Once in a while there’s a concept so exceptional that everyone wants to incorporate it into a feature film, so you’ll see Deep Impact vs. Armageddon, or Volcano vs. Dante’s Peak. Needless to say, nobody wins. But at this particular moment in time, everybody loves Dick.
No, not the collective penis, which no doubt has its audience, but sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, whose works have been adapted into such films as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and, um, Paycheck and Screamers. As Devin recently reported, Bill Pullman is planning to portray the writer in an indie directed by 80s pop singer Matthew Wilder.
And now divinely handsome thespian Paul Giamatti is making plans to do the same, in an as-yet-untitled Dick biopic, which will be handled by his new production company Touchy Feely Films. Giamatti already has experience wearing other people’s pants (Harvey Pekar, Bob Zmuda, Pig Vomit), and his take on the material will be a “nontraditional” approach that weaves elements of duality-obsessed Dick’s unstable existence with his often bizarro and occasionally impenetrable fiction (including his unfinished book The Owl in Daylight), and thus will be penned by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas screenwriter Tony Grisoni.
You gotta hand it to Giamatti – he may not have saved the world from aliens (yet) like Pullman, but a guy who can deliver Oscar-worthy performances while also doing stuff like Amazing Screw-On Head and Shoot ‘Em Up demands a degree of geek respect.