Philip K. Dick
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- Dolan
People complain about how the music business screws people? Read this and check the chart at the bottom for how much the author made from his stories vs. the movies based on them.
- GreedoLives0
You do realize you could buy a house for $6,000 in 1953, right?
- sputnik0
sickening
- Dolan0
Yes, professor --- but as you'll see his total compensation is less than $2500 ... compared with +$300,000,000. Which I think would be considered getting fucked even allowing for adjusting for inflation.
- GreedoLives0
Well, thanks to the new copyright laws, a better question would be "how much is his estate raking in for these movies"?
I bet his grandkids aren't going hungry.
- Mimio0
Should have got an agent that knew how to sell film options.
- loudubs0
well, thats true, if he was a m ore "stable" writer, he probably could've worked something out so that Kubrick or someone worthy of adapting his work would be interested. Not that Ridley Scott failed him, but for as great as Blade Runner is, it still doesn't capture the true essence of his stories. I think Total Recall (also not the worst) set the standard for adapting Dick as a proto-Matrix/post-Matrix action film commodity. He did write a lot of hard boiled, tough guy goes metaphysical stories, but these are the least challenging for the actor and director (ie. minority report, screamers, ben affleck...)
- loudubs0
as yes, Existenz was the closest and, ironically, it is the "thinking man's Matrix".
- tc_fisher0
that chart is annoying because it's apples and oranges.
i'm sure chuck palahniuk payout, juxtaposed to his books-to-movies box office receipts would have similar stats. it's not like they paid palahniuk, a then no name author, millions for his book fight club... (i'm sure the points on the back end has evened it out for him... plus the countless reprints and residules from overseas sales, which pkd never saw for any of this books or short stories or novellas)
the ones to blame for all of this are the publishing houses and the great divide between fiction and science fiction.
there is a reason why kurt vonneguet never called himself a sf writer yet most of his books have sf themes throughout. the reason being at that time, science fiction was thought about as kid fodder. little space books with robots. and they treated their writers like they treated their supposed audience. paying them little to make quite a bit of cake off of 'em.
you also have to take into account that pkd didn't write his books in a day or two.
that six grand? strech that over a couple of years. or five. or the ten years it took to write man in the high castle.
doubleday gave pkd three grand to write a scanner darkly. it took him three years... when he was finished, not only did they sell it as a sf book, they also sold it as a mainstream novel, a fiction novel. fiction writers of the time made many times the amount of sf authors...
and the copyright laws haven't changed... it's the same shit different assholes at the top.
but really, say phil dick made what he should have. make him a milionare, whatever. if that were to happen, the pkd cannon, i feel would not be as good. most of his books, minus the space and robots and rocket sci-fi stories are, more or less stories that happened to him or around him.
he lived in a paranoid world, a fucked up family life, rarely a dime on him. and he like speed. a lot.
money changes people and their perceptions. it could have changed dick if he got any.
i wonder what kind of stories we would have got from a properly paid philip k dick?
would Ubik just be about an aerosol can of hairspray? would a scanner darkly be about an FBI agent that helps people? or man in the high castle just a retelling of WWII?
- vena0
i blam hack "news" reporters that withhold information to make their point.