ELECTRIC DREAMS
A major new anthology show is here, deep-mining the imagination of Philip K Dick. We were there on set – but can we trust our memories?
Blade RunneR, ToTal Recall, MinoRiTy Report, Paycheck, a Scanner darkly, The adjustment
Bureau, The Man in The High castle… though he was pretty much a prophet without honour in his lifetime, the list of adaptations of Philip K Dick’s work has grown and grown since the SF author’s death in 1982. But somehow no one had thought to attach the PKD “brand” to an anthology show – until Michael Dinner was approached by the Dick estate about five years ago.
“They said, ‘Do you realise that he wrote over 120 short stories? Why don’t we find one that interests you and make a series out of it?’” the veteran producer recalls. “So I started reading the short stories. After a couple of weeks I called them and said, ‘Okay, not to sound like a pig, but how about all of them?’”
The 10-episode series Philip K dick’s electric dreams is unusual in two respects. Charlie Brooker is partially responsible for the first.
“Channel 4 approached us because they were losing Black Mirror [to Netflix], and wanted to replace it,” Dinner explains. As a result of their commission, filming was divided equally between the UK and the US – with all the obvious logistical problems that entails. “We made it work the best we could,” Dinner says, with the air of a man who’s conducted one too many 6.00am Skype calls...
Secondly, instead of taking US TV’s usual approach, with episodes “broken” by a writers’ room, Dinner drew on established TV talents like
Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D Moore, life on Mars’ Matthew Graham, and The Fades’ Jack Thorne.
“We approached people that we really liked, both in Great Britain and the United States,” Dinner explains. “A number were familiar with Philip K Dick’s work, and came to the table with stories that they’d always loved. And we really encouraged unique, disparate points of view.”
blade stunner
Browse through Dick’s collected short stories and you soon realise that the 10 chosen – all first published in SF magazines in the ’50s – are pretty slight, generally 10-15 pages in length. As a result, the TV adaptations have to open them out and expand upon them. It’s a task different writers have approached in different ways.
“Some are fairly faithful to the original material,” Dinner explains, “And with some it’s extracting just a kernel of an idea – it depends on the personal preoccupations of the writer.”
In the case of Jack Thorne’s “The Commuter”, for example – shot partly amidst the ersatz architectural traditionalism of Poundsbury, a
new town built on Duchy of Cornwall land – Dinner says the script lent itself to being filmed on this side of the pond. “In some ways his adaptation is very UK-centric – there’s a sense of class that wouldn’t really translate.”
Dinner himself dibbsed “The Father-Thing”. Published not long before Jack Finney’s The
Body Snatchers, it explores similar territory, with a young boy realising that his father has been replaced...
“It raises the question, ‘What do you do when you find that one of the two people you love most in the world turns out to be a monster?’” Dinner explains. “I loved the idea of that, and I was also able to look at my relationship with my kids, the family institution, and the nature of marriage. It starts with a slight notion, but I was able to develop it and do something that meant something to me. And I think that’s what all the writers did.”
SFX gains further insights into how Dick’s work has been used as a foundation to build upon when we visit a studio in Hounslow – formerly a Gillette factory – and step onto a set from the episode based on Dick’s “The Impossible Planet”. It’s a spaceship, but one light years from sci-fi’s gleaming futurism.
The carpet immediately catches our eye. Garishly patterned with jagged pink, red and yellow shapes, it brings to mind a bowling alley in the ’90s – or possibly a particularly tasteless goalkeeper’s shirt of the same era. Dotted about the stepped deck are moulded plastic tables and chairs. Monitor screens display planetary charts and the words “Now arriving Planet Earth, ETA 00:00:00”. “Astral Dreams: because life’s a dream,” declares a slogan on the wall. This is intergalactic tour vessel the Dreamweaver – kinda the outer-space equivalent of a glass-bottomed boat.
Ascending a small flight of stairs, passing signage with arrows pointing to sleeping pods, souvenirs and toilets, we secrete ourselves behind the counter of a small kitchen area. Here, surrounded by pink trays, Astral Dreams-branded coffee cups and drinks dispensers you’d normally find in a motorway services, we observe a couple of takes.
In one, handfuls of grit are tossed up against the giant viewing window that dominates the deck. In another, the lights flicker as turbulence sends tables and chairs tipping over, scattering condiment sets across the carpet… thanks to three guys who are lying on the floor, levering up the furniture with lengths of wood. You can’t beat the old methods.
When filming pauses there’s time to wander the somewhat shabby bridge area at the rear of the deck, whose controls are strewn with drinks cans and plastic snack tubs – and to admire robot RB29, who resembles Robin Williams’s droid from Bicentennial Man, but rendered entirely in distressed mahogany.
It’s a fascinating tableau, in part because it bears so little relation to Dick’s 10-page tale. The spaceship in that isn’t a tourist ship – and while a robot does feature, it’s a “towering, gleaming” figure. Judging by what we learn of the storyline, the differences are more than cosmetic too, adding a romantic thread, and an ending which takes off into fantasy.
How will hardcore Philip K Dick fans react to such tweaks? On the plus side, it means the series has surprises in store. And Michael Dinner is keen to stress that the adaptations which take only a kernel from the original story have what you might call a Kindred spirit. (Psst: that’s what the “K” stands for!)
“I think they’re humanistic stories,” he says, as he ponders what qualities have made Dick’s
What do you do When the person you love turns out to be a monster?
stories age better than those of many of his contemporaries, “And they deal with the great genre issues. What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be an individual faced with totalitarian government? What’s the nature of reality? To me, they’re the great existential themes of post-World War II man.” page to screen Dinner is also confident that despite being the work of many minds, shot on two different continents, together the series’ 10 instalments form a coherent vision – and not just because they all passed through his hands, with the producer acting as a final filter.
“Some take place today, some 60 years from now, ‘Impossible Planet’ takes place hundreds of years into the future – so they’re all unique points of view,” he notes. “But what’s strange is that as the scripts were coming in and I read them, it felt all of a piece. They were all inspired by or emanated from the mind of Philip K Dick; they all have these great genre themes; they all have a twist at the end… Y’know, there are some novels that are really a collection of short stories, like The dubliners or
Winesburg, ohio, and it somehow felt that we were doing one big novel, but each chapter was its own little story.”
If all goes well (and in anticipation, scripts for a potential second season are already trickling in) Dinner hopes audiences will react in much the same way that he did to the daddy of all anthology series. “When I was little I’d watch The Twilight
Zone,” he recalls. “I’d hear the music come on, the camera would tilt to the stars, and I knew that each story would be different but there’d be a twist at the end, and I was ready to get my ticket to go along for the ride. I hope people will feel the same about electric dreams.”