Dystopia by firelight
Pre-production
The irony is that Philip K. Dick never got to see Blade Runner. Dick was one of the most prolific and brilliant of science fiction writers. His work is thoroughly paranoid and simultaneously witty and frightening, filled with slips of reality that are often only imperfectly repaired by story’s end. In his earlier career, following unsuccessful attempts to succeed in the mainstream literary market, Dick began turning out pulpy science fiction tales in which different levels of reality continuously bumped up against each other, with a hapless protagonist struggling in the spaces between. A hallucinatory quality began to pervade the novels, and discussions of (and evocations of) psychosis and schizophrenic breakdown became increasingly prominent. Androids, mass media and religion all produced false realities, worlds of appearance that began to fall apart along with the minds of the protagonists. Drugs and psychosis, which both had their place in Dick’s history, were frequently conduits to another reality, perhaps more real and perhaps not.
After decades of labour, Dick had achieved significant critical, if not financial, success in the United States – even more in France. His agent had sold the rights to his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1974, but nothing was ever produced. As early as 1969, Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese (who would collaborate in 1993 on The Age of Innocence) expressed interest, but the project got no further. In the mid-1970s, Dick himself flirted with cinema, adapting his superb novel UBIK into a screenplay for Godard’s sometime collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin. The screenplay was good too. Dick considered his new medium carefully: he wanted his film to end by regressing to flickering black and white silent footage, finally bubbling and burning to a halt. Once more, the project remained unproduced.
At about the same time, another writer began to wrestle with Androids, trying to fashion a screenplay from its diverse materials. Hampton Fancher was an actor and independent film-maker who aspired to produce for Hollywood. He was attracted by the novel’s saturated air of paranoia and also, not incidentally, by its potential as an urban action film. The novel was optioned for Fancher by the actor Brian Kelly, and Kelly approached producer Michael Deeley, who was intrigued by the book, but not by its cinematic potential. Deeley suggested that a screenplay be prepared, and Fancher found himself, reluctantly, tagged as writer. The initial draft was completed in 1978, and Deeley began to shop it around.
Deeley had worked as an editor on The Adventures of Robin Hood, a television series produced in Britain, and first worked as a producer on The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn (1956), a stilted but occasionally inspired piece of Goonery with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. By the time Kelly and Fancher approached him, he’d gained some experience with science fiction, having produced The Wicker Man (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Deeley had headed British Lion and Thorn-EMI, and also produced Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon (1976) and Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978). His major critical success came with Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, which received the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1978.
Deeley approached Ridley Scott, a former set-designer for the BBC who had directed episodes of Z-Cars and other programmes for British television before producing hundreds of commercials, many strikingly stylish. His first feature was The Duellists (1977), an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story, and a very effective blend of naturalistic and stylised elements. His next work, Alien, was in post-production: it would turn out to be a charged telling of a familiar story. Already Scott’s hallmark was a visual density that revealed as much as, or more than, the script. The characters inhabited complex worlds that provided oblique contexts for their decisions and actions. There could be, in Scott’s best work, no psychology without an accompanying sociology, no individual in isolation.
At first, however, Scott declined the project. He was committed to a number of large-scale assignments, including Dune (1984) for Dino de Laurentiis (David Lynch finally directed Dune which, despite its strengths, is a case-study in how not to adapt a popular science fiction novel), and was understandably resistant to being typecast as a science fiction director. But personal difficulties led him back to Blade Runner, a project that he hoped to begin immediately, although it would be fully a year before shooting could commence. Scott joined the production in late February 1980.
As all this was going on, Star Wars was released. Before its appearance, science fiction was not a commercially viable Hollywood genre. The lively matinees of the 1950s were the stuff of the past, and science fiction cinema in the 1960s and 70s had provided a mix of modernist obscurity (Alphaville, 1965, 2001, Solaris, 1972, The Man Who Fell to Earth) and Saturday-afternoon dystopianism (Soylent Green, 1983, Logan’s Run, 1976, Westworld, 1973). The expansionism that once almost defined the genre had yielded to collapse, implosion and the overwhelming sense of a future of exhausted possibility.
