Perfection

I've never understood filmmakers who want to either recreate or follow a movie that is already perfect. (Or, for those who think there is nothing that is perfect, a truly excellent film.)

One of my favorite films is BLADE RUNNER, the 1982 production starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. It is one of the few movies that I feel is about as perfect as they make them. Based on Philip K. Dick's novel, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, it takes the premise of that book and bends it to appeal to what was then modern sensibilities. It of course takes liberties with Dick's novel, but retains the seed that Dick intended. (I know this because PK Dick approved of the movie which he saw shortly before it was released and just before he died.)

The movie, to me, is a classic. Ford is used to great effect even though he is not--in my opinion--a very good actor. Rutger Hauer turned in what may be the best performance of his career portraying the child-like android, Roy Batty who is the leader of a small group of escaped "replicants" (artificial humans); and whose existence places him as a kind of Christ-like figure. The rest of the cast similarly give us amazing turns. Again, Sean Young as Rachel--a replicant who doesn't know she is not human--never looked better and never again turned in an acting job like that one. Small character roles like M. Emmett Walsh as a corrupt police captain, and Hy Pyke as Taffy Lewis, the sleazy owner of a drinking/prostitution establishment turn out pure performances and unforgettable voices and exposition. Joe Turkel is unforgettable as Eldon Tyrell. James Hong as Hannibal Chew. William Sanderson as J.F. Sebastian. Every actor was chosen brilliantly and directed to perfection.

Even the music (by Vangelis) is inspired. The direction is flawless. The script polished to a dark and horrific onyx.

The movie is, to me, as good as it gets. And yet, when I research the production of the film, I realize that it was saved as much as what ended up being left out of the storyline as by what was revealed onscreen. Scenes were eventually excised that would have ruined the movie. Further research has led me to conclude that studio executives who obviously had some amount of insight used a heavy hand to reign in the director, Ridley Scott. Putting lie to the idea that officious high-minded pricks are always a bad thing when it comes to creating art. In this case it seems that they saved a film rather than hindered or ruined it.

Since BLADE RUNNER is just about the best movie I've seen--and easily the finest genre film I've watched--I wonder what has possessed the money men to create a sequel. The best that they could hope to achieve, artistically, would be to equal the flawless original. And the chances of that are almost zero. So, given that they likely cannot even meet the quality of the first movie, why bother to make what will probably be considered a bland and lifeless movie when compared to the living, gleaming creation that was revealed to the public in 1982? It's as if they're courting disaster not just critically, but economically, also.

I don't think I'll watch the sequel. I won't even mention it by name. I just don't trust the odds that the talent and the pure chance and accident that created the merit of BLADE RUNNER can possibly be repeated.

Sean Young as Rachel: image of perfection.

M. Emmett Walsh as Bryant.

Joe Turkel as Eldon Tyrell.

Hy Pyke as the sleazy Taffey Lewis.

Philip K. Dick Influence on Kirby?

I've written before about the two-story arc in FANTASTIC FOUR 66-67. I won't go into how Kirby's story was all but ruined by the shenanigans played by his editor. But the issues are still intriguing and some of Kirby's writing still shines through, of course, just based on the power of his artwork and the strength of his sequential storytelling.

One thing that I have always been curious about was whether there was any influence on the character of HIM from outside sources. Particularly from the short story "The Golden Man" by Philip K. Dick. Anyone reading the story by Dick will understand that the lead character in that 11K-word tale bears a striking physical resemblance to HIM (later known as Warlock/Magus as written by Jim Starlin). PK Dick's character is statuesque, physically perfect, seemingly cast from gold, and aloof...all but separated from any contact with the world of Man.

Kirby's character spends most of the story slowly forming within a gigantic cocoon, bred by scientists to be the perfect and ultimate being. And when he finally does emerge from that cocoon, he looks pretty much as Dick described his own ubermann--perfectly formed, as if carved from golden marble, and caring not one whit for the humans who had created him.

