Sonic Echo: 606 Sci Fi: We Can Remember it For You Wholesale

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Welcome to Sunday Showcase. The following audio drama is rated PG for parental guidance. The following audio drama is rated PG for parental guidance.

Welcome back to Sonic Echo, where this season we continue to explore the best science fiction of old-time radio drama, except... We're engaging in some time warp shenanigans and are going to be discussing a more modern audio drama. But before we get into all of that, I'm Lothar Tuppen, and let's bring in my co-host, Jeff Billard. How are you, Jeff? I should be on Mars, but I'm down here doing this podcast with you peds.

Excellent. And Jack Ward, how are you, Jack? Ah, you've colored your voice a lovely color today, Aaron Lothar. That's beautiful. I'm doing well. I'm so glad you said that. I had to listen to that like three times. Did you really just say that? Yeah, and when you think of the movie, what they did instead, which was interesting. Yes, and we'll get into all of the anatomical aspects of this film in just a little bit. The reason why I said film...

is because this has been remade into two versions of it, which is the Philip K. Dick story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which this is going to be the BBC. version from 1998 and the reason for this is that last month I said we were going to do a Philip K Dick show and I wanted to stay true to that but I listened to them and the only one that I think is worthwhile to really do is one that Jeff Billard has first right of refusal on called the defenders. And why would that be Jeff?

because we have a reimagining a recreation of it coming out on mutual in early july i guess i don't have the exact date but i'm excited literally two weeks from today two weeks from today We're recording on June 22nd for those people who are wondering and keeping numbers. I'm really pleased with the way it came out. I can't wait for people to hear it.

Cool. And yeah, so Jeff was directing that. So I didn't want to steal his thunder by doing that. But I still wanted to do a Philip K. Dick show because. Philip K. Dick is really important in science fiction and that we've talked about the sort of, you know, space fantasy, sort of space opera stuff, the aspirational sci-fi, even the dystopic. But Philip K. Dick is a slightly different almost a category into himself of what is reality? What is real? Who is the person?

what can you trust and what can you not trust from your own senses and things like that. And that's some of his major themes. And we'll see some of that in today's show, which again is.

We can remember it for you wholesale, which was aired on the BBC on April 6th of 1998. So it's a fairly new show. And it's also one similar to what we did last episode, where you're going to have to find it out on YouTube. In order to find that, I would go to YouTube and you would do a search for BBC. We can remember it for you wholesale by theater in the mind is the channel. And you'll know that you've got the right one when you see.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's face looking very odd and a bit pained. And the reason for that is because this was the story that was remade into both versions of the movie Total Recall.

As we'll get into after we listen to this show today, it's very different. The movies, which were the first one especially, was very good. It's still very different from what's going on in this short story and episode. So one thing I just wanted to mention is that this is a very faithful adaptation for the most part, and we'll talk about the minor areas that it's different on the other side. But before we let them take a pause and go check out what's on YouTube, what do you guys...

Any upfront things you guys want to mention? Jack, how about you? I had not read the... It's not a short story. It's a novella. I haven't read the... It's only a short story. It's only 30 pages. They keep saying novella on the internet. It's not. It's like 34 pages. I thought it wasn't a novella when they said it. I didn't... think it was that big but i have not read that that's true so um i was and everybody kept saying oh it's so different from the it's not as different as you think

Much of this similar story is there. And so it was really cool to listen to it and to hear some of the differences. I adore the original movie. The remake is pretty weak comparatively, but the original movie I... really adore but that's also part and parcel because I really like the director and teaming that director with Philip K. Dick is as fascinating as teaming that director with Robert E. Heinlein so

And I agree with you about the remake, the second one. It was just boring. I think the worst sin a movie could be is just boring. But Jeff, what do you have to say up front? Well, same thing in terms of I have not read the short story, and I love the movie, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. And it's just... So I was really interested in listening to this. When you sent it to us a week or two ago, I listened to it right away and just loved it.

Well, I'll save this. I'll save that. But the I really loved it. It's worth listening to. It's, you know, the same quality. I think that usually comes from BBC. And I just think. I think our listeners will love it as well. Alrighty then. Well, we will take a brief pause while everybody else goes out and checks out the...