Dystopia by firelight
Star Wars opened in May 1977 and quickly became one of the most popular films in Hollywood history. While its initial success was predicted by no one, the history of this saga exemplified the strategies of the post-classical Hollywood film industry. In 1975, Jaws had remade the marketing wisdom of Hollywood by finding and exploiting a summer audience with uncanny dexterity. Star Wars reaped the benefits of this new cinematic season. Its combination of old-fashioned romantic swashbuckling and new computer-driven camera effects proved irresistible to older and younger audiences alike, while its innate gentleness was acceptable to mainstream audiences of both genders. George Lucas had produced a futuristic film steeped in not-so-subtle nostalgia – for Hollywood adventure, for science fiction’s expansiveness, and for a future reassuringly set ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’. The film’s success, along with that of Steven Spielberg’s gargantuan, sentimental Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), established the centrality of science fiction as a Hollywood genre. Technically innovative but ultimately (very) reassuring and familiar, these were canny blends. (The combination of narrative conservatism and technical wizardry had predecessors at other points in Hollywood history, most evidently at the Disney studio in the late 1930s and early 1940s.) Budgets for science fiction films were increased accordingly.
Blade Runner was to be produced through a small company, Filmways Pictures, at a fairly limited budget of $13 million. But before principal photography could begin, the script needed to be reworked. Repeatedly. Fancher ultimately produced eight separate drafts, closely supervised by the director. Scott told him to begin thinking about what lay outside the windows; about what constituted the world of the film. When Fancher admitted that he hadn’t yet considered these elements, Scott told him to look at Metal Hurlant, a rather lavishly produced French comics magazine (published in English as Heavy Metal) that had attracted some of the form’s most innovative creators. Heavy Metal artists produced visually dense science fiction fantasies with baroque designs, airbrushed colour and elaborate linework, as well as highly exaggerated scenes of violence and sex. The aesthetic of Blade Runner derives heavily from a number of these creators: Moebius’s compacted urbanism, Philippe Druillet’s saturated darkness and Angus McKie’s scalar exaggerations come easily to mind.
Disagreements between Fancher and Scott were multiplying, however. While Scott continued to elaborate on the atmospheric world outside the windows, he was also winnowing down the complexity of the story, and Fancher was resisting. With the start of shooting only two months away another writer, David Peoples, was hired to complete the script. Peoples was an editor and aspiring screenwriter: he had edited the Oscar-winning 1977 documentary Who Are the Debolts? (And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?), co-written and co-edited The Day After Trinity in 1980, and would later script Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). Peoples said that ‘Ridley was sort of heading toward the spirit of Chinatown. Something more mysterious and foreboding and threatening.’14 The actual shooting script was an amalgam of Fancher’s work, Peoples’s December 1980 rewrite and a later partial rewrite by Fancher. Peoples has been credited with tightening the mystery aspects of the screenplay and deepening the humanity of the android adversaries, now known as replicants.
The headlong imaginings of Moebius in Heavy Metal
Scott, revealing an awareness of the textures of science fiction, had been toying with the role of language in his strange new world. He wanted to find new names for the protagonist’s profession as well as his targets – detective, bounty hunter and androids were overly familiar terms, no longer evocative enough. Fancher, rummaging through his library, found William Burroughs’s Blade Runner: A Movie, which was a reworking of an Alan E. Nourse novel about smugglers of medical supplies (‘blade runner’ also sounds a lot like ‘bounty hunter’, Deckard’s profession in the novel). The rights to the title were purchased from Burroughs and Nourse. ‘Replicant’ was the contribution of Peoples, whose microbiologist daughter suggested some variation on ‘replication’. The substitution of unexplained terms such as ‘blade runner’ and ‘replicant’ for more familiar ones was typical of Scott’s approach, which was rooted in an intriguing combination of the specific and the suggestive.
As the script was being finalised in December 1980, Filmways balked at the expense and withdrew from the project. Over the next two weeks, Michael Deeley managed to put together a new financing arrangement. There would be three participants, providing an initial total budget of $21.5 million (later raised to $28 million – up considerably from the original $13 million estimate). The Ladd Company put up $7.5 million through Warner Bros., which was granted the domestic distribution rights for the film; Sir Run Run Shaw put up the same amount in exchange for the foreign rights; and Tandem Productions, a company run by Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perechino, put up the remaining $7 million for the ancillary rights (television, video, etc.). Tandem also served as completion bond guarantors for Blade Runner, which gave them the right to take over the picture if it went over budget by 10 per cent.15
The Look of the Future
Alien must have been tremendously valuable preparation for Blade Runner. While its story was filled with horror film clichés that existed uncomfortably within the high-technology spaceship settings, the design of the film raised it to another level of importance. Scott divided the design responsibilities, so that H.R. Giger, for example, was only responsible for the design of the alien beings and artifacts. Meanwhile, the spaceship-tugboat Nostromo, with a vast ore-processing factory in tow, was a masterpiece of corridors and cluttered lived-in spaces, and Scott’s hand-held cameras and use of available light gave the film an almost documentary-like authority. The design and casting of Alien raised issues pertaining to race, class and gender, most of which were only briefly suggested by the film’s script. The environment of the film became its most potent site of meaning, even before the appearance of Giger’s stunningly complex alien creature. Alongside the film’s unlikely narrative events, Scott succeeded in creating a masterfully plausible and nuanced space.
