TZ: All of that changed when you saw David W. People's revised screenplay?
Dick: I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for Blade Runner on the KNBC-TV news. I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.
I wrote the station, and they sent the letter to the Ladd Company. They gave me the updated screenplay. I read it without knowing they had brought somebody else in. I couldn't believe what I was reading! It was simply sensational -- still Hampton Francher's screenplay, but miraculously transfigured, as it were. The whole thing had simply been rejuvenated in a very fundamental way.
After I finished reading the screenplay, I got the novel out and looked through it. The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was amazed that Peoples could get some of those scenes to work. It taught me things about writing that I didn't know.
The thing I had in mind all of the time, from the beginning of it, was The Man Who Fell to Earth. This was the paradigm. That's why I was so disappointed when I read the first Blade Runner screenplay, because it was the absolute antithesis of what was done in The Man Who Fell to Earth. In other words, it was a destruction of the novel. But now, it's magic time. You read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it's like they're two halves to one meta-artwork, one meta-artifact. It's just exciting.
As my agent, Russell Galen, put it, "Whenever a Hollywood film adaptation of a book works, it is always a miracle." Because it just cannot really happen. It did happen with The Man Who Fell to Earth and it has happened with Blade Runner, I'm sure now.
TZ: It's great to hear that.
Dick: Oh, yeah. It's been the greatest thing for me. I was just destroyed at one point at the prospect of this awful thing that had happened to my work. I wouldn't go up there, I wouldn't talk to them, I wouldn't meet Ridley Scott. I was supposed to be wined and dined and everything, and I wouldn't go, I just wouldn't go. There was bad blood between us.
That David W. Peoples screenplay changed by attitude. He had been working on the third Star Wars film, Revenge of the Jedi. The Blade Runner people hired him away temporarily to do the script by showing him my novel
I'm now working very closely with the Ladd Company and, I'm on very good terms with them. In fact, that's one of the things that's worn me out. I've been so amped-up over Blade Runner I couldn't work on The Owl in Daylight.
I hear the film's going to have an old-fashioned gala premiere. It means I've got to buy -- or rent -- a black tuxedo, which I don't look forward to. That's not my style. I'm happier in a T-shirt.