Philip K. Dick is one of the most important and influential science fiction authors of all time, having written masterpieces like The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and the novels that inspired the movies Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and more. Dick was also a very troubled man who suffered from drug abuse, hallucinations, a suicide attempt, and many other psychological ailments. Now the author’s tumultuous real life will get its own movie.
Based on a biography of the same name written by Paul Williams, who managed Dick’s literary estate after the author passed away in 1982, Only Apparently Real will be centered around an event in 1971, where Dick returned to his home and discovered his safe had been opened and the personal papers in it were missing. While it was initially investigated as a robbery, the police began to suspect Dick did it himself for unknown reasons. Either way, the culprit was never caught, and Dick wrote this about the event the next year:
“…the vast robbery and looting of my house a year ago in San Rafael, which caused me to move out of the United States while I thought it over. I came home one evening and found rubble and ruin, my locked files blown open, papers of every sort gone, stereo gone, virtually everything gone, windows and doors smashed. To this day I don’t know who did it. Robbery was not the motive; too many valueless items were taken, too much care to take correspondence and business records… the police to a certain extant [sic] favoured the theory that I had done it myself. I didn’t. I to a certain extant [sic] favoured the theory that they had done it…”
The film version has no director yet, but it will be produced by John Shestack (Air Force One, Waiting…). However, the Hollywood Reporter says “The project is being financed through a blockchain-based DAO,” so perhaps we don’t need to hold our collective breath.
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