The spaceship as factory, drifting in the voids of interstellar space, recalls the Pequod of Moby Dick, which in Melville’s hands became a foundry, an infernal intrusion of culture into the natural environment.16 The comparison is further justified by the aesthetic of Blade Runner, with its city that resembles nothing so much as a vast, boundless refinery, and its world that no longer contains any trace of nature.
Ridley Scott has said that Blade Runner ‘is a film set forty years hence, made in the style of forty years ago’,17 and this combination informs everything from the narrative to the design and photography. The story borrows liberally from the private-eye genre, via the films noir of the 1940s and 50s. The voice-over narration (which was, in fact, always part of the conception but was less pervasive), the alienated hero with a questionable moral compass, the femme fatale, the Los Angeles setting, the movement from high-class penthouses to lower-class dives: all of these are familiar – indeed, overfamiliar – trappings of noir. Dick was openly upset with Fancher’s drafts, and had good reason to complain of ‘the old cliché-ridden Chandleresque figure’ at the centre of the narrative (he called early versions ‘Philip Marlowe meets the Stepford Wives’).
Scott’s own artistic sensibilities were hugely important in the development of the project: he was capable of dashing off useful sketches that could guide writers, designers or storyboard artists. Michael Deeley and production designer Lawrence G. Paull, among others, have given Scott much of the credit for Blade Runner’s design. His future city was informed by a range of sources: engravings by Hogarth and paintings by Vermeer, photographs by Jacob Riis of New York’s Lower East Side, the urban nightdreams of Edward Hopper and the baroque visual science fiction of Heavy Metal. What was needed was some means of unifying these disparate visions, of shaping a future that was close enough to touch.
Syd Mead, a commercial and industrial designer as well as an ardent science fiction reader, was hired as Blade Runner’s ‘visual futurist’. Mead had been imagining things for decades, first for various American corporations, including Ford, US Steel and Sony, then as a freelance designer and illustrator. In his career he has designed automobiles, yachts, nightclubs and the interiors of privately owned jumbo jets. His first film work was designing the massive V’ger construct for 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (his model was photographed by Douglas Trumbull’s EEG unit). Blade Runner, however, offered something different: the opportunity to extrapolate a detailed future world that remained deeply rooted in lived, physical experience. ‘The essence of my work’, Mead has written, ‘is an involvement with the total scenario; the world of an idea made into an article and the translation of fantasy into visual fact.’18 Small wonder that the industrial designer of ‘total scenarios’ should become involved with the film director of ‘total environments’.
Bright lights, big city
Mead was only hired to produce designs for Blade Runner’s vehicles, and he tried to base these on his understanding of technology, socio-economic conditions and the personalities of the characters. His rich sketches with their futuristic settings, however, persuaded Scott to put Mead in charge of street scenes and interiors as well. Scott admired how Mead’s speculations remained grounded in plausible engineering principles; he provided the film with a disciplined, unifying visual imagination.19
The dominant strategy in designing Blade Runner’s future was ‘retrofitting’, which, according to Mead, ‘simply means upgrading old machinery or structures by slapping new add-ons to them’.20 The future, in other words, is a combination of the new and the very, very used, just like the present: the utopian fantasies of Things to Come (1936), with its gleaming new Everytown, are no longer economically, ecologically or politically supportable, even in dreams and fictions.
The major set for the film, nicknamed ‘Ridleyville’ during the production, was the New York Street at Burbank Studios; built in 1929, it had been the setting for numerous Warner Bros. crime films and noirs. Mead studied photographs of the site, and began adding on patches, ducts, rewirings, expansions, lights and grime. New detailing was laid over the backlot façades (Paul Sammon points out that the new setting was thus ‘retrofitted’ over an older one). The New York Street set was loaded with neon and the streets were filled with what the publicity notes called ‘a variety of mechanical stuff’. The ‘stuff’ was remarkable, even obsessive, but crucial: newsstands featured the latest issues (one assumes) of Krotch, Kill and MONI magazines; parking meters warned of lethal consequences for vandals; and video monitors, called ‘trafficators’, provided traffic information and directional signals.
