Mike’s SCIFi Channel review: THE DARK KNIGHT
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Believe the hype about Ledger's Joker


http://www.scifi.com/sfw/screen/sfw19120.html

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My SciFi Channel review of INDIANA JONES

Hey, here's my review for the SciFi Channel:

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/screen/sfw18917.html

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Depressing moments as a critic...

Just watched a movie that I'm to review, and it was really bad. No problem there, occupational hazard. I see bad movies. I see good movies. I get paid to review bad ones. I get paid to review good ones. Beats having a real job. This was a very low-budget movie. Made for peanuts. But at the same time, there was a lot in the movie that was very good. You can tell everyone involved worked for nothing. They gave their all. It's one thing to nail a piece of crap like OVER HER DEAD BODY ( http://www.scifi.com/sfw/screen/sfw18105.html ). It's quite another to nail a movie made by people who really bled to make it. It feels like kicking a kitten.

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Geekiest objective reached--JUSTICE LEAGUE
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

I have reached the geekiest objective of my very geeky life. Thanks to Netflix, I have just finished systematically watching, in order, every episode of the Bruce Timm-produced JUSTICE LEAGUE and JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED TV shows. It's taken me a few weeks. It has fried parts of my brain that probably shouldn't have been fried. It has cost me a few solid night's sleep, once I was in "these-episodes-are-like-potato-chips-I'll-watch-just-one-more" mode. But I think it was worth it!

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2005 Interview w/ Jonathan Lethem on Omega the Unknown
Category: Writing and Poetry

Two years ago, I talked to Lethem about his work resurrecting the comic book Omega the Unknown, a 1970s Marvel Comic created by Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes and Jim Mooney. It was part of SciFi Magazine's special "People to Watch in 2006" issue. As the first issue of Lethem's Omega hit the stands yesterday (October 3, 2007), I thought I'd post this here.

Jonathan Lethem on Omega the Unknown

By

Michael Marano

"It was ahead of its time," says Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Jonathan Lethem about Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes' obscure mid-70s Marvel comic Omega the Unknown, which ran for 10 issues. "It was a precursor, for those of us who read it and relished it, to things like [Alan Moore's] Watchmen and other self-aware examinations of the superhero image, not just in comic book form, but in novels like [Michael Chabon's] The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay."

As reported in Time, MacArthur Fellow Lethem will be writing a new Omega title in 2006. "I'm approaching the material very reverently. That isn't to say that I'm not going to try to do something of my own with it.... A lot of my responses to [Omega] are relatively eccentric and peculiar, and I'm going to try to get those [ideas] into the mind of the artist and get my own version of Omega onto the page."

From an era in which Spider-Man couldn't throw a punch without a clever quip, Omega, the comic's eponymous caped hero, was noteworthy for hardly ever speaking. This puts him at the opposite end of the verbal spectrum from Lionel Essrog, the Tourettic protagonist of Lethem's most famous novel, Motherless Brooklyn (reportedly to be adapted for film by writer/director/star Edward Norton). "I've also always written about silence, to a certain degree. If you look at a book like As She Climbed Across the Table, which features a character who is kind of a cosmic black hole who doesn't ever speak or offer any kind of behavior for anyone else to interpret." For Lethem, it's not too incongruous "to be fascinated with babble and stream of consciousness language and also to be interested its opposite."

"The key for me to writing the comic book is that it's a visual medium more than it's a verbal one. So, I'm going to try to create a visual narrative, like a director would," says Lethem. "I'm not going concern myself... with issues of language, particularly, but [with making] something happen in narrative as a series of images and scenes and dreamscapes."

Gerber and Skrenes' comic, which dealt with the arrival of extraterrestrial Omega on Earth and his friendship with James-Michael Starling, a home-schooled orphan living in Hell's Kitchen, featured the distinctive artwork of Jim Mooney, whose grittily realistic vision of New York echoed that depicted in films like The French Connection, yet could still accommodate Omega and The Hulk squaring off. "I'd love to capture some of the same gritty poetry of the urban scenes that Jim Mooney and the writers captured so beautifully. It does connect with me with images of the city in certain [1970s] films like The Taking of Pelham 123 and The Warriors, but also some more recent ones, like Spike Lee's films.... I want to give Farel [Dalrymple, the artist of Pop Gun War fame whom Lethem helped find for this project] the freedom to make [the comic] his own, too."

