Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I've been trading e-mail with director Mark Steensland for a while now regarding his documentary THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PHILIP K. DICK. Just the other day, I got a press release from him that began:
"The documentary The Gospel According To Philip K. Dick premiered in spectacular fashion before a sold-out audience in New York City last August as a key event of the Sci-Fi Channel Exposure Film Festival. Now First Run Features will bring this profile of the science fiction legend whose ideas have shaped our collective unconscious to theatres in early Spring 2001."
"Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982 following a series of strokes, left behind a legacy of more than fifty novels, five volumes of short stories, reams of correspondence, and an 8,000 page self-examination he called The Exegesis, explaining, he hoped, the mystical experiences which inform his later fiction. His work has been adapted into films including Blade Runner and Total Recall, as well as the upcoming Impostor and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, and has influenced films such as Fight Club and The Matrix. His writing and ideas on reality, humanity and technology blend West Coast Utopianism, counterculture paranoia and mystical experience."
It looks like First Run's going to do a limited theatrical release before putting the film out on tape and DVD. I'm jazzed. I love Philip K. Dick. I discovered his work the year I turned 10. Someone turned me on to THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, a parallel history in which the Nazis won WWII, and that's all it took. The idea that someone would create that world only to have a character in the book write a piece of speculative fiction that imagines a world in which the Nazis lost WWII, a work of fiction that is banned... well, it made my head hurt. I thought this guy must be the craziest SF author ever. I sought out his other work, devoured it, and when BLADE RUNNER came out, I didn't go in because it was a Harrison Ford movie. I went in because I adored the source material. I hope to get a look at this film soon, and I'll be bringing you more word on it when I do. Until then, visit the official site to learn more about the film.
"Moriarty" out.