23 minute show. I think it's only 23 minutes, maybe a little bit longer with the credits, but, um, This, again, was the BBC show dramatized by Graham White, and we have Bradley Lavelle playing Douglas Quayle, John Rowe playing McLean, and a few other actors in... unknown spots like Shirley and so forth. So enjoy that. And we'll be right back. Time warp. We're back. Hey. So let's start off with you, Jack. What did you think of the show?

I thought it was fantastic. I did get a chance to do some deep diving and finding out some of the names of the characters and actors. Well, I found them out at the end of the... credits of course um but uh it was it was really interesting that they would take that like it's one of those shows they could have gone an hour so the the making it as short as they did i'm wondering why

um maybe is that is exactly the the length of the short story or not but i i quite enjoyed it um i quite enjoyed the wackiness philip k dick has such a a strange way of approaching things. And they can come out of like left field, like literally out of left field, like that term, like when he, Doug Quayle comes in and says to the secretary, you've painted your breasts a little.

lovely color uh it's just like that's that's by the way that's good dialogue and the respect that it's a conversation that is is stunning to the listener but appropriate for the actual uh setting and time and stuff like that you know so it's it's as it's as natural as saying oh i love your hairstyle or something like that or you know that's a that's a that's a lovely blouse you have on today or something which um back in the time and you know

minutes ago wouldn't have been completely inappropriate for somebody to comment someone on something else um but it was just, it threw me. And then in the movie, of course, she's doing her fingernails. So, and she's changing each color all the way through as soon as he enters the thing. I was fascinated that they used the name Quail instead of Quaid. And I wonder if there was

a reason why he picked yes there is um one thing i just want to address before i forget is yes this is almost beat for beat what's in the short story so they really could not extend it to an hour perfect um the only thing that they would have that they dropped And then I'll get over to you in a sec, Jeff, is he has a wife in the short story and she's kind of always chiding him.

Kind of like in Total Recall where Sharon Stone plays, she's sort of pretending to be his wife, but she's actually in on the whole conspiracy. We don't really know for certain. what's going on in the short story because it's very dreamlike she just kind of goes i'm fed up with you i can't take you anymore and i'm leaving and literally right after that the agents come in to sort of capture him And he starts the action sequence of running away. So it seems like she's in on it.

but maybe not either other people have analyzed that it's just it's pkd being his dreamlike self and it's really kind of like a mirror of a lot of his own marriages where they just got fed up with him and his weirdness and left right so it's an odd little relationship and that's the only thing they really left out at all um and

Quail was the original story. I mean, that's the original name in the story. They changed it to Quaid for the movies because it sounds too weak and wimpy for an Arnold Schwarzenegger character. Yeah. And they also split up. uh the two characters well because he's he's mclean um in the story as well he's he's in the in the movie he's quaid when he remembers who he is

And he's McLean, I think, when he's not. One of the others. Doug? No, no, he's Doug when he doesn't remember who he is. No, maybe it's not McLean. He's somebody else. He doesn't have, it's not McLean. He has a different name. That's true. I can't remember from the movie, but in this one, he's just Douglas Quayle all the way through all different levels of his personality. But Jeff, what did you think? I thought it was wonderful.

I really enjoyed it. I listened a number of times, and at first, I was a little taken aback by the stylized accents. Like, when... Like when McLean's like, yeah, you know what I mean? Jimmy Stewart is his travel agent. I love it. Oh, see, there you go. He sounded like a cross between Edgar G. Robinson. Jack Benny and Jimmy Stewart.

This weird stylized American noir gangster, whatever, I don't know what it was. Then he kind of calmed it down, and it would come up a little bit. But it was funny at first, and then to hear them doing the... The noir-ish kind of narration and giving it that dark feel. And I liked how Quayle changed his voice, you know, when he's... you know interest was it interstar interstar you know agent interplan yeah yeah when he's the agent he's like okay i'm gonna kill you i can hear you talking

I was really impressed by that, too. I thought that was a lot of fun. And then when he was just quail, he's like, oh, yeah, hey, can I get a brochure? You know, but it was... Bradley Lavelle. He did a great job. I enjoyed his performance quite a bit. I just thought the whole thing was great. See, I have never read it, so...

