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Last week we fea­tured stu­dio-exec­u­tive notes on Blade Run­ner. “This movie gets worse every screen­ing,” they said. “Dead­ly dull,”  they said. “More tits,” they said. These remarks now offer some­thing in the way of irony and enter­tain­ment, but they only give even the most avid Blade Run­ner enthu­si­ast so much to think about. For a more inter­est­ing reac­tion, and cer­tain­ly a more artic­u­late one, we should turn to Philip K. Dick, the pro­lif­ic writer of psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly inven­tive sci­ence fic­tion whose Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep? pro­vid­ed Blade Run­ner’s source mate­r­i­al. Dick, alas, would not live to see the film open in the­aters, much less ascend to the top of the canon of sci-fi cin­e­ma decades lat­er, but he did get a good look, before mov­ing on to oth­er realms, at the script and some of the footage. With just those, he man­aged to out­guess every­one — audi­ences, crit­ics, and espe­cial­ly stu­dio exec­u­tives — about the film’s fate.

“This indeed is not sci­ence fic­tion,” Dick wrote in a let­ter avail­able on his offi­cial site. “It is not fan­ta­sy; it is exact­ly what [star] Har­ri­son [Ford] said: futur­ism. The impact of Blade Run­ner is sim­ply going to be over­whelm­ing, both on the pub­lic and on cre­ative peo­ple — and, I believe, on sci­ence fic­tion as a field. [ … ] Noth­ing we have done, indi­vid­u­al­ly or col­lec­tive­ly, match­es Blade Run­ner. This is not escapism; it is super real­ism, so grit­ty and detailed and authen­tic and god­dam con­vinc­ing that, well, after the seg­ment I found my nor­mal present-day ‘real­i­ty’ pal­lid by com­par­i­son.” 32 years on, many of us fre­quent Blade Run­ner-watch­ers feel just the same way, and Dick wrote that after catch­ing noth­ing more than a seg­ment about the pic­ture on the news. “It was my own inte­ri­or world,” he lat­er told inter­view John Boon­stra. “They caught it per­fect­ly.” And, at this point, all of our inte­ri­or worlds look a lit­tle more Blade Run­ner-esque.

H/T to Mar­i­anne for the lead on the PKD let­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

The Mak­ing of Blade Run­ner

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Grow­ing up, I did­n’t think about all the indi­vid­ual qual­i­ties that make a great movie. I just thought of Blade Run­ner. What­ev­er Rid­ley Scot­t’s 1982 adap­ta­tion of Philip K. Dick­’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep had, it made for high cin­e­mat­ic qual­i­ty indeed. As naive as it sounds, it does­n’t fall much short of mod­ern crit­i­cal and tar­get-audi­ence con­sen­sus. Visu­al­ly, intel­lec­tu­al­ly, and tech­ni­cal­ly, Blade Run­ner has endured the decades almost effort­less­ly; how many oth­er tales of humans real and arti­fi­cial in a dystopi­an future mega­lopo­lis can you say the same about, at least with a straight face? Yet back in the ear­ly eight­ies, you would have had to call the pic­ture, which opened to a week­end of only $6.15 mil­lion in tick­et sales against its $28 mil­lion bud­get, a flop. Nor could crit­ics come up with much praise: “A waste of time,” said Gene Siskel of Siskel & Ebert. (“I have nev­er quite embraced Blade Run­ner,” Ebert wrote 25 years lat­er, “but now it is time to cave in and admit it to the canon.”)

Have a look at the sheet of screen­ing notes above (or click here to view a larg­er image), and you’ll find that even the stu­dio exec­u­tives did­n’t like the movie. Some Blade Run­ner fans blame the poor ini­tial recep­tion on the cut that 1982’s crit­ics and audi­ences saw, which dif­fers con­sid­er­ably from the ver­sion so many of us revere today. They cite in par­tic­u­lar a series of dead­en­ing­ly explana­to­ry voice-overs per­formed after the fact by star Har­ri­son Ford, which sounds like a clas­sic demand by philis­tine “suits” in charge until you read the notes from one exec­u­tive referred to as J.P.: “Voice over dry and monot­o­ne,” “This voice over is ter­ri­ble,” “Why is this voice over track so ter­ri­ble.” And under “gen­er­al com­ments”: “Voice over is an insult.” But with the offend­ing track­’s removal, the replace­ment of cer­tain shots, tweaks in the plot, and the sim­ple full­ness of time, Blade Run­ner has gone from one of the least respect­ed sci­ence fic­tion films to one of the most. Yet part of me won­ders if some of those high­er-ups in the screen­ing ever made peace with it. A cer­tain A.L., for instance, makes the four­teenth point, and adamant­ly: “They have to put more tits into the Zho­ra dress­ing room scene.”

via Neatora­ma

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mak­ing of Blade Run­ner

Blade Run­ner is a Waste of Time: Siskel & Ebert in 1982

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

Blade Run­ner: The Final, Final Cut of the Cult Clas­sic

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.