Shooting science fiction on a low budget

By Sheidon Teitelbaum

Two weeks before he was stated to direct his first feature, THE TROUBLE WITH DICK, Gary Walkow found himself with the proverbia! curtain coming down around his ears. His star was backing out because he thought that the film would look “cheesy,” in the unlikely event that it was ever actually completed. And he still hadn't found a house to shoot it in

ironically, Walkow, a 33 yearold Texan who had worked as an editor, screenwriter and music-video director, had left littie else to chance. Preproduc tion for this simple saga of a science fiction writer undone by astalied career and a difficult living arrangement with three women had lasted four months Every scene had been storyboarded, each optical and camera angie painstakingly plotted. And suddenly Walkow found himself bereft of two pivotal elements in a production already pared down to a minimal level of complexity

Walkow’s casting director Susan Young, fresh froma seven-year stint with Norman Lear, came to the rescue. She called in actor Tom Villard, who had appeared in small parts in the TV series, WE GOT IT MADE and later landed a part in Eastwood's HEARTBREAK RIDGE. Young also scored a coup by bagging actress Susan Dey for the role of the writer's girlfriend

With his cast squared away the matter of finding a house came to the fore. Walkow had designed the film to locations, the writer's house (needed for the bulk of filming) and a desert locale for brief science fiction scenes of the writer's fictional character, With the help of a cooperative real estate agent, Walkow found his dream house in Monrovia. The house had one hitch. The wallpaper was hideous. And so. a week before shooting, Walkow and crew set about steaming it off and repainting the interior, a service which, he said, contributed to the agent's ability to sell the place

Walkow’s film has been shown by the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and at numerous film festivais (it premiered in January, 1987 at the United States Film Festival in Park City Utah, where it copped the grand prize). Walkow said he always wanted to make a film about a writer. When asked why he picked a science fiction writer Watlkow just pointed toa bookshelf in his small apartment in Santa Monica, lined with what appeared to be the complete works of Philip K. Dick

Walkow stressed that he did not set out to make a movie about the late Philip Kendred Dick, whose work served as the basis of BLADERUNNER, although references to him abound in the film. Walkow has also optioned Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon for filming.

"A friend of mine told me after seeing THE TROUBLE WITH DICK that the desert sequence was what had been left out of BLADERUNNER," he said.

Walkow fashioned his film around a science fiction writer who is afraid to go outside. "That was a natural way of keeping the scope limited," he said. "I knew that if I wanted to make any movie at all, it would have to be the simplest concept imaginable and the lowest budget—something with basically four people and a house."

Walkow raised money for the film from relatives and friends and developed its story with college chum Paul Freedman. Walkow wrote the script himself—all seven drafts. To produce the film Walkow formed a partnership with Robert Augur, an art supply importer and art director for rock videos, who became the movie’s executive producer.

THE TROUBLE WITH DICK looks as good as it does because Walkow was able not only to come up with SAG members willing to take a chance on him, but because his crew was first-rate, He said he interviewed about 100 people before settling on Albert Barosso as his line producer. “There are thousands of people in L.A. who are willing to work on a feature,” said Walkow. “They’ll work almost for free, especially if it’s not an exploitation film.”

Shooting for THE TROUBLE WITH DICK began in mid-October, 1985 and lasted six weeks. The schedule allowed for five weeks to shoot the house scenes, a week off for Thanksgiving, and then a week to shoot the desert fantasy sequences. During the week off, Walkow and crew worked on second-unit shots. “I calculated 33 days of first unit photography and eight or nine days of second unit,” said Walkow about the tight schedule.

Walkow said he had hired someone who had worked with makeup wizard Rick Baker to do his off-camera special effects, but said the man was a “prima donna,” and was fired within a week. “He kept proposing million-dollar aliens we had no money to make,” said Walkow.

James Zarlengo, Walkow’s dolly-grip, took over. Walkow said his entire crew revelled in taking new jobs as the need developed. Zarlengo is a lawyer who had a background in animation. He not only helped with some legal questions but delivered the film’s aliens and its talking zap gun.

“The guy is an inventor, a tinkerer,” explained Walkow. “He told me he could deliver a gun like I had never seen before. We called it a chrono-blaster, made from an old chair leg, bike parts and friendly plastic. The headphones I stole from a plane.” The sentient rifle-cum-navigation guide was eventually equipped with a voice by sound designer George Budd, who went on to work on the sound of STAR TREK IV. “He did that using the same process he had used on 2010: ODYSSEY II,” said Walkow. “He used a live actress and treated her voice electronically.”

Walkow said that careful planning compensated for the production’s niggling effects budget. He had wanted to cast his desert sequences in a green hue, with the skies green as well. “I’ve heard of big-budget SF movies running into insurmountable problems while trying to manage the same effect,” he said. But by restricting the number of shots in which the sky was visible, Walkow and visual effects supervisor Les Bernstein managed to turn the desert into a sufficiently alien environment. “If it hadn’t been coordinated right,” he said, “we would have needed a travelling matte, which we could never have afforded.”

Walkow did invest in a number of impressive opticals, particularly the movie’s 2001-style opening planetary vista and its closing “beam me up” shot. He said that because he was judicious in their use, it gave them greater impact.

