Do Androids Dream of Adaptations?
In his younger days, my father was a poster boy for success. He was the son of a war hero, state Governor and Supreme Court Justice. He attended an Ivy League school. He captained a tank in Korea. He was a hunky college athlete. He had a hugely successful acting career, ranging from bit parts on sitcoms, to the lead role in Flipper and starring in spaghetti Westerns. He was a household name and on the cover of TV guide. According to my mom, he was shortlisted for a James Bond role and the lead in Deliverance. But all of this was cut tragically short by a motorcycle accident that forever shifted his life.
By the time I came to self awareness, he was a paralyzed, twice divorced alcoholic living in a one bedroom apartment in an LA suburb. He was a funny, charming man who loved my sister and me, but struggled with how to best show it. I was barely two when my parents divorced and my sister five years older, so their relationship had better cemented. I always craved more throughout my youth and early adulthood. I felt like he infantilized me and couldn’t treat me like a young man. Later, in moments of clarity, I realized it may have been pride and shame. But even this was a narrative in my head. He loved me as best he could.
I saw him infrequently. I moved to England with my stepfather for a few years, then spent only a couple back in California, seeing him one weekend every month or so before my family permanently relocated to Idaho. His paralysis prevented him from doing much. When I did see him, it consisted of eating out, watching tons of movies (many inappropriate for my age), numerous snippets of nostalgia for his lost or long dead friends, and fear of him and his twin brother taking me to the bar so they could get shit-faced. That last part probably become an overarching narrative based on a few incidents. But that’s how I remember it.
Looking back, I’ve come to realize how much those small actions were his attempts at showing love, and they rubbed off. I share his love of food and cinema, my mom says our humor is just alike, and I often see things through a similar lens. I’ve also come to realize he wanted me to know what things had been like, how much he had loved it, how he missed his friends, and how betrayed he felt by the people who abandoned him after his accident or burned him financially. I wish i had realized then what I know now. I would have listened more, caught the nuggets, basked in his sentimentality.
But there was one thing that hit me hard, hit me early, and has remained with me throughout my life: Blade Runner. The film, the soundtrack, the book, the cult status and the mythos surrounding production all helped shape much of my own early identity. For better or worse, it and his relationship to it helped make me (and -I think- my sister) who I am today.
Dad was Blade Runner’s Executive Producer. The story I’ve always known is that his good friend Hampton Fancher turned him onto “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and convinced him to option the rights from Philip K. Dick. My dad wasn’t a square, but he also wasn’t the new Hollywood, countercultural party guy that Hampton was. This shifted somewhat after the accident, but Hampton and other friends got him smoking weed, reading PKD, (I believe) dabbling with psychedelics, and trying to find other ways to cope with this new reality. All of this was a dramatic shift from his patrician upbringing, and more like a real-life version of the mood caught in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” I unfortunately didn’t appreciate it until after he was gone. Oh, the things I would ask now…
There is much lore surrounding Blade Runner’s creation (including Paul Sammon’s Future Noir, a pretty good read with tons of details). The majority is about the mood, esthetic, and emergence of a whole new genre of cinema. Or it’s about the tumultuous relationship between young Ridley Scott, Harrison Ford and the studio execs, who’s last minute meddling forced Ford into a banal overdub introduction because they thought people wouldn’t get it. Or it’s about how it opened the same night as E.T and tanked in theaters, leading to huge debts and rights issues (including for my father), only to make tons for a handful of people after it became one of the biggest grossing VHS sales ever. Dad wasn’t one of them. The film left him broke.
But there are other, personal compelling stories. I could go off about the larger than life place the film has in my own history (including a blown up review my father had taking up a huge portion of his tiny apartment). I could trace my own passion for social justice to the Replicants struggle for liberation, or my love of dark techno and the rave scene to early exposure to Future Noir, cyberpunk and that eery Vangelis soundtrack. Or I could talk about how it broke something in my father’s brain (and likely his marriage to my mom); how it added to his stress, alcoholism and depression. I could talk about how countless geeks have cornered me and lectured me with their much deeper but trivial knowledge of something core to my experience.
But I think the most valuable thing I can share is this first draft, which sat in a box in my sister’s garage after my dad passed, coming to me a few years ago. It is the rainbow bridge between Philip K. Dick’s massive, densely packed world of visionary futurism, dystopian paranoia, ever-repeated motifs (why is everything always Nexus-this or Nexus that?) and vaguely defensible misogyny, to Ridley Scott’s parsimonious Future Noir centering an unreliable narrator in an existential crisis. It is an impassioned attempt to capture much of a world that couldn’t survive the “show, don’t tell” maxim of good filmmaking. It is sprawling, beautiful, and filled with the inherent contradictions surrounding adaptation of good writing… particularly if you’ve never written before. People who’ve read the book, ever tried screenwriting, or have had a drug induced psychotic break should all understand. As should anyone who’s ever watched an adapted PKD film. There are tons. Most suck.