Currently listening : Twenty-Seven By The Adicts Release date: 27 September, 1993

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Mike’s 2003 review of Rob Zombie’s HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

I took a lot of heat for my panning of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN over at the SciFi Channel. ( http://www.scifi.com/sfw/screen/sfw16873.html ). It got me thinking, though, about how much I dug Zombie's earlier stuff. With that in mind, I thought I'd post my 2003 review of CORPSES, just for fun.

House of 1000 Cheeseball Quotes

by

Michael Marano

(c) 2003, Michael Marano

Rob Zombie's first effort as a director, House of 1,000 Corpses, is a fragmented piece of trash that panders to lowest common denominator knuckle-walkers who find enjoyment in grotesquerie, flashy editing, cheap thrills, and who find a twisted solace in the misanthropic loathing of one's self and of others.

And the count me the fuck in among that lowest common denominator! House of 1,000 Corpses had me grinning from ear to ear for its entire 88 minutes. Corpses isn't a movie. It's sitting around for an hour and a half talking about sleazoid trash with a guy--Zombie--who loves sleazoid trash. Look, I don't know what Universal was thinking when they gave Rob Zombie seven million dollars, but they sure weren't thinking he'd hand them Bambi, did they? So, why the hell'd they back out of releasing it? Miramax and New Line both backed out, too. Look... it's a Rob Zombie flick, full of trash and psychotronic mayhem. Yeah, there's torture and carnage. But lighten up! Two characters are named after characters Groucho Marx played. "That's a joke, son!" as Foghorn Leghorn would say.

Corpses is not a good movie in any sense of the word "good". Or in any conventional sense of the word "movie". House of 1,000 Corpses is a fun house ride. It's a Halloween Haunted House freak show that just happens to be in two dimensions and projected on a screen. Had I known the movie was gonna be a carnival ride, I'd have snuck in some fresh hot candy apples and baggies of sawdust and roasted peanut shells, for the full olfactory effect. I'll say it again. This is not a movie in and of itself. It's a love letter to other movies that I, and millions of people, love, too.

It's telling that House of 1,000 Corpses is set in 1977, because it's a tribute to a number of great, crappy (and not so crappy!) '70s horror flicks that showed up at 3 A.M. on UHF channels back when UHF used to mean late night fun. Yes, House of 1,000 Corpses most resembles Tobe Hooper's brilliant 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre and his follow-up, '76's Eaten Alive. But there are quotes from a whole sub-genre of '70s "freaks in the out in the sticks" movies, none of the titles of which I can remember right now. I do know that a lot of them seemed to star actresses who'd go on to play daughters on Eight is Enough. (Hey! Just remembered the title of one! Warlock Moon.) Zombie seems to setting the clock back to the days before scores of Halloween rip-offs took a lot of the fun out of low-budget mayhem. While filming Corpses, Zombie told Penthouse: "When I'm flipping channels, if I see that something like Friday the 13th Part V is on, I'll go, 'Okay, I'll watch this,' and five minutes later I have to turn it off.... Those movies are so bad. Where's the horror? There's no atmosphere. There's no monsters. There's no terror. There's nothing."

Zombie gives you lots of horror and atmosphere and monsters. No sense or plot or purpose. But who cares?

If ever there's an Oscar for casting, this flick should get it. Sid Haig, who played the big tall freak Ralph in Jack Harris' demented 1964 masterpiece Spider Baby (aka Attack of the Liver Eaters) plays fried chicken huckster Captain Spaulding. Haig's pal is Michael J. Pollard, who's been in everything from The Wild Angels to Bonnie and Clyde to that Star Trek episode with the freaky kids: "bonk-bonk on the head!" Bill Mosley, Chop-Top from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, done plays hisself another freaky character who throws knives and Walter Benjamin quotes. Then there's Tom Towles, Otis from 1986's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and a nifty cameo from Jeanne Carmen, star of 1959's Monster of Piedras Blancas.

But it's Karen Black as Mother Firefly who steals the show. Mother Firefly is the bad girl "Therese" that Black played in 1973's Trilogy of Terror amped on an estrogen rush. Corpses is Karen Black's movie. Anyone who can kiss the... icky thing... that she kisses in this movie with true maternal love is gonna walk away with the picture, and she does. That she used to be married to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 scribe L.M. Kit Carson may have something to do with it.