Elaborate matte-paintings were also important to Blade Runner’s look by allowing further layers of retrofitting, such as the huge towers that loom above the city’s street scenes. They are especially evident outside Deckard’s apartment and in the rooftop battle between Deckard and Batty. Mead’s original designs served as guides for the finished paintings by Matthew Yuricich. Yuricich had been working on effects for decades, and his credits included the brilliant matte-work on Forbidden Planet (1956). The scene with Pris walking along a street was originally designed to include a high-angle shot revealing a multi-layered freeway system below her (as in urban science fiction comics by Moebius). Yuricich had done something similar in Forbidden Planet, including the use of a beam of light to focus attention on the diminutive, walking figure(s).21
The mixture of periods defines the film’s set design: futuristic hovercars, called ‘spinners’, travel through the city, while some retrofitted Plymouths and Cadillacs continue to cruise the streets. Costumes and hairstyles were also borrowed from earlier styles, helping to avoid the science fiction cliché of overly uniform clothing or hair. Rachael is the most evidently ‘1940s’, resembling an upscale Mildred Pierce when we first see her (Pauline Kael remarked that her shoulder entered the scene long before she did). Pris and Roy quote punk hairstyles, which Roy supplements with clothing of militaristic greys and blacks.
Special Effects
Special effects are an important part of cinema’s experiential dimension: they can bring the visual, auditory and even tactile and kinesthetic conditions of perception to the foreground of the viewer’s consciousness. Blade Runner’s sumptuous effects were produced by EEG (Entertainment Effects Group), a partnership between Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich (Matthew’s younger brother). The two had worked with Blade Runner’s associate producer Ivor Powell on 2001.
Trumbull’s work is especially interesting: he created the psychedelic Stargate effects for 2001 and the lovely lightships of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He also directed two features, Silent Running (1971) and Brainstorm (1983) while developing his 65mm, 60fps Showscan exhibition system. A Trumbull sequence is less the description of an object than the construction of an environment; this is especially apparent in Blade Runner’s gorgeous and monstrous Los Angeles. He has expressed dissatisfaction with the flatness of earlier effects work, which required cutaways to distract the audience: ‘I like the idea of creating some crazy illusion that looks so great that you can really hang on it like a big master shot of an epic landscape.’20 Trumbull’s effects are profound and contemplative, and in each film that features his work there is at least one sequence where the characters stare mutely at the marvels they behold. These spectacular fields – the Stargate, the Mothership, Los Angeles 2019 – testify to the sublimity of technology, an experience of its beauty infused with the anxiety that acknowledges its power. Trumbull’s sequences are different from most other effects work in that they reveal an ambivalence towards technology. They are neither celebratory nor condemning, but instead articulate a tension between uneasiness and identification as viewers try to assimilate the artificial infinities of his technological environments. These effects also testify to the beauty and terrifying power of the cinema, which is itself a technological marvel of vision.
After the disappointments of the Brainstorm production, Trumbull gave up on Hollywood, which was, he said, ‘multiplexing itself to death’, and began developing multimedia forms for theme parks and World’s Fairs. An attention to spectacle and exhibition connects Trumbull’s work to early cinema and pre-cinematic entertainment. Just as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century panoramas and dioramas once incorporated motion, lighting and sound effects, Trumbull has developed the ‘Ridefilm Theatre’, a simulator-theatre system with a fifteen-passenger motion base encompassed by a 180 degree spherically curved screen. High-resolution images are projected with synchronised movement to produce a strong sense of kinetic involvement in a complex technological space. The popularity of these simulation rides has provided him with new opportunities to experiment with experiential cinema. He is currently a vice-president of the IMAX Corporation, which has been experimenting with large format, 3-D film presentation. His work continues to be characterised by a strong sense of presence, enhanced by extensive subjective camera movement and visual immersion, whether in Cinerama or Showscan or simulators.
