Why does Hollywood like Dick so much?

Cafe Society
21

Evil Captor writes:

> To be fair, there are others who DO think he was a topnotch writer, so much so
> that there’s a major SF writing award named after him, widely known as 'The
> Dick Award."

The Philip K. Dick Award is for the best science fiction novel of the year that appeared originally in paperback. It’s to commemorate the fact that, particularly in the period when Dick was writing fastest, from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s, science fiction had such little reputation that many authors couldn’t get hardback editions of their novels at all. It’s a way of replying to those people who say, “This writer [Dick in particular, but certain other writers too] just writes pulp novels. They don’t deserve hardback publication.” It’s saying in reply, “No, you’re missing something here. There’s a power in this writer’s novels if you look behind the pulp writing that you don’t appreciate.”

> And like I said, his stuff is one-note crap and it stinks. When you compare Dick
> with his contemporaries, the difference gets more noticeable. Take the writers
> mentioned in my OP. C.J. Cherryh, whose “Downbelow Station” is a better SF
> novel than Dick could ever dream of writing, is not represented in the IMBD,
> period. Poul Anderson has just one listing. Iain Banks has two listings. Larry
> Niven has three credits.
>
> All of these writers are as well known as or better known than Dick among SF
> fans, and arguably MUCH better writers than Dick. He has gotten attention all
> out of proportion to his talent. I don’t understand the appeal that his stories
> have for Hollywood types. All I can guess is that he appeals to people who
> don’t really like SF, because to me his books read like literary SF – stylistic stuff
> that really doesn’t work that well.

Look, you’re welcome to argue that these writers are better than Dick. You’re not the only one to believe that. However, the fact is that these days Dick is better known than Cherryh, Anderson, Banks, or Niven. Many (probably most) longtime science fiction fans prefer Dick’s works. I spend a lot of my time talking with other science fiction fans at club meetings and conventions and it seems to me that Dick is better known among longtime science fiction fans than the other authors you list. Incidentally, it’s arguable whether Dick’s stuff reads like literary fiction. In certain senses, yes, but in other ways Dick’s works are about as far from standard literary fiction as possible. The first reaction of someone who likes literary fiction but who hasn’t read Dick before on looking at a Dick novel is probably, “Wow, is this ever pulpy! This feels like those pulp magazine stories that I don’t like reading.”

22

:eek:

Wow, I couldn’t disagree much more emphatically; I think that A Scanner Darkly is one of Dick’s best novels. It has just the tiniest veneer of science fiction, and the verisimilitude of a roman à clef. For me, this makes it much more emotionally engaging.

I suppose most of Dick’s later work is similarly roman à clef, but Scanner is grounded in consensus reality in a way that the Valis trilogy and the rest are not.

I like Dick for the far-out ideas, sure… but Scanner works as literature. Perfectly at home on the shelf next to Camus, Kafka, and Gogol.

Confessions of a Crap Artist is another favourite, for the same reasons. I think that Dick was at his best when he looked at himself critically.

23

What I don’t understand is Hollywood’s love of taking a work by Philip K. Dick, then altering it so much that you wonder why they bothered.
Bladerunner, as mentioned above, is vastly different from “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Total Recall exhausts the Dick material in the first 15-290 minutes of the movie. The rest of the fluick feels to me as if it was lifted from Robert Sheckley’s “The Status Civilization”.

Minority Report changes the story a huge amount, including the climax and ending. And all the imagined-future stuff has nothing to do with Dick at all.

Paycheck was Hollywood glitzified rock-em-sock-em storytelling, but it actually was more faithful to Dick’s short story than most of the movies have been, even if over-steroided.

In view of the fact that they’re hardly using Dick’s work, why bother buying it at all? Why not just make up your own stuff and not associate it with him? Can it be that they’re convinced that the “by Philip K. Dick” label sells?

24

Well, the Valis trilogy were the last things written by Dick. Other novels were published after the trilogy, but had been written earlier but not published.

25

It’s the ideas.