Yeah, Corpses is an exercise in brutality... but hey... it's also a throwback to a more innocent time. Keep your Norman Rockwell memories. Rob Zombie gave me the warm fuzzies for an era when wresting with rabbit-ears to pick up a movie sponsored by used car lots meant a good time.

Currently listening : The Very Best of Vice Squad By Vice Squad Release date: 14 November, 2005

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Joe Conrad Rages Against the Machine
Category: Writing and Poetry

I'm working on a novel right now that treats of a lot of themes first mapped out by Joseph Conrad. Conrad's my boy... and if you ever want to feel totally inadequate as a writer, just crack open some Conrad and keep in mind that English was his third language (after Polish and French). Just wanted to share one of my favorite Conrad quotes about the hideous complexity of Modernity. It's from a 1897 letter that Conrad wrote to the politician R.B. Cunninghame Graham:

"There is a -- let us say -- a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! -- it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider -- but it goes on knitting. You come and say: "this is all right; it's only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this -- for instance -- celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold." Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident -- and it has happened. You can't interfere with it.  The last drop of bitterness is that you can't even smash it.  In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is -- and it is indestructible. It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions -- and nothing matters. I'll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing."

Currently listening : The Best of the Business/The Business Live By The Business Release date: 01 January, 2002

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Article on Friedkin's BUG
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

(c)2006/2007 by Michael Marano
Originally appeared in SciFi Magazine

A Bug's Life

by

Michael Marano


Playwright Tracy Letts, author of the SF/horror play Bug, now being adapted for the screen by French Connection and The Exorcist director William Friedkin, has said that characters like Peter, the male lead of Bug, are the "unhealthy manifestation of healthy paranoia about powerful institutions' activities." Both Letts' play and the movie version of Bug narrow that "healthy paranoia about powerful institutions" down to the claustrophobically intimate relationship between (possible?) Gulf War vet Peter, played by Michael Shannon, and a waitress with a few hard years on her named Agnes, played by Ashley Judd, as it unfolds in a seedy hotel room in Oklahoma infested (or maybe not?) with bugs that are (or might not be?) part of sinister plot by a malignant shadow government.

Paranoia is a staple of SF, and its unique flavors are a handy barometer of cultural anxieties. Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers could have only been made in the McCarthy Era depicted in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake, set in the groovy hot tub-soaked, consciousness-raising San Francisco, could have only been made in the soul-killing era of I'm OK--You're OK. How is William Friedkin's celluloid creepfest addressing today's paranoia? Michael Shannon, who not only stars as Peter in the film, but originated the role in theatrical productions staged in London, New York and Chicago, says that Friedkin "has always warned me to keep my mouth shut about politics, and I think that's wise advice.... but having said that, I think the state of things now is a little strange, and I'll leave it at that."

Friedkin himself is more vocal and specific. Talking about Bug last May, the 71-year-old maverick told AP: "This is the first time than I can remember even beyond the Nixon administration where everybody felt bad about the direction our country was going in. I feel, and the people I know feel, that it's kind of a hopeless situation the way we're headed. Constantly at war with any number of people, no apparent reason. To even suggest that America would spy on its own people would never have been accepted years ago. Now we know it's true, and so this brings about a great paranoia and makes Americans feel uncomfortable with their neighbors and everyone else, just as we think the government is uncomfortable with its citizens."

Bugs and paranoia have been… well… bugging Western Culture in particular ways for almost ten decades since Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis back in 1912, about poor Gregor Samsa, a proto-Dilbert traveling salesman who wakes up one morning from a night of troublesome dreams to find he's turned into a giant bug. The Metamorphosis is a simmering pot of early 20th century tensions about family, bourgeois propriety, financial insecurity and workaholism. (Wouldn't you want to take the day off if all of your DNA were rewritten into something with an exoskeleton? Not Gregor, who's desperate to make a train in time for an important business trip, despite his new mobility problems.) In the 1950s, giant irradiated bugs, from the ants of THEM! to the grasshoppers of The Beginning of the End, were the psychic ground zero for anxieties about the Cold War and the fear that the click of Geiger counters might replace the happy beehive hum of Levittown lawnmowers. In the 1970s, eco-disaster movies like Kingdom of the Spiders refracted anxieties about DDT-like pesticides into Creature Feature fodder in the years following the first Earth Day. Earlier this year, Richard Linklater's adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick's fable about surveillance and domestic spying, featured Rory Cochrane crawling with otherworldly aphids.