The effects budget for Blade Runner was originally $2 million for thirty-eight shots, later expanded to $3.5 million for a total of ninety separate shots. This was still a limited budget, and several scenes, notably an opening sequence of Deckard entering the city on a high-speed train, had to be jettisoned in the planning stage. Effects production for Blade Runner extended from March to December of 1981.23 Trumbull was involved only until about one-third of the way through principal photography, when his Brainstorm project (a film about a fantasied ‘total cinema’ that could record and play back sensory experience, emotions and memories) was finally given the go-ahead by MGM. After Trumbull’s departure, David Dryer took control of the special effects unit, with evident success (Trumbull continued to participate in a more supervisory capacity), but the finished film still bears Trumbull’s stylistic stamp. In addition, Trumbull’s characteristic production methods were used: the effects were first produced on 65mm stock for enhanced resolution, and then the footage was reduced to an anamorphic 35mm negative. Any live action scenes that would require the later addition of special effects were also shot in 65mm, in order to avoid the increased graininess that marked most pre-digital effects work. The integration of live action with effects had rarely been so effectively planned or executed.
Trumbull has enjoyed claiming that he was bored by the Blade Runner production because it required few technical innovations. But there were some challenges. The near-future setting put an increased emphasis on plausibility; atmospheric effects had to be carefully planned to provide the sense of smog, fog and gigantic scale upon which the look of the film would largely depend. Trumbull had designed a ‘smoke room’ (actually, vaporised low-grade diesel fuel), which was used extensively on Blade Runner to blur details and produce a sense of aerial perspective and distance. Smoke served multiple purposes in the film, enhancing the romantic, noir look of the city while summoning a general unhealthy haze and convincing perspective to the miniatures.
The Tyrell pyramids were constructed on an elaborate 8-foot deep model which included thousands of windows that could be illuminated from behind. The panoramic Los Angeles of the opening sequence was popularly known as the Hades set, for reasons that should be obvious. It was a miniature set, 18 feet long and 13 feet deep. The foreground buildings were three-dimensional miniatures, giving way to two-dimensional models nearer the background. The Hades set was constructed on a raised platform to permit lighting from below, and featured forced perspectives to exaggerate the sense of depth and compensate for optical distortions caused by the camera lens.
The Tyrell Corporation
To photograph the Hades set, Trumbull used his computer-controlled camera – the first – originally developed for Close Encounters.24 Such ‘motion-control’ cameras made it possible to reproduce camera movements with absolute precision by computing the changing relations between visual elements. Multiple ‘passes’ over and around each object and background element would supply separate pieces of film that could be composed into a seamlessly matched whole. In addition, the camera itself could become an active, gliding agent, fully interacting with the world onscreen.25
Much attention was paid to the spinners, the flying cars. Mead designed them with masses of jutting elements for the retrofitted look, many of which suggested their functions. They featured ‘twist-wrist’ hydraulic steering, gull-winged doors that opened vertically and internal lifting turbines. The interior sported an impressive set of read-outs, including one for an onboard computer and a sensor for reading traffic patterns. Miniatures were constructed on a variety of scales, depending upon the requirements of the shot: an 18-inch model was used for more distant camera setups, since it was more manoeuvrable than the 4-foot version. A full-sized model was used for the street scenes.26
An interesting technique was used for objects flying in depth, such as the spinners’ flight over Los Angeles in the first sequence. As the object receded into the distance, the exposure on it would be reduced and the matte photographed less clearly. As a result, the object became ‘contaminated’ by the background images; in other words, background and object would blur together slightly, as though the object was disappearing into a real distance instead of simply shrinking on the screen.
It is difficult to imagine Blade Runner without the exceptional cinematography of Jordan Cronenweth, who had previously worked with Robert Altman (Brewster McCloud, 1970), Jonathan Demme (Handle with Care, 1977; Stop Making Sense, 1984) and Ken Russell (Altered States, 1980); he would subsequently direct photography for Francis Ford Coppola (Peggy Sue Got Married, 1986; Gardens of Stone, 1987). The film’s noir conception needed to evoke romanticism and urban chaos, and the photography had to create a pervasive claustrophobia that would not overwhelm the audience.27 It also had to blend with the effects footage that Trumbull and Dryer were supervising.
Cronenweth’s characteristic method, especially on interiors, involved combining a soft frontlight (sometimes a soft uplight), with a hard backlight, creating intense silhouettes and haloes; the addition of smoke or reflective effects in the background further abstracted the space. The end results were crisp, even harsh, while remaining hazy and glamorous. The street scenes, on the other hand, were often shot with a hand-held camera, using the available light from Ridleyville’s dozens of neon signs (some of the neon had been used in Coppola’s One from the Heart, released in 1982). If more light was needed, more neon would be added to the set.28 These scenes are more jittery, and certainly more harsh. The street, after all, is where the replicant Zhora is killed, smashing through layers of plate-glass windows and crashing to the floor amid piles of anonymous mannequins.