I do know that Kirby read widely in science and in science-fiction, so he certainly must have read Dick's work. But did "The Golden Man" in part serve as an inspiration for HIM? It's something I would like to have asked Jack Kirby.

Philip K. Dick's "Golden Man".

Kirby's HIM.

Taffey Lewis

At the top of my list of favorite movies is the science-fiction film BLADE RUNNER which was adapted from the equally brilliant novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP by Philip K. Dick, probably the most talented writer ever to turn his pen to science-fiction.

Among the things that set that film apart from other genre movies is the excellent cast made unforgettable by the direction of Ridley Scott. Most of us are quite familiar with the major players in BLADE RUNNER, but even the incidental characters stand apart. One character in the movie who remains foremost in my mind was Taffey Lewis. He runs a nightclub in an apparently rougher part of town--so seedy that the replicant Rachael, portrayed by the then-stunningly gorgeous Sean Young initially refuses an invitation to meet Deckard (Harrison Ford) there because she doesn't visit such sleazy places.

"The man's dry. Give 'im a drink."

Taffey Lewis was played by a character actor named Hy Pyke who died in 2006 and left not much of a record in major films. This is a shame, because his brief few seconds on the screen in my favorite movie was an amazing bit of acting work.

So, the next time you have a beer or a glass of wine, raise a toast to Hy Pyke, who never reached a larger audience, but probably should have.

"Buzz off."

Advice

Every once in a while a struggling writer asks me for some advice. I don't have a ton of advice to give out and I'm especially careful about it because compared to a lot of the authors I've met I've had a very minor career as a writer. (When you've stood beside Ray Bradbury at a book signing you are bound to feel humbled.)

But here's some basic advice that I always feel confident about doling out:

Write often. My feeling is that you should write every single day. If you can't find the time to accomplish that, then write as often as you possibly can manage. But even if all you can do is jot a few notes, do it every day.

Try to sell some short stories. It's a good way to build a track record if you're aiming to become a novelist.

Don't worry about rejection. If rejection bothers you, you've no business engaging in the writing and submission process.

If you're ready to submit a novel length manuscript you'll need an agent. Search for a reputable agent, but under no circumstances should you ever pay an agent any kind of fee. An honest agent is going to earn their fee by selling your work. If they don't feel confident enough to make their livings based on a percentage of your sales, then they're probably not any good at being a literary agent.

Well, that's about it. Just a few simple things. I get a lot of questions from people who want to be writers, but those are the things that I feel should be common knowledge.

Philip K. Dick's typewriter.

Influences

A lot of fiction heavily influenced my life in general, my life as a reader, and my life as a writer. Since I now make a decent paycheck now and again with my own fiction, that third influence on me is often foremost in my mind.

What books pushed me to write later in life more than others?

At some point I discovered the works of Charles Bukowski. At first it was his short stories that grabbed me, and then I moved to his novels, and then his poetry. Bukowski was an original. He made everything he did seem easy and casual, but that's not the way it was, at all. Underlying everything that he wrote was a humor and a wit that were both as sharp an insightful as any I've encountered. A lot of other writers try to imitate him, but no one succeeds at that. Don't try.

I also found Cormac McCarthy at some point. The first thing of his that I read was BLOOD MERIDIAN. It made quite an impact on me, and I've continued to read just about every novel that he produces. Some others are almost as powerful as that first one, but none of those have influenced me quite so much as that one. His style is another that one should not try to imitate. It's not that it can't be done--Charles Frazier did a passable patch on McCarthy with his COLD MOUNTAIN--but no one else can quite capture the world that McCarthy can conjure. Again, my advice would be to not even try to copy that style...and certainly don't compare yourself to Cormac McCarthy--this is a bit of hubris I've seen out of a few authors. Silly chaps.