"In the grand cultural scale, I don't know why it's bugs [that are a reflection of cultural anxiety] and not some other kind of plague," says Shannon. Referring to the use of bug paranoia specific to Tracy Letts' play and screenplay adaptation for Friedkin, Shannon says "There needs to be something there that Peter and Agnes can feel… parental about. The idea is that the bugs kind of wind up being their children. If Peter were saying 'There's a poisonous gas that's going to kill us!' then there's not the opportunity to wind up claiming these creatures as their children, which I think is very important in terms of what Agnes is going through. The idea is that the bugs are something that you can take care of, that at the same time are going to destroy you. Which is ultimately what Peter and Agnes are to each other. They're there to take care of each other, but in the process of taking care of each other, they wind up destroying each other."

Is Bug, then, not just SF and horror, but also a tragedy?

"For me, in my world view, there's such a thin line between tragedy and comedy. I'd say more than anything, I've always considered Bug to be a tragic love story. I've always considered it a love story about how close can two people get to one another, and what is worth sacrificing in order to be intimate with somebody else. Is it worth sacrificing your own identity to be close to somebody else? Without giving away too much of the ending.... [Bug] is a tragedy depending on what you think happens when somebody dies."

Tragedy or not, the play Bug, when it had its premiere in 1996, riffed on the paranoias stirred up by the feds' siege of the Branch Davidians compound in Waco, Texas and the Oklahoma City bombings; Oklahoma City bomber and 1991 Gulf War vet Timothy McVeigh claimed that the Army implanted a computer chip, a "bug", into his body, much like the claims that Peter makes about the Government and literal bugs. In one breathless, manic, perhaps thirty-five second exchange in the play, Peter spews forth a series of vintage conspiracy theories, Frankenstein-stitched together in a master plot involving the CIA, Calspan, Nazi scientists, Jim Jones' People's Temple, Timothy McVeigh, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, a few other Id Monsters that stalked the ether in the days of slow dial-up modems and mysterious black helicopter sightings.
As a film made ten years after the play premiered, Friedkin's Bug exists in a new world in which conspiracy-based paranoia squirms in a new context that makes the shadowy plots of the X-Files era seem quaint. Today, when according to Time Magazine, 36% of all Americans "consider it 'very likely' or 'somewhat likely' that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves", the new, high-speed internet sprays conspiracy theories about 9/11 like tracer fire, from the on-line documentary Loose Change to sites claiming that at least one of the airliners that struck the World Trade Center had missiles mounted under its wings.

The themes implicit in these kinds of paranoias, when applied to the hyperbole of SF and horror, usually play out in broad scenarios, in thrillers like John Frankenheimer's political SF films Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate (and in Jonathan Demme's recent remake of Manchurian). Yet Bug, filmed for just $4 million, narrows this scope down to the wounded emotional reality of Peter and Agnes. What were the differences between carrying this kind of scope on stage and on screen?

"I think a lot of people imagine the difference [between stage and screen acting is] in the size of the performance," says Shannon. "The thing about all three [stage] productions of Bug that I was in was that they were all in very intimate spaces. The production here in Chicago was in a room that seated about sixty people. There people sitting literally about two feet from the stage. I wasn't like I was doing Bug in a coliseum and all of a sudden I had to do it [differently} on film. Everything had always been kind of subtle, in those regards. When you do a play, you go out every night and you go from beginning to end and it takes about two hours and then you walk out of theater and then it's done. And when you get home you think, 'Maybe tomorrow night, when I ask to pass the salt, I'll stand up.' It's the little things. You keep working on it and refining it. When you're working on a film, you spend all day long trying to shoot three minutes of film, knowing you're trying to get it exactly right, knowing for the rest of time, whenever somebody sees Bug, that's the performance they'll see. It's a lot more pressure to try to get it right, only you're not sure what 'exactly right' is."

"Film is a director's medium. In theater, once the show opens, it's like taking the cork off a bottle of wine. The show gets richer as the actors keep working on it, whereas in film, the wine doesn't breathe. The breathing process [in film] is the editing process. Editing is where the story gets told, I think."