Blade Runner’s city rejects boundaries between public and private. Beams of light strafe the innermost recesses of apartments and alleys. Cronenweth said that the lights were used ‘for both advertising and crime control, much the way a prison is monitored by moving search lights. The shafts of light represent invasion of privacy by a supervising force, a form of control. You are never sure who it is …’.29 Replicants are programmed with false memories, a further dissolution of personal space: even the private territories of the mind become vulnerable to attack.
Principal photography began on 9 March 1981, and was completed a long four months later, on 9 July. By all accounts, it was a nightmarish production. Hollywood was not entirely prepared for this British director’s autocratic style, and Scott was equally unprepared for the facts of life in unionised Hollywood. It should be understood, however, that a production of Blade Runner’s conceptual complexity required managing an overwhelming accumulation of details in the set construction, props, costuming and lighting, and further, that footage from the live shoot would need to be perfectly synchronised with the film produced by the effects team. Nevertheless, as the shoot proceeded, it became apparent that director and crew were not getting along, and neither was the director with his star, Harrison Ford, or Ford with Sean Young.
Meanwhile, the relationship with Tandem, which held a completion bond on the film, was uncomfortable almost from the start. Yorkin and Perechino (Lear was not involved with Blade Runner) had little confidence in the vision of the film’s creators, especially as the production fell increasingly behind schedule. Scott insisted on immediately reshooting the entire first two weeks of material, after deciding that the original footage was simply too dark. It’s also very possible that Tandem was beginning to realise that they had not funded an action-adventure of the order of Star Wars.30 The financial backers were increasingly upset about Scott’s on-set perfectionism, which revealed itself in seemingly endless retakes (Sammon writes that fifteen to twenty takes were the norm). By the end of shooting, the film was already $5 million over budget. On 11 July, according to the terms of their original agreement, Tandem stepped in to take over the production.
Artificial eyes
Preliminary owl sketches
The organisation’s first action was, essentially, to fire Scott and Deeley, although this was more along the lines of a technical notification than an actuality. Tandem did, however, begin to exercise significant and increasing control over the production. The screenings for the financiers were apparently depressed and depressing affairs: ‘This movie gets worse every screening,’ was one Tandem comment. In the eyes of the Tandem producers Blade Runner was morose and narratively muddled, but they were hardly interested in the expensive reshooting ideas that Scott and Deeley proposed.
Disastrous sneak previews in Dallas and Denver were held in early March 1982. The negative comments concentrated on narrative confusion, the film’s slow pace and the unresolved ending, in which an elevator door closes on the fleeing Deckard and Rachel. To resolve these problems, Tandem insisted on a number of changes, two of which effectively reshaped the entire experience of Blade Runner.
First, there was the addition of explanatory narration, an idea that had been part of Fancher’s earlier drafts, but was only minimally present in the filmed version. While the shooting script had largely jettisoned the voice-overs, it was always assumed that they might be restored later if needed. Three versions were recorded: the first was written by Daryl Ponicsan, and was considered ineffective. Peoples then constructed an amalgam of Fancher’s and his own lines. After the screenings for Tandem, Scott eliminated nearly all of the narration, except for Deckard’s response to Batty’s death. However, following the sneak previews, Bud Yorkin supervised a third attempt, this one written largely by television writer Roland Kibbee and recorded without Scott’s or Deeley’s participation. Persistent rumours have circulated that Harrison Ford, who had never liked the idea of the narration anyway, tried to sabotage this final recording with an impossibly flat delivery.
Pre-production artwork by Syd Mead
Tandem’s other major contribution to the reshaping of Blade Runner was the happy ending, in which Deckard and Rachael soar over surprisingly pristine landscapes (comprised of out-takes from Kubrick’s opening montage for The Shining, 1980) as Deckard informs us that Rachael, mysteriously, had no termination date. Again, as other writers have emphasised, this ending was anticipated by earlier versions of the script, but Scott’s increasing insistence on ambiguity (as well as very real time and budget difficulties) led him to prefer an ending in which Gaff’s line, ‘It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?’ would resonate with the audience as the credits rolled.