Sure, PKD wasn’t a great writer. I recognize that the ideas in his books are often poorly strung together and that the prose is occasionally unreadable. I believe that if he would had more time to edit his books he would have been a fantastic writer as well as idea man, but he couldn’t–he made his living off his writing and had to keep churning out stuff on a regular basis so his family didn’t starve. But the man was an idea factory. There are some of his books that could easily fuel a dozen movies, so full are they of ideas that are more alien than all the trumped-up space opera in the world.

And about the Dick vs. Heinlein and Asimov thing: negativity sells. Despite all the talk about Hollywood’s love of the happy ending, pessimism and paranoia sell much more than shiny-young-white-men tales about science’s good. Because that’s not interesting, not to people above the mental age of twelve. Personally, I didn’t get into science fiction until I was a jaded teenager, so Asimov and Heinlein just don’t cut it for me. They’re too naive. No offense, but they’re kiddie stuff; adults should know better than to think that all scientific advancement is for the public good and that the robots will never hurt you. But despite his take on technology, Dick’s stories connect with people because the characters are so sympathetic. The characters in Dick’s novels (and to a lesser extent short stories… I am one of the fans that can actually take or leave most of the short stories, partially because I’m not a big s.s. fan in the first place, but also because they are one-note and one-idea unlike the sweeping idea orgies of the novels) express what it is to be human in a world going crazy, but still pushing through, people against the system. For the most part, Dick’s characters were not scientists or adventurers; they were handymen and salesmen and drug addicts, and people like that are a lot more likable–and marketable–in the 21st century than Cal Meacham at his interoceter.

I guess that if you just want to see or read about bug-eyed aliens and know exactly how much plutonium you have to burn to reach Saturn, you’re not going to like Dick. But IMO he is one of the “truest” science fiction writers there is. Space opera is just an adventure story set in space; they could all be set on the high seas without anyone skipping a beat. But Dick’s stories, even when the use of technology is minimal (as in ASD), are alien in the truest sense. And when you’re plugged into the ideas, the bad writing just doesn’t seem to matter that much.

(P.S. There has only been one movie–not counting ASD–based on a Dick novel. All the other adaptations are short story adaptations. Though there are a number of movies that should have his name on them since their plots were obviously looted from PKD.)

26

Hmm? What? I was getting caught up on my interociter soaps. Hadn’t seen As Metaluna Turns in ages.

Agreed – the “flashback” (“flash-forward”?) scene from Terminator seems to be lifted more from Dick’s Second Variety than from anything of Harlan Ellison’s. But, as I say above, too much of Total Recall feels ripped off from Robert Sheckley (who seems like the most ripped-off-from SF writer around, to my mind.)

27

As I said in the thread about A Scanner Darkly, once you’ve seen the movie, this makes more sense. Unadulterated Dick (or, at least, less-adulterated) doesn’t really work on screen. The movie offers a lesson in why moviemakers have felt it necessary to revise Dick, structurally and thematically, to make it function as cinema.

As far as adapting better writers, the refrain we hear constantly is that “writer X’s work could be the source of a fantastic movie if done well.” It’s that last little caveat that’s the killer, always. Because, ultimately, what does it really mean? Thinking about successful adaptations beyond SF, from Never Cry Wolf to L.A. Confidential, the really good ones feel free to jettison details and condense plots while communicating the essence of their origin. On the flip side, leaving in details while ignoring the heart usually results in failure (e.g. I, Robot).

Consider Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Great, great book. Stunning. Hugely entertaining and massively influential. It’s got some amazingly visual stuff that would kick ass on screen: Foyle, alone in the wreck at the beginning; the Burning Man; the lightless prison; the Circus; the epic destruction of the pre-climax, and Olivia “watching” with blind eyes; the neurological implants for accelerated combat; the hallucinatory, non-linear finale; and much, much more.

And yet: the central plot hook, the jaunt, the idea that a human being can teleport if he really, really wants to, would, I am confident, come off as being incredibly stupid on screen. In the book, Bester can devote pages to exploring the notion, putting it across in a lengthy prologue and then basically taking it for granted; while by contrast, a movie cannot stop dead for lengthy minutes of exposition in order to sell an idea like that. It has to be grasped and believed almost immediately. And given how the story turns out at the end, jaunting is not something that the writer can adapt around; it’s pretty much essential to the plot.