Shannon has made almost a sub-career for himself playing military men in movies like Tigerland, Pearl Harbor, World Trade Center (in which he portrayed real-life Marine Dave Karnes) and now Bug. "I have a lot respect for the military. I've spent a lot of time around these guys. Some of these movies [in which you play military roles], when you do them, [the producers will] have you do a kind of boot camp. These guys come in and put you through your paces and try to show you a little bit of what it's like. And it's obviously anywhere near as extreme as what these guys actually have to go through. But you certainly walk away from it having a new found kind of appreciation for the rigors of military life."

Bug will mark Shannon's second film in a row informed by conflict in the Middle East, the previous one being Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, in which Shannon played Marine Dave Karnes. Given that both films, in very different ways, address the anxieties of a post-9/11 world, does Shannon himself have any specific concerns?
"One of the caveats in Bug, and you don't necessarily have choose to look at it this way, but I do, is that if you believe that Peter is a veteran of this conflict, we should all be on alert that there are a lot of people coming back who are not too dissimilar to Peter who have serious mental problems and who are going to have serious mental problems, because they're going through something that none of us can hardly imagine, no matter how many articles you read about it or how many documentaries you see about it. They're going the Hell over there, and some of them are going to come back and they're going to be damaged. And we have to be prepared to deal with that an accept that and treat them with the love and respect that they deserve."
Given the fears that Bug articulates, and the troublesome dreams that it dredges up, you have to wonder what will happen when we collectively do wake up like Kafka's Gregor, and what we'll find ourselves to have become.

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WEBSLINGER: Spider-Man essay & book sneak peek

Hey, folks... just wanted to give a shout-out concerning a really cool book that's coming out soon, in which I have an essay. It's a book called WEBSLINGER, and yes, it's a collection of essays by a bunch of comic book and science-fiction writers about your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.  The special guest editor of the collection is Gerry Conway... that's right! The writer who freaked out generations of comic book fans by KILLING GWEN STACY!

That was back in 1973, and I *STILL* haven't forgiven him.

The book will be out in March. My essay is called "Inner Demons, Outer Heroes, Outer Villains: A Look at Monstrosity in Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2"    More updates to come.  Forward this to any comic book fans you might know, if you get the chance. Here's a look at the totally bitchin' cover.

8:52 AM - 5 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

SCANNER DARKLY w/interviews w/ Woody Harrelson, etc

 (c) 2006/2007 Michael Marano, all rights reserved

DARKLY THROUGH A SCANNER DARKLY

 Originally published as "Doctored Phil" in the August 2006 issue of Sci Fi Magazine
 
By 

Michael Marano

On November 17, 1971, on Hacienda Way in San Rafael, the home of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was broken into. His fireproof, more-than-half-a-ton steel file cabinet was blasted apart, his tax records and cancelled checks stolen. It's a legendary event among PKD fans, for whom fandom can be a pursuit of an intensity that shames "red-string" Kabbalists. The break-in crystallizes issues that would define the rest of Dick's personal and artistic life: paranoia (Dick brought a list of missing items to the cops, who told him there'd been no break-in); mistrust of authority (the break-in was thought to be the work of a government agency); the psychotic shifting realities particular to 1970s Northern California; the notion of becoming your own nemesis, nurtured by the suggestion that Dick, in a fugue, may have unknowingly broken into his own home or staged the break-in and forgotten about it. This last possibility found expression in Dick's 1977 novel, A Scanner Darkly, now adapted for the screen by Richard Linklater, the Austin-based filmmaker who made "Slacker" a household word.

Scanner is the story of Fred (Keanu Reeves), an undercover narc shouldered with putting drug dealer Robert Arctor (Keanu Reeves) under surveillance. That's no typo. Reeves, who slow-mo'ed his way through three Dick-inspired Matrix movies, plays Fred and Robert: the same person. In this near future, in which narcs wear holographic "scramble suits" that blur their features with those of a myriad other people to protect their anonymity and in which high tech information storage systems are used to document every move of a suspect, Fred is so deep undercover, he must spy on himself. While on the case, he'll also be watching his drugged-out housemates, Barris and Luckman (played by Natural Born Killers alums and Oscar nominees Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson), and also his sometime girlfriend/sometime dealer Donna (Winona Ryder, who starred with Reeves in Bram Stoker's Dracula).

Dick's work is of course science fiction, his paranoia a hyperbolic expression of the tensions of the era in which he wrote, just as Giant Bugs of the 1950s expressed the atomic tensions of the days when Levittowns bloomed and Tail Gunner Joe saved us all from Commie Pinko janitors.

