28 responses so far ↓

• Like Philip K. Dick Movies? Try Jack Womack Books | Movie Crunch // Jan 9, 2008 at 3:23 pm

  […] the way, if you like Philip K. Dick movies, you’ll probably like a lot of his dystopian science fiction short stories and novels. And in […]

• TheManInTheLowCastle // Jan 9, 2008 at 4:53 pm

  I can’t see them making a movie out of The Man in the High Castle. Its the only work of his I’ve heard, but it seems like a lot less action/intrigue than the other movies.

• thekow // Jan 9, 2008 at 4:55 pm

  Paycheck was an embarrassing massacre of one of Phillip K. Dick’s greatest stories.

• Jon Roth // Jan 9, 2008 at 5:25 pm

  @Thekow: Very interesting. The problem is, despite reading a great deal of PKD’s writing, none of what I’ve read has been turned into a movie. So I cannot claim to be able to compare his original writing against what’s in the movies. I did have to watch Paycheck five times before I liked it.

  @LowCastle: Yeah, I thought that. That means a more “Hollywood” treatment of the screenplay, which could end up offending PKD fans. It’s a tough call.

• Rob // Jan 9, 2008 at 5:35 pm

  If I had to pick a PKD novel to film, I always looked at UBIK as being a fun film. I was convinced Vanilla Sky was a PKD story until I looked it up (it has most of the traditional PKD elements).

• Tom // Jan 9, 2008 at 5:58 pm

  Paycheck is bad, and you can’t get the rights to The Man in the High Castle unless you’re getting some pretty insane bank from this blog. Get real. If you mortgaged your house you couldn’t get the rights to an unknown Dick short story, let alone his masterpiece.

• Tim // Jan 9, 2008 at 6:46 pm

  You forgot Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (based on We Can Remember it For You Wholesale–same story as Total Recall)

• Adrain // Jan 9, 2008 at 7:01 pm

  Even thought it wasn’t based on a PKD story, Soldier does take place in the Blade Runner universe and was written by David Peoples who co-wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner.

• scififan // Jan 9, 2008 at 7:19 pm

  One can easily argue that the plot is not even close, and Dick never got any credit for it, but I always believed Terminator was inspired by the short story Second Variety.

• Jon Roth // Jan 9, 2008 at 8:44 pm

  @Rob: Yeah, I thought the same about Vanilla Sky at first, but it seemed quite f**ked up. I know I read UBIK, though I can’t remember the story anymore.

  @Tom: Re the rights, I’m just dreaming Hopefully someone will do High Castle and do it right. If I dream hard enough, it might be me in a few years, with someone else’s money. If not, ah well.

  @Tim: No kidding. I was not aware of that. Thanks for that tip. I’ll have to be more thorough.

  @Adrain: I didn’t know that either. Thanks for the tip.

  @scififan: I didn’t know that, but I vaguely recall the same type of argument made for a movie that came out after Blade Runner and possibly before Terminator that was loosely based on a PKD story. But that’s all I remember, and that possibly Rutger Hauer was in it as well. Since hearing that many years ago, I’ve not found any more info.

• Wonderful Author « Get the Hell Out of Here // Jan 9, 2008 at 11:29 pm

  […] clipped from movies.popcrunch.com […]

• gnomead // Jan 9, 2008 at 11:41 pm

  Hard Boiled by Frank Miller is a loose interpretation of The Electric Ant.

• Jennifer // Jan 10, 2008 at 12:33 am

  I really hope they don’t make a movie out of “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” and I am sad that they are filming Radio Free Albemuth” as these are my most favorite PKD novels, and I would hate for them to be butchered. I did enjoy A Scanner Darkly” but unless they keep them more independent films, It seems they really dumb down the stories, and I think Tom Cruise in a Minority report is Blasphemy.

• darren // Jan 10, 2008 at 12:37 am

  DUDE!!! You forgot ‘Barjo’ the french movie based on ‘Confessions of a Crap Artist”

  Also, I was introduced to PKD as a really trippy author, but I didn’t want to read just based on the fact that he was the author of the book ‘blade runner’ was based on.

  The cool thing about PKD for me is his mix of a mid-lower class existence and the spiritual. The beauthy of “Do androids dream of electric sheep.”, for me is the doctrine of Mercerism, and the obsession with living animals.

• fanshawe // Jan 10, 2008 at 1:56 am

  There was a joke going around a couple of years back saying that, other than Blade Runner, The Matrix was the best PKD adaptation to date. Abre los ojos/Vanilla Sky may just come in third and fourth.

