Rubber Dickie

Sorry about that title, the significance of which will become apparent shortly. I saw this still from the new George Clooney movie Syriana about three times before I realized it was George himself. What struck me next was just how much George, with a few extra pounds and a salt-and-pepper beard, looks like...Philip K. Dick. It then occurred to me that, in a funny way, George is well situated to make a fantasy project of mine - a biopic of Phil Dick, that would probably intertwine elements of his autobiographical alternate history novel Radio Free Albemuth.

The political slant of RFA would superficially appeal to George - a dystopian America in which a Nixonesque thug becomes President and turns the country into a police state, the kind George already thinks it is. For reasons touched on elsewhere, Dick is able to turn this material into a masterpiece, a million miles from the dreary moonbat propaganda it might otherwise be. But as George reads into the book, he might find reasons to lose interest: Dick makes rather too much fun of Berkeley radical culture, and arrives at the conclusion that left-wing fascism and right-wing fascism are indistinguishable. Still, that's what script doctors are for.

The notion of a biography that blurs fantasy and reality is territory that George is already familiar with, in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, his biopic of Gong Show host Chuck Barris. In fact, the whole idea is very Phildickian - Phil's life story gets optioned by a big Hollywood star, and is turned into an unrecognizable fantasy. Just as, at the end of RFA, Dick's sci-fi novels are being re-written as pro-government tracts while he languishes in a labour camp.

Even stranger, but still true to the Dickian worldview, is this. (And checkout the name of the Animation team leader - Frankenburger. A perfect PKD joke).