I was wondering the same thing that Jack was wondering. The first time I listened to it, I thought it ended quickly. I felt like... Then I listened to it again, and it felt longer. I don't know why. But it just felt like...

We just tie this all up and go. But it was very cool. And the second, I'm sure we'll get into this, but I love the fact that the little mice-like creatures were going to take over the world. um that that turned out to be real i just absolutely love that and that was like straight out of x minus one wasn't it like that kind of ending that's something you know and it is it is exactly the way it ends in the short

in the short story. It ends very abruptly with the, basically, I think it's with the line of, you know, from McLean going, you know, We don't even have to deliver that prop because the real one's going to be showing up any minute now sort of thing. You know, yeah, that was really it. It was great. That kind of what you're mentioning that brings up probably what is the biggest difference in where I see there's a major difference between total recall.

And we can remember it for you wholesale, which is the thematic aspect to where with Total Recall, there's all of this like revolution and all of this different plot going on of what is the conspiracy and everything. And really the main theme here is.

what is reality yeah what is fantasy what is what is memory what is who are we and and beyond beyond the layers and the layers and the layers to where something like as completely absurd as a race of mice that are going to take over a planet except for what this little child can do um and showed them kindness which sounds like some sort of like

again the power fantasy of like a six-year-old like they were mentioning turns out to be reality or is it you know and that's that's what i think is always so fascinating about philip k dick stuff well it's interesting too um because in this case It's the reverse of what the movie is trying to say. So in the movie, yes, they're asking what is reality. But in the end, they define that it's but in the in the short story.

It is the reality that they're uncovering in the movie. It's, it's a fantasy that he is stuck in and can't get out of. And we know that for a fact because the director finally sort of let it out of the... let the beans spill or spill the beans on that particular situation because for for years people were saying well was he really this guy hauser was his name was he really hauser or was he really doug mclean and

And I always thought, yes, he's really Doug McLean stuck in his mind. I thought the hints that they put in there were too large to jump past to say that he didn't go through, he wasn't going through some kind of destruction of his brain. because of what happened schizoid embolism they kind of called it um so so but it's that's not the case in the short story the short story is no you're literally uncovering the truth which is kind of what

PKD, like Philip K. Dick loved to do more often than not. He loved to be able to say, what you think is real is not real. And I'm going to show you just the next layer of how crazy things can get.

That's interesting because that never crossed my mind once about the movie, that he wasn't really Quaid. I mean, I even remember reading something about Dan O'Bannon, writing about it, saying like, no, it absolutely happened the way that it was. So here's the hints that I'll tell you why I thought about it. And like I said, the director, I forget his name now, they're a famous director. Oh, is it Verhoeven?

Yeah, he said very clearly, no, this was all in his brain. The one that got me was the most was it fades into white, not fading into black. So the fading into the white is kind of like his mind going and this is a dream as opposed to fading into black in the same way. The other thing is that when he sits down in the chair... Before they even implanted in him, they say, oh, blue skies on Mars. That's a new one. I've never seen that one before. So.

For me, like that, to me, that's a huge hint because that's what's going to happen in the future. And it has nothing to do, if like he was really living his life, then he wouldn't know the fact that he was going to create blue skies on Mars. in the same way so that the program they were putting him in was called blue skies on mars and that's how he saves mars in the end so

So, yeah, anyway. I have heard Dan O'Bannon, who was one of the writers, say that that was not his take on it. So who knows? But you're absolutely right. It is obviously, you know, slightly different than what we're dealing with.

You know, we can remember it for you wholesale with what's actually going on. The way that Philip K. Dick does some interesting things with just the way that the world has changed, like, oh, there's no more tobacco. There's no more wine. Apples are, you know, this forgotten thing. You know, and then the decadence of it with the breasts being painted.