Responding to the Replicants
Blade Runner opened on 25 June 1982 throughout the United States. The initial response to the film could not have been entirely unexpected, but it was still grievously disappointing. Neither critics nor the public were prepared for the pensive darkness of the finished work. In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael admitted that ‘a visionary sci-fi movie that has its own look can’t be ignored’, but, she added, ‘If anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide.’31 Kael was not only sharper about the story’s shortcomings than any other critic (then or now), she also criticised the lack of sustained erotic tension with which a Sternberg or Nicolas Roeg would have invested the film’s dissipated decadence.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times found the film ‘muddled yet mesmerizing’, while Gene Siskel wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the film ‘looks terrific but is empty at its core’.32 Reviews in Time, Newsweek and The New Republic praised the complexity of the film’s aesthetics but maintained reservations about the narrative. Most critics missed an overtly humanist side to the film – a clear indication as to what being human was and what it meant. Blade Runner was not a film designed to provide straightforward answers to those questions. Its dehumanised world – the world that Scott and the production crew had laboured over – superficially blocked the very possibility of humanist survival, yet subtle signs of its existence echoed through the cacophony of the city.
Science fiction fans were not immediately any more perceptive, although they ultimately formed the core of the film’s emergent cult audience. Blade Runner shared nothing (other than the casting of Harrison Ford) with the affirmative, hugely kinetic adventures of Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones and the USS Enterprise. These works dichotomised good and evil and sent them into pitched battle. Blade Runner’s world was neither so certain nor so resolved: it offered a framework for doubt. On the other hand, for those viewers who had been awaiting another 2001 or Alphaville, Blade Runner made immediate sense as a serious attempt to explore the intricate surfaces of urban culture and exploit the visuality of science fiction.
The film’s opening weekend receipts totalled $6.15 million – not much for a wide release on 1,290 screens – and they dropped steadily from there.33 The final earnings on the film’s initial theatrical run were only about $14 million – or half of its production budget. Circumstances, however, were fortuitous for keeping Blade Runner before the public, and its audience continued to grow. As Paul Sammon has pointed out, ‘One of the sudden (and major) catalysts behind Blade Runner’s resurgence was the sudden, near-simultaneous expansion of the cable television and home video markets.’34 Faced with the disappointing box office, Warners pulled the film from distribution earlier than usual in order to broadcast it on its own Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Network. The film’s release on video also did well, not unusual in itself for a big-budget science fiction film, but it became one of the most rented tapes on the market. The usual science fiction cult discovered it, but the film’s density and complexity encouraged repeat viewings even among lay audiences. Another sign of the film’s emerging success came when Criterion released a high-priced laser-disk version with the widescreen ratio preserved and some supplemental materials: it was their top-selling disk for several years.
Sepia fashion
The audience continued to grow. In 1982, Cityspeak, the first fanzine dedicated to the film, appeared. The next year, Blade Runner was voted the Third Most Favourite Science Fiction Film of All Time (following Star Wars and 2001) at the World Science Fiction Convention. An anthology of scholarly writings on the film appeared in 1991, which included essays on the architecture, gender issues, genre issues and problems of textual adaptation. The film was also rapidly becoming a touchstone for writers on postmodern culture, and provocative work on the film was produced by such prominent cultural theorists as Guiliana Bruno, Andrew Ross, Kaja Silverman, Vivian Sobchack and Slavoj Žižek.35
Blade Runner Revised and Revisited: The Director’s Cut
Interest in the film was significantly boosted when Michael Arick, a film sound preservationist, found what he first thought was a rare 70mm print in the Todd-AO vaults. After a few months of effort he secured the print for the Warners archives, where it remained until a May 1990 screening at the Los Angeles Cineplex Odeon Fairfax Theatre, which was mounting a retrospective of 70mm prints. The Sunday morning screening was sold out, already attesting to growing popular interest, but the film shown that day was not the Blade Runner with which the world had become familiar. From the text of the opening crawling titles to the virtual absence of narration, to the way the story ended, significant differences existed throughout.
Know thy maker?
The print was screened for Ridley Scott, who recognised it as a workprint used for the Denver and Dallas sneak previews. The sound mix was crude and the Vangelis score was absent from the final reels, but Scott was delighted to find a print of the film that was closer to his original conception. Further screenings at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sold out well in advance, and enthusiasm for the alternative version was strong enough to tempt Warners into a ‘re-release’ of a restored print. A 35mm version of the workprint was shown to steadily building audiences at the NuArt Theatre in Los Angeles and the Castro in San Francisco, where it broke box-office records.
