With Paycheck (a new John Woo movie based on a Philip K Dick story) opening on Christmas, the time is right for Wired to run a long feature on Dick’s life and death, and his posthumous career as a film-writer. I have to confess that I prefer the movies built on Dick’s work to the work itself, which I often find clumsily written, thinly characterized, and incoherently plotted — but when streamlined by a screenwriter and acted out by a cast of talented actors and designed by a stylish director, Dick’s work really shines.
Isa and her older half-sister, Laura Leslie, are upstanding Bay Area citizens, both intelligent and obviously competent. Together with their younger half-brother, Chris, who works as a martial arts instructor in Southern California, they control their father’s legacy. Russell Galen advises them from New York. The four take their stewardship seriously: They’re fine with repackaging a novel to tie in with a movie, for example, but novelizations of short stories are out. And thanks to Vintage Books, every word of his fiction will soon be in print – as you’d expect for an author who’s now taught in colleges and cited by the French post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
As for film deals, the estate has become increasingly choosy. “We sort of feel like we have to protect Philip K. Dick’s brand image,” says Galen. “So we set very, very high prices, and we’ll only do business with people who are established. It’s ironic, because the films that created the phenomenon started with options that were granted to struggling filmmakers. Today, we shun people like that.” Not every movie based on Dick’s writings has been a hit: The 1996 film Screamers, starring Peter Weller, and last year’s Imposter, with Gary Sinise in the lead, grossed only $12 million between them. “But in Hollywood, what matters is getting the movie made,” explains Galen. “If somebody options a story and it’s not made, that spoils the track record.”