Different colors showing just how open they are. And I just love those little things that he drops in to make it seem like this is a very strange future. Absolutely. yeah when he's when he's it took me a second when he's like you know he's eating the apple i think he calls it yes you know and then he he goes no i don't want to eat this crap

You know, it's just funny, and there's only like three of them left in the world. So, yeah, I agree. It's some really interesting, interesting things that he's doing. Philip K. Dick.

I'm surprised they haven't done more adaptations of his stuff. Like, I would love to hear Clans of the Alfane Moon done as a full... audio drama adaptation it was hilarious and a lot of fun and so much of his stuff is designed for people to really question and think you know uh the the man in the high castle that they did in amazon prime right they it you know for good or for bad and and you can argue that they maybe dragged it out too long but the truth of the matter is it's it's a great

story to be able to look at minority report they did a great job in the movie they there's just some really great concepts that you can walk away i highly recommend i think i've told you this before on prime everybody should watch electric dreams um it's a fantastic anthology series of his stuff and adaptations of his short stories and i loved every minute of all i'm gonna go back and re-watch it now that i think about it so

I really liked The Adjustment Bureau also. I thought that was a pretty good adaptation of his stuff and a pretty good film on its own, too. It didn't get the love it deserved, that's for sure. No. no no it did not in a scanner darkly that uh link later did was another great one yeah and such a cool use of the rotoscope right for that yeah yeah very cool exactly did you see a scanner darkly there uh jeff no i didn't no that was very cool

Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and All Done Rotoscope by Richard Linklater. Really? Yeah. I'll have to check it out. No, I don't know it. Yeah. Very cool. So as we're talking a little bit more about Philip K. Dick and his themes, one of the-

I'm sure anybody who's familiar with PKD is aware of this, but we wouldn't have movies like The Matrix or Dark City if Philip K. Dick wasn't the weird, odd duck that he was.

I'll get back to this in a second, but I find it very interesting. The original short story that this was based on came out in April of 1966. And a lot of his themes that are in here, almost like... proto-Gnostic themes really come to the forefront after he experiences what is called in his writings 2374, which is during February and March of 1974, Philip K. Dick had

a bunch of very strange transformations of consciousness and his own understanding of the world. And he had these weird visionary experiences, which A materialist would say, well, yeah, he had temporal lobe epilepsy and he was prone to this sort of thing. And a lot of other people go, yeah, there's too much weirdness that goes on with that to really have that be the explanation of what was going on. The first thing that he had was...

He had an impacted wisdom tooth, so the dentist gave him sodium pentothal, and he's sort of still high on it, and this was in the days when someone might deliver you a prescription from a doctor, and he was in, I think, the East Bay here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And a woman comes in, a delivery girl comes in fairly young, and she's wearing one of those fish pendants that was still fairly unfamiliar at the time because that was part of a lot of the Christian resurgence that was going on.

during that time it's actually the earliest christian symbol too before the cross yes but but it was um it was it wasn't used by people until it sort of had a resurgence in the 20th century so the churches kind of dropped that out and so he didn't really that sort of like opened up and he had all these visions about this and then he felt like there was a pink beam of light being beamed into his head and that turned

into what became his Valus trilogy. And one of the most important things that happened to him during this time period where people go, hey, maybe there was a little something else going on, is that his infant son, he woke up with a dream.

Yeah, and he woke up with a dream and his hearing a voice saying that his son needed immediate attention and he knew what was going on. And he takes his son into the doctor and says, you have to do these tests. He's going to die otherwise. And they finally do the test and they find out that he. had an inguinal hernia fatal fatal potentially fatal yeah exactly he was going to die if that wasn't um

you know, dealt with. And so he absolutely knew what was going on. And there was a few other things like that to where people go, you know, maybe his visions were more than just mental illness based on, you know, a condition. He had a lot of things like that. And he wrote what he called his exegesis, which was thousands and thousands of pages. You can actually buy his exegesis now that is all of his rambling notes about these strange experiences he had. And it's about a thousand pages.