While writing this article, having spoken to people associated with Dick and the production of Scanner, and having written about the break-in of Dick's home for another venue, I shipped a box of notes, discs and tapes from my office in Charleston, SC, to my office in Boston... just as the controversy over the National Security Agency undertaking warrantless surveillance of US citizens smacked the fan. Upon delivery of the box, I discovered that the majority of the tapes and discs had been removed, including a notebook of handwritten works-in-progress. The box had been carefully resealed, the missing items replaced with heavy packing paper. The shipping company said they'd send an inspector to examine the box. Close to 5 PM on the day the inspector was to come, I called the company and was told no inspector was coming, nor was any inspector ever scheduled to come. I faxed a list of missing items to the company. And was informed that a claim on the missing items had been made for me... upon the recommendation of the inspector, of course.

In a Dick-ian, broken reality state of paranoia--as disconcerting for an SF media writer as glancing out the window and seeing a giant irradiated ant, blissfully indifferent to its supposed hyperbolic unreality, peering in while Geiger counters crackle like crisp morning bacon--it seemed useful to trace the origin of the media adaptation of Scanner, arguably Dick's most paranoid work, about which he told his then-agent: "I swear, Scott, this is shaping up to be the greatest novel ever written. Or at least the greatest novel I've ever written, anyhow." That "ground zero" moment might be one in 1982, in which a girl cried alone in an empty movie theater and reality started to rip, a little.

"I was very sad," said Isa Dick-Hackett. "My dad had just died. I was very emotional to begin with; I had just seen something that he should have lived to see. The theater was pretty much empty. [The movie] was clearly not doing well. People were not getting it. The reviews were poor. It sunk like a lead balloon. It was devastating. I sat all the way through to see the dedication without another soul in the theater. The lights were on. Everyone was gone. And I just cried. It was horrible."

Isa is Dick's daughter, and, along with her siblings Laura Leslie and Christopher Dick, owns and controls Dick's literary works. She was fifteen when her father died in March, 1982. Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott movie based on her dad's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was released three months later. The dedication she stayed to see was added onto the end credits by the filmmakers in remembrance of her dad. Nine years later, she had a very different experience. "Flash forward to the release of the Director's Cut [in 1991]. It was playing at the Castro Theater [in San Francisco]. My mom and my sister and I drove in from Marin. And we saw all these people and it looked like the line went around the block. And I'm still thinking that we'll be the only ones in the theater. This can't be the line for Blade Runner. And I see people are wearing Blade Runner T-Shirts. They're in line for the Director's Cut! And this time, upon the release of the Director's Cut people were so enthusiastic, I couldn't believe it."

The film adaptations that have helped fuel the iconic stature of Philip<span style="font-family: Courier;"> K. Dick since his death have made him two figures, but the same person. Just Like Arctor and Fred. There are two competing Dick realities. There's the guy who wrote Do Androids Dream?, and then there's "The Author of Blade Runner!" plashed on movie posters. The two, though the same, have two separate existences. Hackett mentions that fans of her father refer to him as "Phil", as if they knew him.  There seems to be a desire to merge, in this newest adaptation of a story about a split human being, the movie poster tag line Dick with the writerly Dick.   She and her siblings wanted, around the time Minority Report was in production, to be much more active in the development of film adaptations of her father's work, especially with what they call the "crown jewels" of his writings. "Scanner is such a personal story [of her father's], we felt really protective of it. Our biggest concern was that it be done as faithfully as possible. You know in reading the book that a lower budget, smaller, independent film was the way to go. The bigger the budget, the more pressure there is to give it as wide an appeal as possible. And with that particular story, we just felt that that wouldn't be in the best interest of the book, or [her father's] intentions. I'd be shocked if people don't say, 'Wow, that's incredibly faithful to the book Scanner]'. And that's huge. That hasn't really been done yet, with Philip K. Dick material."

It's too bad that, as the film version of Scanner might, to a certain extent, rejoin two, or maybe even more, disparate aspects of Dick (as happened during the cold-sweat-painful climax of his novel VALIS), it will be impossible to see any one film based on Scanner. In true Dick-ian form, there is no one film of the book. Like the dual-ing, dueling personalities of the story's protagonist(s), two films of Scanner will occupy the same space on the screen at the same time, each imposing itself on the other. Scanner will be a blend of animation and live action, a process called interpolated rotoscoping, in which footage is "painted" over with state-of-the-art computer graphics, of the kind first used in Linklater's dream-like filmed philosophy essay, 2001's Waking Life. This most faithful of Dick films, unlike Paycheck, Minority Report, or Total Recall, will be a film of two competing realities, thereby making it yet more faithful to the spirit of Dick's work.