Walkow and production designers Eric Jones and Pui-Pui Li fashioned the film’s force-field with a number of sono-tubes they brought out to the desert. These tubes, used for pouring concrete, seemed to stretch off to the horizon and, conceivably, around the planet. The power field effect was created by Bernstein and his partner, Kurt Zendler, using rotoscoping and animation. “The desert shoot was very intense,” Walkow said, “mainly because we didn’t account for the short shooting days forced on us by the lack of sunlight. We had an effects sequence scheduled every day—the flying fish-bird, the eel, the force field. It got to be a real nightmare.”

The beam-up sequence for THE TROUBLE WITH DICK, using sono-tubes made for pouring concrete to represent the force field stretching around the prison planet.

Tom Villard as Dick, the hallucinating science fiction writer who gets caught up in the fantasy of one of his own stories.

Director Gary Walkow’s comic book promotional campaign tor the film.

Filming Lars (David Ciennon) in his battle with an alien “tying fish” (inset) using a camera trapeze rigged by Robert Augur and Jim Zartengo to give a bird's-eye-view of the atiack The tail rudder was added to give the Arri S camera in use a smooth flight.

Charlie Mullin and Robert Augur prepare a low-budget desert creature

Comic book view of what it’s like to write science fiction

THE TROUBLE WITH Dick

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a ee ee et by Sheldon Teitelbaum

The trouble with THE TROU- BLE WITH DICK is that it’s a good movie about the wrong Dick. The Dick in this picture, Dick Kendred (Tom Villard), isa science fiction writer who expeences a nervous breakdown brought on, in part, by cheesy editors and by an impossible living arrangement with a dilettante divorcee landlord, her Lolita-like daughter and a former girlfriend

But despite a liberal peppering of references to the late, great Philip Kendred Dick, this film clearly isn't about him at all. And though you can't fault director Gary Walkow for creating a protagonist of his own or for paying homage to a writer who got little enough of it while he lived, it’s hard not to see this picture, despite its obvious charm and craft, as a missed Opportunity

And make no mistake this movie oozes with charm no mean feat with this kind of subject. The film sets up it sources of conflict quickly and easily, And both Villard and Susan Dey make you care about the outcome. THE TROUBLE WITH DICK maintains a good-humoredness throughout, and is sometimes very funny

A case in point is Jack Carter as SF editor Samsa, who tells Dick he wants “something different but also the same.” He then breaks off the conversation to take a call from Sri Lanka. “Hello, Arthur,” he says. “We have a bad connection.” You cither get the joke or you shouldnt be watching this movie. But on the other hand, the film isnt likely to score big points with SF writers despite the movie's obvious cinematic merits, which are primarily solid acting and high production values.

If you're going to make a film about an SF writer's bout with madness, Philip Dick is your man Accounts of his last years suggest that by the time Dick was wnting his final novels, his grasp of reality had become as tenuous as that of the characters he had fashioned This was a man who not only spoke with God — he featured him in one of his novels

Barry Malzberg’s essay collection, The Engines of the Night describes at some Icngth the vile existence of the SF writer prior to this, for some, inordinately lucrative decade. Not that long ago, Malvberg recalled, the average SF writer could expect to make about $5000 a novel, Or perhaps Scentsa word top rate in one of the magazines, He could anticipate being ignored by the critics, disdained or exploited by academics, and hung out to dry by editors and publishers. This state of affairs. said Malzberg. killed some, crazed others, and made the survivors an insufferably prickly lot

1 digress because Malzberg's book clearly documents the manifold pressures facing the people who write SF for a living. Yet the writer in Walkow’s film, this sweet-faced Dick Kendred (1 defy anyone to skim the pages of The Faces of Science Fictionand come up with even a pair of sweet faces). is pushed over the edge by a menage a quatre that is about as likely an event in the lite of a struggling SF writeras winninga million-dollar contract on the first outing

Put simply, with a world of real problems to pick from, why bother with silly ones. There is a moment in this movie where a pre- L. A. LAW, post-PARTRIDGE FAMILY Susan Dey asks a troubled Dick what's brought on his breakdown. “Pressure,” he replies, But he can't say what kind of pressure, There is good reason for this. If the script isn't straight about what's troubling Dick, how can Dick be?

We know that Dick’s career has gone into a stall. We know that he'd like to resume his relationship with Dey, And we know that both ambitions have been thwarted by his sexual involvement with Mom and daughter Dibble. But are such pressures sufficient to kick off bouts of hallucination and free-association in an otherwise normal human being?

The thing is, of course, Dick isn't normal to begin with. We know that because the film starts with a shot of Dick's lithium prescription. In other words, it’s not that the life of a science fiction writer makes you nuts, This movie says that people who are unstable to begin with gravitate toward the genre. In many instances both axioms are probably truce. But neither are explored here in any depth

Walkow peppers the film with Dick's hallucinatory visions of one of his own fictional characters, prison-planect convict Lars Shrike (David Clennon), who is attempting to escape his captors and “beam” himself clsewhere Shrike gets his cye gouged out bya fishbird, his leg gnawed by a burrowing serpent, and his chatty zap gun goes on the blink. In the end Shrike escapes in glittering transcendence. Technically, Walkow does very well with this part of the film. But although it issupposed to mirror Dick's real-life predicament, it is too removed from anything real (in marked contrast to much recent print SF) to serve as serious commentary on anything at all, save the apparent inanity of what can justifiably be called sci-fi In fact, after reading Dick's story, those are precisely Dey’s comments in the film

Director Gary Walkow and one of the flim’s low-budget planet creatures.

David Clennon as Lars, the author's derring-do science fictional alter ego.