There’s an adaptation of Stars My Destination in development, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to suck, if in fact it ever gets made. Either the screenwriter will dump the jaunting, which makes it a completely different story; or he’ll use it as is, and the audience will roll their eyes the first time it happens.

The point is, adapting material from one medium to another is a much, much more complicated question than most people seem to understand, given how these threads usually develop. Complain about bad adaptations all you want, and fantasize about what could be done with some favorite piece of material or other, but please, understand what’s really involved in making it happen.

28

Two main things stand out for me.

  1. Name Recognition. “Here’s an idea for a movie; it’s taken from a book written by the guy that did Blade Runner.” Cinema gold, baby.

  2. Producability. They need a story that can be completely self-contained in one movie. Blade Runner and Total Recall work for that. The Foundation Trilogy? Not so much. Sure, people are better writers. Also, it helps if the ideas can be expressed in a cheap movie. Blade Runner didn’t have one tenth the technological sophistication of I, Robot.

29

Hijack, but Cervaise started it.

See, here I disagree with you. I have argued several times on this Board for filming TSMD precisely because it has so many great visuals. But I don’t think it’ll founder on the unacceptability of human Jaunting, unless you make too big a deal out of the reasons for it. The American public (and much of the world’s) has been watching teleportation without receiving booths on Star Trek since 1967. Watching a person teleport isn’t going to make anyone’s eyes roll if you treat it as a mutant ability (nobody rolls their eyes at the X-men movies) – you’ll only elicit groans if you try to say that “anyone can, if they wish hard enough”. Heck, even Bester didn’t say that in his book. I think you could make a helluva movie out of TSMD.

Unfortunately, even without foundering on this particular rock, Hollywood usually manages to destroy good and creative SF, and insists on dumbing it down and adding ridiculous stuff that’s not in the book to begin with. (That’s the real reason we excoriate them for not being faithful to the book – not because we’re compulsive fanboys, but because, when they try and do something original and clever, they’re not capable of being original or clever, and they screw it up. “Weiding Modules”, indeed.)

30

Haha, I totally forgot there was a poster by that name here. I’ve had MST3K on the brain lately.

And I think that if done right, jaunting could pass most people’s suspension of disbelief. There could be a short flashback of the first jaunt during Gully Foyle’s jaunting class at the beginning of the novel. Just a short explanation would be enough for most people, those who don’t obsess over exact scientific calculations and just roll with a movie.

31

To continue the Bester hijack, I read and really liked TSMD. Just last month I picked up Bester’s The Demolished Man. As I was reading it I was thinking to myself “Wow! This would make a great movie! I wonder why no one has made it?”

Reading this thread prompted me to check IMDb and lo and behold there is a “Demolished Man” in production right now. The director is no one I’ve ever heard of before. I hope he does a good job with it.

32

Many PKD novels can be made without the huge green screen, let’s remake reality, sort of set design and so it is cost effecrtive.

Also PKD is dead. He won’t shoot his mouth off about how bad the movie is and send away fans. If you made a pie chart of movie goers, I think you would find that most people don’t know Dick, the next largest chunk like Dick and the smallest sliver, hates Dick. So there is little downside to doing a Dick novel.

33

Alfred Bester! A name to conjure with. Didn’t he start off in comics scripting for the Green Lantern?

*A tune of utter monotony filled the room with agonizing, unforgettable banality. It was the quintessence of every melodic cliché Reich had ever heard. No matter what melody you tried to remember, it invariably led down the path of familiarity to “Tenser, Said The Tensor.” Then Duffy began to sing:

Eight, sir; seven, sir;
Six, sir; five, sir;
Four, sir; three, sir;
Two, sir; one!
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tension, apprehension,
And dissension have begun.*

BTW does anybody know why they came up with the title Blade Runner for Dick’s* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* It’s not in the book and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything.

