Halycon Goes After Philip K. Dick
Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Deals, Newsstand
Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick has always been a vault for great sci-fi movies. What's impressive is that most have been pretty darned successful. Sure, there's flicks like Impostor and Paycheck, but there's also the first to hit the screen -- Blade Runner -- as well as Total Recall, Minority Report, and my personal favorite, A Scanner Darkly. The thing is, this is only the tip of the Dick iceberg -- he's written over a hundred short stories and 45 novels. In a fairly excessive deal, Variety reports that The Halcyon Company has signed a 3-year, first-look deal with Electric Shepherd Productions (run by Dick's daughters) for all of his writing. That's right -- all of it.With this renewable deal, they can pretty much pick and choose between Dick's other stories and novels (those that haven't been adapted), and bring them to the big screen, home video, and even other media. For the writer's fans, this can be either wonderful news or a possible kiss of death. Will the company just motor through a bunch of ideas to make money, rather than stay true to his work? Or, will they pick and choose carefully? Luckily, the deal also states that they must be made in conjunction with ESP, so that should help with quality control. With the floodgates open, which Dick novel or story would you like to see on-screen?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-09-2007 @ 2:16PM
Cath said...
Crap. I always wanted to do Ubik and Valis.
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10-09-2007 @ 3:40PM
isa Dick hackett said...
Love the site, great blogs!
Just for clarity, the deal is not a "library" deal...Please see our official site at www.philipkdick.com if you would like to read the actual press release...Fans should not fear this --Electric Shepherd (Laura and I) will be bringing projects forward and will be involved in all! Thanks for the interest.
Isa
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10-09-2007 @ 5:14PM
chainsaw said...
how about "the transmigration of timothy archer"? i love that book.
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10-10-2007 @ 12:14AM
gottacook said...
My vote would go to the 1966 novel Now Wait for Last Year, if the right actors could be found, especially for the role of Gino Molinari. It would represent a refreshing change from the majority of PKD films made so far - in this one, no characters have implanted memories or precog ability. The special nature of the JJ-180-induced time travel (i.e., most people who ingest the drug go into the past, some into the future, and at least one into parallel presents) would be cinematically interesting, although the last of these is off-stage in the book.
Also there is a great bad-marriage situation involving two of the central characters that lasts the length of the story. And there are the tall insectlike aliens (the reegs) who are enemies in one reality and allies in another, plus a raft of good subsidiary roles (Bruce Himmel; Mary Reineke; Virgil, Jonas, and Phyllis Ackerman; plus Don Festenburg, Dr. Teagarden, Roger Corning, and Minister Freneksy, just off the top of my head).
Now Wait.. has one of the most twisted plots of any PKD novel, but I really think it would work on screen, more so than (for example) The Penultimate Truth, A Maze of Death (which the TV series Lost already resembles), The Game-Players of Titan, etc. Yes, I think the novels are the best source - the stories have to be padded to feature length and must always lose something in the process (a rare exception is the scene in Total Recall where the Rekal Inc. rep comes to Quaid's hotel room to inform him he's still in the chair actually, offers the virtual pill to swallow, etc.).
As for Ubik, I've seen the PKD screenplay written in the early 1970s (published around 1985) for a French director who never made the picture. Maybe it would be suitable?
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12-13-2007 @ 4:46PM
coonass said...
Has anyone else noticed similarities in the plots of "A Little Something for Us Tempanauts" and the main premise of the TV show "Seven Days"?
Apart from the obvious "Tempanauts"="Chrononauts" parallelism, the process of time travel only works over a span of a few days (although PKD's Tempanauts travel FORWARD in time, not back as Chrononauts do), and the process is harmful to the travelers (OK, so it's lethal in the PKD story, and just very, very painful in "Seven Days").
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