"It's especially challenging. When we were shooting it, we were basically shooting two films," said Scanner producer Tommy Pallotta, who had previously worked with Linklater on  Waking Life. "We'd shoot it once, live action, digitally, like a normal movie, edit it, lock picture, and, we're done, as if it were a live action film. And then we'd start the process of animating over it."

In dealing with a story about split realities and split personas, that as a film has a split reality, the question arises: is Dick's vision really SF anymore? In the 1977 novel (the first Del Rey paperback edition quaintly has a mail-in coupon among the back pages for the novelization of Star Wars), Dick predicted Orange County politicians creating policy around a "War on Drugs" before any such term plopped from a spin doctor's lips. As of the start of 2006, surveillance of the kind Dick describes in Scanner without checks from the Judicial branch is a point of debate on cable pundit punch-outs each night. "The thing about SF is that it allows you to ask philosophical questions in a safe way," Pallotta said. "[This story is set] in the near future. It gives you a level of safety, in which you can reflect on what is going on now much more accurately than if you're dealing with a movie about the here and now. The drug hysteria has been replaced with terrorist hysteria. It's still the same impulse. It's still fear. About surveillance, for me personally--one of the best books I ever read was Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. His main assertion is that surveillance is a mode of control. If you have people in fear of constant surveillance, which he calls the 'Panopticon', then you don't have to worry about actually surveying them. They will control themselves. They'll censor themselves. This is something that everyone on the creative end of this project felt very strongly about."

The Panopticon, which Foucault called "a state of conscious and permanent visibility", may coerce people to censor themselves. Yet the animation process used for Scanner seems to have had the opposite effect for one of its stars. Perhaps because the animation clouded that visibility a bit? Woody Harrelson, who first got noticed playing a guy named "Woody" on Cheers, found it freeing to be two people in two simultaneous movies in his Scanner role as narc Fred/dealer Arctor's big druggie lug of a housemate, Luckman. Harrelson was in London starring in a production of Night of the Iguana when I spoke to him. I asked him about the differences between doing live theater, with the immediacy of a live audience, and working on Scanner, in which his performance was "mitigated" not only by the medium of film, but by film that would be painted over with computer animation, making him "a Woody analogue"... like something out of a Dick story.

"In a way I found it freeing... and would ergo be some kind of an animated character, made me feel a little more..." he laughed... "animated."

"I wasn't afraid to go bigger, whereas in other things I've done lately, I've been trying to play everything as true as possible and contain myself more, because I do as an actor tend to go over the top. With this, it was fine to shoot for the moon."

Harrelson, who lives in a solar-powered semi-agrarian community in Hawaii where many use bio-diesel for their tractors (a place that, back when Dick was writing in the 70s, would have been the setting of an SF story), finds himself in a fractured, Scanner-like headspace of having two selves, and watching himself, while under the panoptic gaze of a live audience. "On stage, I'll be inside the character's head, and then suddenly I'm thinking from in terms of the audience, but specifically, [that happens] a lot of times if I know someone in the audience is there. Then I'll think of that person watching it, and what they're thinking. That is very much like Scanner, in terms of being on the inside and the outside of the experience, simultaneously."

A few years back, Harrelson had starred in EDtv, which had a... yes... Dick-ianAnimal Farm, and some of those books, I was always thinking of Russia, not the United States. Yeah, it's not really funny anymore."

Dick once famously wrote that realities are strung in a line, like suits in a closet. At any given moment, the primacy of one reality can eclipse the other. Given the Dick-ian and Dick-centered erosions of reality that seem connected to the Scanner film, the question arises: are we living in a reality that is like Fred's/Arctor's scramble suit? With a blur of features bleeding into and over each other like animation over live footage? If we are, is this the primary reality? Dick called the idea a "terrific absurdity", but it's also terrifically absurd that we live in a world in which androids designed to look and talk like Dick can go missing and in which for a small fee you can subscribe to an AI girlfriend named Vivienne with whom you can interact with on your cell phone (something that echoes Buster Friendly of Do Androids? and Perky Pat, the beloved AI program from Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch). The fact that it's all like something out of a Dick story is very much like something out of a Dick story.

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