Some key things stick out. Deckard is married and struggling with his relationship. He is physically vulnerable; his doctor asks why he doesn’t emmigrate while he still can. Everything is much less stylized, and even more morally ambiguous. Buster Friendly plays a small but important part -including elements of the “Mercerist” religion from the book- and he captures both the moral ambiguity and deep paranoia rampant throughout PKD’s work. But most important are the animals. While it’s understandable that the film reduces the dilemma of post-nuclear fallout loss of animal life to a well-crafted owl and snake, I love that the first draft focuses on the fetishization of both biodiversity and commodities. Removing every last sheep or goat and the pithy “keeping up with the Joneses” scene feels like a shortcoming.
But this is how filmmaking must work, particularly for adaptations. You can see it in my dad, Hampton and others’ hastily scrawled notes on the script (my dad’s are the sloppy ones. His accident paralyzed his right side and he had to train his left hand). You can see it in the script’s long exegesis (both in dialog and scene descriptions), that had to be cut. You can see it in Hampton’s later scripts (I have a semi-final copy, too, with only a few but important scene differences). Of course, you can see it in the final film, after the studio made Fancher work with David Peeples, after Ridley Scott fought tooth and nail to protect his vision, after the various names my dad mumbled invectives against ripped it apart. This is the art, science and brutality of adaptation. Some of it is completely worthwhile, some of it based on studio greed, some cynicism about viewers.
Of course, the picture for this post is of the recently passed Rutger Hauer, giving his career defining, self-penned “Tears in the Rain” monolog. I’ve always understood this to be ad-libbed, or perhaps hastily written the night before. Either way, it is one of the few things that stick out as transforming a great film into a timeless one. It’s referenced constantly. It appears in pop culture. It’s taught in film class. And it was undoubtedly his response to a script that couldn’t possibly capture the empathy he must have felt for Roy Batty; for the empathy he wanted all of us to feel, that we should feel. It’s an actor at his peak. It’s a saving grace, Hail Mary for the role and the film. It’s awesome.
To me, the Roy Batty ad-lib also reflects returning something of the original, sprawling glory of the book… or the first screenplay draft, which is equally surreal. The first draft’s climax has an almost magical realist element, as Deckard chases Batty through a wrecked building to a long Buster Friendly monologue, then fades out on a weird epilogue rendition of the children’s song “Animal Fair.” It is PKD. It is Hampton Fancher. I believe it’s a bit of my father. Hollywood it ain’t. And, while I love the Tears in the Rain monologue – also decidedly non-Hollywood- I wonder if it would be necessary had the writers, the director or the studio taken more risks. I dunno. I haven’t asked and don’t intend to. But I’ll stick with my conjecture and I love that it’s there.
As mentioned, my mom and dad divorced shortly after Blade Runner’s release. He lamented the film and her for a long time, although I think they came to respect each other again in their later years. He never made another film, but he did option the rights to a book and made many failed attempts at a screenplay (by himself, with Hampton, and even once shopping it to me and my stepdad). It was a good idea for its time, but far from timeless. I think he was both sad that it never took off and deeply resentful of film studios. Still, the germ of this idea stayed with him forever, and is what ultimately contributed to me writing my first screenplay, starting after I attended the Blade Runner sequel with my mom and sister. That story is a trip, too, but I’ll save it for later.
My father passed away in 2005 in Vorhees, New Jersey, two days before his Valentine’s Day birthday (and incidentally, Pris’s inception date, with my mother’s being Batty’s). My sister, mother and I were with him when he passed. He remained an angry film buff until his dying days, and I distinctly remember him demanding my sister and I take his wheelchair out of the theater in the middle of Tom Hanks’ “Castaway” because we all thought it was garbage (it is). He obviously didn’t live long enough to watch Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049”, or for me to come to better terms with how much he loved me. But I think he would have adored the film (as I do), and we would have had some pretty good laughs and connects over the first draft.
Blade Runner remains a timeless film, despite its many flaws. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep remains an amazing book, and one I’ve revisited multiple times (including, ironically, being assigned it in a College English class, when I first realized how much Phil Dick hated women). This script is a great intermediary point. A glimpse into what was, what could have been, and what became. It’s weird, confusing, at times beautiful, and never could have been made into a final film. Luckily, Hampton, my dad and others believed in it and took the risk of pushing forward. I hope folks enjoy it as much as I have, and that this glimpse into my dad’s life and my own reactions offer a smidge of entertainment or insight.
