, on the other hand, is fully authorized by Dick's estate, and is being co-produced by the estate's Electric Shepherd Prods. Currently untitled, the film is described as a "nontraditional biopic [which] will interweave the prolific author's life with his fiction and incorporate elements of his last unfinished novel, The Owl in Daylight", and will be written by Tony Grisoni (who, having also helped write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, seems the perfect choice). The increasingly prolific Paul Giamatti, already on board as a producer, is currently in negotiations to star in the film.

There's no word yet on a start date for either project, but since the screenplay for Panasonic is already done, that one would seem to have a head start.