At that point, Arick, Warners and Scott were all interested in preparing a more official re-release, a ‘director’s cut’ of Blade Runner that would restore the film’s original, darker, vision. Unfortunately, Scott was not insistent enough, and Warners not willing enough on its own, to rework the film as fully as was first intended. Nevertheless, the banal narration was scrapped, in its entirety this time; the ambivalent original ending was restored; and the ‘unicorn reverie’ was inserted in one scene (a different version from the one first filmed, because the original footage was probably destroyed). The version as finally released also contained numerous sound continuity errors, footage that hadn’t been colour-corrected, and it lacked some of the more violent footage that had been part of the film’s original international release version. While known as the Director’s Cut, it was more of a compromise between the 1982 domestic release and the version originally envisioned by its director.
With the narration jettisoned, the film’s formal opulence became more pronounced. As Deckard approaches police headquarters, the viewer is now free to contemplate the cityspace with him: to see what can be seen through the rain-spattered windscreen; to make connections between the hovercar’s graphic displays and the real space through which it glides; ultimately, to read the space. Freed of the teleology of a narration that told more than it should, the viewer could become more fully engaged by Blade Runner’s elaborate scenography. Further, now that they could be heard, ambient sounds and advertising slogans (‘Helping America into the new world!’) enhanced the richness of the film’s sonic texture and provided an effective analogue to the film’s decentred scopic field.
The Director’s Cut was released in September 1992 to mark the tenth anniversary of the original release. With its grandeur restored to the scale of the big screen, Blade Runner was more gorgeous than ever, and audiences responded. Its opening weekend earned the highest per-screen revenues in the country, and the film continued to play in nearly one hundred cinemas a month later. This success continued in Europe, Japan and Australia. As Paul Sammon wrote, ‘Not bad for a film that was already a decade old. Or which had previously gained such wide exposure on cable TV, laser disk, and home video.’36 The reviews improved – William Kolb found that the film’s average ratings rose half a star! – but the film was now immune to mainstream critical opinion.
Blade Runner acquired a reputation for coldness, but it contained some surprising and satisfying moments of intimate, sensual detail: the blood that flows from Deckard’s wounded lip into his glass of vodka; Pris’s tongue protruding from her dead lips as Batty caresses it with his. The film feels languid, like the wind chimes heard in some scenes. The score by Vangelis, more tonal than melodic, evokes a poignant melancholia. Sometimes the film even seems to be taking place underwater: reflections play off the walls, liquid sounds are exaggerated and in the final battle water drips down the walls of the Bradbury Building. Batty dies in the rain, speaking of what he’s seen: ‘Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die.’
The impact of Blade Runner continues to be felt. There has been a continuing movement beyond the original boundaries of the text, with comic-book adaptations, a series of sequels and the discussion groups and websites that proliferate on the Internet. In 1996, Paul Sammon’s Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner appeared, and the British Film Institute included the film as part of its canon of important films (resulting in the present volume). Is it any wonder that the film continues to exist beyond itself? Its very style already promised infinite expansion.
The aesthetic of cyberpunk was almost defined by Blade Runner, although both were anticipated by the comics of Heavy Metal. They had other sources in common as well, including the influence of Electric Sheep’s author. Blade Runner stimulated the rediscovery of Philip K. Dick – perhaps this was its most significant effect. Ironically, Dick had been asked to write a novelisation of the film adaptation of his own novel, but he turned down this ‘opportunity’ and insisted instead upon the re-release of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel, appearing under the film’s title, has not been out of print since the film was released. Properties that had been optioned years earlier were put into production, resulting in Total Recall (1990) and Screamers (1995), based on Dick’s stories ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (1966) and ‘Second Variety’ (1953). Both played with themes of appearance versus reality, and both were adapted by Dan O’Bannon, who once worked with Moebius on a proto-cyberpunk thriller called The Long Tomorrow.
The Philip Dick renaissance continued with the republication of his complete short stories, and Vintage Books’s release of a handsome set of some of his best novels. Excerpts from Dick’s darkly paranoid journals, known as the Exegesis, have been edited and published by Lawrence Sutin, who also wrote a biography of the author. All of this, of course, came too late for Philip Dick. In 1982, shortly after enthusiastically approving an early cut of Blade Runner, he died of a massive heart attack.