34

I suspect that Ridley Scott saw William Burroughs’ screen treatment for Alan E. Nourse’s book “Bladerunner” and just liked the sound of the title. It does make sense in Nouse’s book, which has nothing to do with Philip K. Dick’s book. In the closing credits Scott thanks Nourse and Burroughs for letting him use the title.

35

:smiley:

I didn’t mean to start a hijack. The topic was “why film Dick when there’s all this other great stuff” so I thought I’d provide an example of “other great stuff that I think would be tough to pull off.” Should have known the Bester fans would jump up and slap me. :stuck_out_tongue:

I like your angle: make it more of an explicit mutant thing. That could work.

And yeah, divemaster, The Demolished Man is also great, though I have no idea how they’d pull off the intricacy of the psychics’ mind-blending thing that Bester did so brilliantly with the typography. On the upside, the director of the announced movie version, Andrew Dominik, did a great Australian film called Chopper with a rivetingly despicable central character, which leads me to suspect he’s capable of giving us a great version of Reich. On the other hand, Dominik’s already got another movie project in the pipe, the Jesse James movie starring Brad Pitt, scheduled for next year, so I’m guessing Demolished Man is on the shelf again, where it’s been languishing since it was first optioned back in the 1950s. I wouldn’t expect it to be forthcoming any time soon.

36

I think the argument that has sprung up about whether or not Dick is a particularly good writer is beside the point. I don’t think he was a particularly good writer by almost any standard, though I’ll agree he was a good “idea” man. Except that a lot of his ideas had that 'late night college dorm bullshit session" feel to them, which I suspect is why Hollywood finds the ideas so accessible. (In short, Dick isn’t the “out there” idea man some here claim he is, he’s attractive to Hollywood because his ideas were in fact kind of … accessible … to non-SF fans).

But the real point is that Dick’s works are WAAAAAAY over-represented even if he IS one of the greats. Unless you’re willing to go way out on that limb that Davenport Avenger is perched on and claim that all other SF writers do work fit only for 12-year-olds. (How’s it feelin’ out there, Davenport Avenger? Nice ‘n’ breezy, I bet!) you have to admit that there are many other SF writers who’re just as good as Dick (if not better) who have gotten little or no attention from Hollywood.

And I would maintain that the kind of stories Dick wrote: “What is reality?” shit, don’t do great at the box office compared with the REAL successes, which are galactic empire stories. Where’s the “Total Recall” franchise? (One failed TV series that barely lasted a season does not a franchise make.) Where’s the Blade Runner franchise? Where’s the Minority Report franchise?

Frankly, I think most of the success of Dick movies have more to do with big marketing and advertising budgets, because they sure don’t have a lot of legs once all the promo money is gone, unlike, say, Star Trek and Star Wars which have huge fan bases and would even if there weren’t any promotional efforts to stir them up.

It’s very obvious that galactic empire stories, with their huge scope (mulitple planets to explore, all kinds of alien civilizations and spaceships and technologies and biologies to show) are MUCH better franchise properties than some piddly little story about some guy with a “special power” or who isn’t in touch with reality. (Let’s face it, most Dick plots are best suited to Outer Limits or Twilight Zone eps.)

37

You have overlooked Confessions d’un Barjo, which (despite being a French-language film) is more-or-less faithful to the text, unlike anything yet released by the usual suspects in Hollywood.

38

Franchisability is not the be-all and end-all for judging the success of SF stories. I’ll take a one-shot gem like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind over any bloated dead-horse-walking franchise Sunday to Sunday.

39

This is logically equivalent to saying that the Mona Lisa is a shitty painting because Leonardo could have painted a prettier woman, or that “Strawberry Fields Forever” is a bad choice for a song title because you think raspberries taste better than strawberries.

The literary quality of a book has absolutely nothing to do with how good a movie you can make out of it. “Jaws” was a shitty book and a great movie. “The Silence of the Lambs” was a shitty book and a great movie. “The Godfather” was a mediocre book and a great movie. On the other hand, “Les Miserables” was a great book but the recent movie version was so bad it gave me cancer.

40

I was operating under the assumption that the people who bankroll movies in Hollywood like movies that make a lot of money better than those that make … less money. Artistic content doesn’t enter into it.