• Sylvain // Jan 10, 2008 at 2:31 am

  12!
  You’ve dropped the french movie “Confessions d’un barjot” from a mainstream novel of Ph. K. Dick “Confessions of a Crap Artist”
  http://french.imdb.com/title/tt0104003/

  More movie/gamel/other aaptation in french here:

  http://www.noosfere.com/heberg/Le_ParaDick/adaptations.html

• 11 Science Fiction Movies based on Philip K. Dick’s Writing « Kenny’s Entertainment Blog // Jan 10, 2008 at 5:13 am

  […] read more | digg story […]

• Darryl Mason // Jan 10, 2008 at 6:21 am

  Actually Philip K Dick was a remarkably successful writer, though he didn’t see real financial worth from his work until the mid-1970s. Then again, there weren’t exactly a lot of rich authors in the US back then.

  Dick’s first published novel, Solar Lottery, sold more than 300,000 copies in only a few months, back in the early 1950s. Astoundingly successful for an unknown novelist in those days.

  One of his last novels, Valis, was anything but a mainstream thriller, filled with warped realities and chicaning plot lines, and it still managed to sell more than 130,000 copies in hardback and paperback on its release.

  Dick did no major promotion or publicity for any of his books, outside of about a dozen or so interviews and a large feature in Rolling Stone in the mid-1970s, and yet he remained a consistently popular author for decades, even when SF sales were in the gutter.

  I’d tip Terry Gilliam for director of The Owl In The Daylight.

  Dick must now be one of the most ripped off novelists in all of filmdom.

  The Matrix, The Terminators, The Truman Show and dozens of other movies were not ‘inspired’ by his writings, they were direct steals.

  Then again, we are now living in a Philip K Dick reality, from the ‘War on Terror’ to GW Bush to the internet to designer drugs. The first person to claim the world was turning into a Philip K Dick novel? Philip K Dick himself!

• Matt // Jan 10, 2008 at 7:45 am

  …and you all forgot the Truman Show. That was based on his 1959 novel, Time out of Joint.

• soundtrackgeek // Jan 10, 2008 at 8:40 am

  Keep ‘em coming is all I can say!

• RegorA // Jan 10, 2008 at 12:57 pm

  To call Truman Show “based” on TOOJ is giving it more credit than it deserves. The terms “plagiarized” and “stolen lock stock and barrel” spring more readily to mind.

• Jon Roth // Jan 10, 2008 at 2:17 pm

  Wow, that’s fantastic. While I’m happy to know that there are more movies (and TV shows?) based on PKD’s writing, i’m embarrassed to realize that I didn’t know so many of them.

  Didn’t know about ‘Barjo’, Truman Show, Hard Boiled, etc. Love Frank Miller in general. Terry Gilliam would be brilliant. I agree that he’d be an excellent director - and maybe not just for ‘Owl’. Can you just imagine if he did ‘High Castle’?

  Thanks for all the info/tips. Much appreciated. PKD is one of my fave writers, with Jack Womack coming in a close 2nd, plus Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, etc. All of my own “proto-cyberpunk” writing is influenced by these writers.

• The films of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick : Behind The Scenes TV // Jan 10, 2008 at 11:45 pm

  […] There have been nine movies made from PKD’s writing (excluding documentaries), and two more are in the works. One of my fave Rock chicks, Alanis Morrissette, is going to be Radio Free Albemuth in 2008. (But you oughta know, don’t expect her to go down on you in the theater. Don’t get it? Never mind.) Owl in Daylight, a biopic of PKD, will be out in 2009. Here’s a quick rundown of PKD movies, in chronological order, and with relevant video clips and posters/ stil…. […]

• DaveUK // Jan 12, 2008 at 10:19 am

  You missed the best of the lot, I-Robot !

• Jon Roth // Jan 15, 2008 at 6:19 pm

  DaveUK: Wish it were so, but I, Robot is actually based on Isaac Asimov’s novel of the same name.

• ArthurT // Mar 31, 2008 at 11:33 am

  A common mistake:
  You missed 13th Floor, Make that 12.

• Adam // Apr 27, 2008 at 4:23 am

  Paycheck wasn’t that bad, I think. It was closer to the original novel and had better story than Next.
  Next is the worst “adaption” yet. How can you take a satirical story about a fascist police state, and make it a patriotic story about the “need to give up our rights in the war against terror”? And who are the terrorists in the movie? They speak german, french, italian… What do they want? How do they know about Nicolas Cages character, and do they have any other agenda besides killing the man that can foresee their crimes? The movie has fatal plot-holes and the only reason they kept the “based on the novel by…”-line is so they could sell a few more tickets.

  I think that at least the first half of Paychek was good and close to the original. The ending was a bit to happy and hollywoodesque, but the same thing can be said about Minority Report.

• Arko // Jun 28, 2008 at 3:01 pm

  Thanks all. Great fodder for NetFlix. I just filled up my Queue with great movies to see. Signed, Big Blade Runner Fan

Leave a Comment