one-tenth of what he wrote. Isn't it like, didn't he call it like Theophany or something like that? I don't know about that. P-H-E-O-P-H-A-N-Y. I think he called it Theophany, like when that beam hit him in the thing. It is...

probably which would be the understanding of god or the realization of god and that's like when we talk about things like um man in a high castle he genuinely believes that the nazis won the war and that they reset uh somehow they ended up resetting uh history and history got corrected so that we won and he has a full had a full memory of what happened when the nazis won the war and that's why he was sort of chronicling this down in a science fiction novel it's crazy yeah it will uh

What I've heard about that is it goes back to Rome. He thinks that the Roman Empire never ended. And that's where he has the statement, the empire never ended. He believes that we are still in the same period of time that Christ had lived in. and it just keeps basically reskinning itself over and over time and we're still in that time period we've never broken out of that so that's that's kind of a weird aspect of him but

He brought back the ideas of Gnosticism into a pop culture. He started having these ideas and then he found out about the Nag Hammadi library and started reading some of the Gnostic gospels and texts and realizing, oh, this is what I've been, you know.

understanding without knowing i was understanding it and he started looking to that and so a lot of the neo-gnostic churches and modern movements of people either whether they're you know part of an actual group or just doing it on a solo basis, really have Philip K. Dick to thank for bringing that into the forefront out of academia and obscure heretical studies of theology and things like that.

And we wouldn't have Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, and we wouldn't have The Matrix, and we wouldn't have all these things about being stuck in a simulation. All of that stuff can pretty much go back to Philip K. Dick trying to popularize that.

And I think what's interesting is, you know, eight years before he has those experiences, and we can remember it for you wholesale, some of those same themes are there of, you know, what's the true nature of your life? What's the illusion that's been put on it to keep you enslaved?

you know where are you in the black iron prison which is another term that he came up with later right and his book valus uh brings up an account of uh a character that he created that ended up being a real person years later in his life kind of thing too um oh interesting yeah yeah i think it's um was it he created a fictional woman named um like

Gloria Knudsen or something like that and she had a child who was dying and needed help and then it matched the character almost perfectly to a woman in his neighborhood right down to the name of the sick child. um oh interesting yeah there's there's so many of those things where um that was in i think that was in valus

I think it started off in exegesis and later in the novel Valis, V-A-L-I-S for anyone who's looking for it kind of thing. So, yeah, crazy. And there's basically a Valis trilogy, which I'm remembering what all the... titles were here. Let's see. And, you know, while you're looking that up, it's fascinating because he is at the same time as things like Frank Herbert and Michael Moorcock, who were experimenting an awful lot with drugs and and very much.

in a metaphysical kind of science fiction and in a whole vein that you did not see in any of the science fiction writers beforehand right so I'm not sure if Gordon Dixon was involved in stuff like that, too, but it's the same era where you've got a lot of really kind of wild, imaginative stuff popping out. of all of these people because of their experimentations in deeper consciousness and mind exploring sort of hallucinogenic drug stuff. So it's very cool.

The Valus trilogy is Valus, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Cool. Radio Free Albemuth is considered part of it, but it's a little bit of a side... More like a site experiment. It's not really part of the trilogy itself. It's funny. He comes up with a character in Valus that's called horse lover fat, which is basically if you go etymologically, what Philip.

Dick means if you break it down into it, it's like meaning he then like translated that. So it's an alternate version of him as horse lover fat. Sure. Very cool. It's typical. It's just crazy. So this is your new project is do a full audio adaptation of Exegesis. No, no. There is no narration. It's like somebody's most crazy diary. I mean, it's just weird-ass thoughts and then contradictory things because he never could quite reconcile everything. And, you know,

I like you bringing up, you know, Moorcock, especially because while Moorcock did some stuff, he was always very politically minded. And you can always see that, like even with his, you know, eternal champion stuff and even his, you know, more nihilistic aspects of Elric and the, you know.

fighting between you know law and chaos and all that stuff it's very simplistic and it's very binary and dualistic and when you have like you know true visionary experiences like dick none of it makes sense it's always contradictory like like you know mythologies are you know this experience kind of you know invalidates that one and you can't quite put it into simple boxes and that's one of the things that makes dick stuff so uh so interesting and powerful um

In some ways, his writing style is very pulpy, hack, just churn a lot of stuff out. Nothing very impressive. And then there's times you read it and you go, I feel like I'm being affected by this in some way that I can't quite. apprehend normally

And Ursula Le Guin always argued that Philip K. Dick should have gotten a lot more respect and that he was the closest thing that we had to a magical realist writer in that time period. Which I don't think they even had a magical realism as a title at the time.