I came upon The Beats rather late in life. I was well into my forties before I "discovered" them. It wasn't that I hadn't tried reading the work of that group of creators before I was older--but the fiction never held me for more than a few lines or pages, and so I'd cast that stuff off. Finally, though, I picked up ON THE ROAD for maybe the twelfth time in my life and, for some reason, that time everything fell into place. All the tumblers clicked. I was hooked for over a year on the fiction of Jack Kerouac, and then William S. Burroughs, and the rest of the bunch. I learned quite a lot from reading The Beats, and I almost abandoned genre fiction entirely after feeling that horrors and fantasies could never match the kind of power I was reading within the paragraphs of DESOLATION ANGELS or JUNKY. But eventually I came around and returned to what I knew best.

Somewhere in those past-40 years I found Robert Graves. First it was I, CLAUDIUS and then CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSILINA. Later I sought out his short fiction and after reading a bit of that I discovered some things about how to write that left me very well educated, indeed. Graves was a bit of a nut in many ways, but he was about as skilled a writer as I have ever encountered and I learned about as much from reading his fiction as from the works of anyone else I could name.

And even later than Graves and Kerouac and Bukowski I finally buckled down to read as much as I could of Hemingway. As with Kerouac, most of my friends had read Ernest Hemingway's work in their youth and been influenced by it as very young men. For whatever reason I found more to admire in the fantasies of Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and so would give up on the tempered realities of Hemingway. My loss as a young man, but there's nothing to be done for it now. Better that I finally appreciated him late than not at all. As with the others, reading his stories and novels showed me how to write more effectively than just about any of the fantasists with whom I'd been so engrossed from the age of eight through forty-two or so.

Did I waste a lot of my youth chasing dragons and demons and aliens creatures? Not really.

For the writer who influenced me more than any other was the crazed visionary Philip K. Dick. Most people today who know his name at all hear it because of his connection to so many film adaptations of his novels and short stories. He was, for many years, quite prolific and his mind was a vast factory of ideas. Today, he's considered the father of cyberpunk (go look it up). Some of his fiction seems dated--a product of the 1950s and 1960s and showing this in his language and condescending attitudes toward race and sex. But much of his work has stood the test of the decades since his death, and that material is as powerful now as when he first produced it.

My favorite Philip K. Dick novel is THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. It is set in a world in which it was not the Allies who won World War II, but the Axis. Furthermore, he cast his characters in a North America that has been divided down the Mississippi River basin--the Germans in the East and the Japanese in the West. If he wasn't the first to exploit this concept, he was likely in the first tier of those using that idea effectively.

But Dick goes further. Within the novel is another novel. This novel is called THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. The characters hear about it--written by an author who has used the theme that it wasn't the Axis who won WWII, but the Allies. And in MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, walls sometimes break down and the boundaries of reality are changed and altered. The characters within Dick's book are left with the idea that there is another world--one in which they were the victors and not among the oppressed.

This novel affected me on many levels. The night that I finished reading it, I placed it on my bedside table and turned out the light and went to sleep. Some time later--well before dawn--I came awake. Or at least I thought that I was awake. Then I realized that I was dreaming very vividly that I was lying in my bed in my own house. And I dreamed that I had just finished reading a book that I had placed on the bedside table before turning out the light. That book was, I realized, THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY.

This realization so startled me that I had to get up to turn on the light to look at the book. So I sat up and reached for the light.

And then I woke up. Really woke up. I was already up on one elbow reaching for the lamp, pretty much in my sleep. I knew what I was doing. For a moment, in the dark, I froze. I couldn't recall if the book by my bed was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE or THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. Which one was it?

After a few moments I couldn't take the suspense so I turned on the light and reached for the book. Picking it up, I realized that it was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. The bad guys had not won WWII. I was not living in a world dominated by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich.

That's what writing is all about. That's power. That's talent. It's not something I'm ever likely to equal, but it's something to reach for.

Philip K. Dick may very well have influenced me more than any other author.

At least I think so.