Well, they did, but only for the South American stuff, which again is really where it comes out of. So it's, you know, out of South America, these people writing these things about weird experiences, but they're taken, you know, normal, you know. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude is probably the biggest example of magical realism. For sure.

comes out of their political sense and their publishing where here all the people that would have been thinking along those ways were stuck into the sci-fi ghetto of just churn stuff out for the magazines and the paperbacks later right right and so you know that's culture colored that way, but Le Guin always, uh,

She was a big advocate for Dick after his death, especially. Yeah. And he was always fighting people because they, like you said, science fiction was often pushed into this sort of ghetto. Well, this is sort of just popular. It's not real literature. And Dick especially was. very angry at that because he felt that really good science fiction could be put up against any of the quote unquote best fiction that was coming out easily enough because the ideas were there. The thickness of

of the stories and the characters could be there if they were done properly. It didn't have to just be pulp. So, yeah. Something that I want to see if you guys think I'm, uh,

inferring this incorrectly or not, but there was something that I thought was interesting about the BBC show where they kind of leaned into the... illusion of stories and especially the illusion of movies even though this was done in audio where we've got the obvious film noir you know music at the beginning the hard-boiled detective sort of thing

Maybe even the voice of McLean that we were making fun of earlier, maybe that was done a little bit more intentionally. And then there's the point where he says something that stands out because it seems so weird.

I want to be left alone, which is a variation of the very famous Greta Garbo and then later Audrey Hepburn quote. So it almost seemed like they were trying to shine a very subtle light on the... illusory nature of of stories and the types of stories that we would watch on the screen but i'm not sure if i'm uh projecting that or not no i i i think so i mean there's certainly something there and

You know, and I think they were trying to make it very American, right? So it was, you know, hence those, you know, the hard-boiled noir and Edward G. Robinson type accent. You know, so I think so. They were trying to, you know, hit on something like that. And is that in the story? Lothar, do you remember that I want to be alone? I don't remember that line.

And it was just done in Dick's normal style, so it didn't have the sort of metatextual aspects of having the music and the voice that we could hear. You know, I find it very interesting. You know, I was just listening to all the stuff you guys are saying, and I'm going, man, I have to look into this guy a little more than I have. I really haven't read a ton of his stuff, and I don't know much about him beyond, you know, Wikipedia stuff.

So it's very interesting, and I think probably, yes, I think they're probably leaning into that whole illusory effect of trying to add that in there and make it resonate with the listeners, because it certainly did. you know this is the guy you know on the one hand he wants to be alone the other hand he wants to be somebody right he wants to be important or he wants to be you know now he's the most important guy in the whole world or something right so

It's just interesting, and I'm kind of rambling because I'm processing all this and I'm listening to. So, yeah, I think so. Something I thought was interesting also was the...

in some ways the bravery that quail showed of like i'm finally going to do this i'm finally going to you know face you know going to to recall incorporated and on one level it's the you know bravery to have something you know uh

put into your brain and the fear of having false memories put in, but on some others levels, it's weird because it's like, it's the, it seems like the bravery to have a fake experience. Like I'm going to actually go to Mars. You know, it was, it seemed to feel like a little bit of both of that.

strangeness of what that means to jump into there, but then it's also the bravery to maybe finally remember who you are and to have what Dick called anamnesis, which is basically the opposite of amnesia when you remember something that you didn't think you knew before very cool i you know i felt like like that was such an integral part of getting to know coil very quickly and

You know, how many times has he walked by recall, which is spelled R-E-K-A-L, right? Or maybe two L's, I don't know. I thought that was interesting. But, you know, how many times has he walked by?

how many times has he looked in the window how many times i'm gonna do this and i was getting in the beginning i think what's kind of fun about that is that i was getting you know some walter middy vibes there you know of you know his wife's giving him a hard time you know this is going to cost you a lot of money oh boy you know I can't and so it's

It's interesting. I'm going to do this. And he finally takes that step to walk in there and say, hey, let's do this. And he gets the hard sell by McLean. And by the receptionist, I can't think of her name. Shirley. Shirley. Who can only be, what was her, what'd she say?

I can only be whatever for long. Seductive. Seductive for so long and then have to give you your, get your way. Or throw you out, right? That's right. Which I thought was funny because the actress sounds like somebody's like, I don't know, librarian grandmother. She didn't. sounds seductive at all right you know so that could be like an ai right nowadays you know what i mean like the whole idea is like yes

They will never challenge you. They will always try to make you feel good, even though it's kind of like the worst case scenario of help calls, those help desk people. me furious because they're so pleasant when they tell you they can't help you and they take you 20 minutes down the line and you get nowhere but you know have a wonderful day you know

Is there anything else I can help you with today? You didn't help me with the first thing. And you feel bad because you don't want to say anything to them because it's their job and they're not making a whole lot of money in the first place, right? So it's a pain in the butt for them. But the truth of the matter is, is that, yeah, you're stuck. You're stuck because you don't go anywhere. Yeah. It's interesting. I was fascinated by the way that they said recall.

and recall like they said recall and instead of recall was what we we hear it in in the in the movie and probably say in north america and so both both ways saying it different ways can have different emphasis in And so I was fascinated by that. I also felt while we're talking that, gosh, I wish we could have had a novel written by Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut together. Oh, boy.

because because kurt vonnegut does the swan song of the ugly duckling and philip k dick could take that and take that character that Kurt Vonnegut had and use him as basically the focal point of the universe without him knowing it. right? And it would be really fascinating to see how that they would put that together. I just think it would be really cool.

because I have no idea how their styles would mesh but that would be mind-blowing wouldn't it wouldn't it be really I don't know I don't think their styles mesh I don't even think they would get along two different personalities but what a great what a what a missed opportunity because of the way that they look at their central characters and how they could be used like if you had kurt vonnegut do this story how different would that be in the end

it would be interesting, right? Because he would still follow the same plot points, but he would emphasize various different things. So... Anyway, that is just me going off on the deep end. Sorry for that rabbit hole. I really liked the line, and this was in the short story as well, but I thought the actor did such a good job of delivering it, and it really resonated with me because I'm...

sort of reviewing a lot of the themes from 1984, which I think is more prescient now than it's ever been. But the, you know, anything you think may be held against you. You know, the idea of thought crime, but in here it's because he could literally... you know, monitor his thoughts because of the telepathic implant and, you know, things like that. And it's just, you know, again, the Gnostic themes of, you know, who are our jailers? What is the illusion that is keeping us?

from knowing our true divine nature within ourselves and that we're just menial little you know cogs in a machine and and all that stuff i just thought that line was delivered well and you know without beating you over the head with the theme of it yeah no it's it's powerful Yeah, and I noticed that the ambiguity about Quayle's real past and his past as a secret agent is like...

It becomes one of those things that you find in every Philip K. Dick story that it has become meaningful, right? Is that ambiguity of what you think you are is not necessarily what things are. And whether you're an illusion or you belong to somebody.

else and you have no idea that you do um it's it really it really makes you sit there and think like you could just sit there read a philip k dick story and just stare at the ceiling for two hours thinking of the concepts that are involved and for a 23-minute audio drama to make you sit there and think about it that way too.

that's so rare nowadays. Like how many people, how many science fiction writers have that ability? Yeah. And, and he just gets better with it as, you know, as time goes on and his later novels, one of, uh, um, One of my favorites, even though I wouldn't say it's one of his best necessarily, but it is one of my favorites, is Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, which the best way I could describe it is...

a guy who's a famous personality and he's more like a, you know, like a newscaster, but it's in the future, but it's that type of like anchor man who's famous because he's attractive and he's just a personality on the screen, but everybody knows him. Girls want to, you know, have sex with him. Every man wants

to be him all this stuff he's rich and everything and he wakes up one morning and nobody remembers him his bank account is gone his apartments lived in by somebody else he's been completely erased and he has to figure out what goes on And then it gets weird.

that's that's almost you could just use that last line and that's every philip k dick story ever made and then it gets weird because and you could just tack it on to every summary of every story that he's you can go through the entire summary and then just add dot dot dot and then it goes weird or gets weird so

um i really i wish we could have an interview with katherine horn the lady who directed it as much as i mean it would be interesting to hear graham white who actually did a lot of other uh adaptations of stuff um but uh Catherine Horn specifically, these kinds of adaptations, I'm almost more interested in the director to sit there and think, what is it from the story that you feel has to be articulated most?

in the audio drama to be central to telling philip k dick's vision yeah yeah and because you know it can be on the page and you can and you can organize it through the page but You know as well as I do that anybody can take a script as a director and you can... do all kinds of things to change it to uh by theme and tone and sound and music and all that kind of stuff to create entirely different fields just direction to the actors right um what did you do when you sat down and read this and said

Oh God, I need to do this. That's what I wanted. That's what I'd ask Catherine Horn. So Catherine, if you're listening, contact us because I really want to know. Yep. Now, what did you guys think of the weird Martian worms thing? Yeah, that wasn't worms in the story, right? It was something else. Oh, it was worms. They call it fauna, but there is a point where they actually specify that it's Martian worms and something that the worms would eat.

And then they're just dead in the box. I guess probably because he forgot, but it was just, like, so bizarre. Yeah, I saw, because I read a summary, and I saw that it said Fauna, and I just thought it was, I don't know what I thought it was, but anyway, yeah, that was weird. You know, the worms, the dead worms in the box. And it's, what was it, six months he had been back? Is that what they say?

I can't remember off the top of my head. Something like that. I think the agent says to him, you know, it's been there sitting there six months and you haven't even thought of it. And, um... you know and so yeah when he pulls it out and there's the six dead worms in there um yeah i just i just so much of it i just It's a lot of processing of, hmm, that's interesting. And they come back to the worms, too, again. And it's very, very interesting. And the rod of death or whatever that thing was.

yeah you know I guess it was a happy rod then it was a rod of death or something but just very very interesting and I love stuff like this and it it brings up You know, Blade Runner, do androids dream of electric sheep, right? And all of that ambiguity that's in that of the humanity and, of course, the great speech Rutger Hauer makes, right? Oh, yeah. Which was off the cuff, if I remember correctly. He wrote it himself.

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Yeah, he did not. That wasn't on the page. He actually went back and he thought about what he should be saying for that. And he ended up writing his own little aria for it. That's amazing. And I think that... part of the quality of that movie of the depth of that film is that okay these guys these replicants aren't just replicants they you know they have

whatever you want to call it there's there's some kind of humanity there right and so it's just it's interesting that that just adds to it and of course deckard you know and what his situation was and he falls in love with with um you know sean young's character and you know and all of that i just there's so much so with the ambiguity you were talking about before uh lotha that just adds depth to the whole thing you know and

And so it's just so rich. It's just so rich for ideas and thinking about things. There was another Walter Mitty thing I just thought of when you were mentioning that, which is that in the story, his wife at one point is confronting him going like, why are you so into this Mars thing and you're doing something fake? It's going to cost you a lot of money.

And why don't we just rent, and I think it was something like these weird gliding suits or something to where they could have a vacation together and go do this thing instead that would be real, but it was just a... It reminded me again, because part of it is, it's going to cost too much money, and it's not something we're doing together. Why don't we do this other thing instead? Walter Mitty. I love that. Inscrutable to the last.

Interplan, that's another one where I was trying to look up, okay, is there other references to that? I couldn't find anything in any of the stuff that I have about Philip K. Dick that explains that, but it's a weird portmanteau. What does it mean? What is going on on the eastern seaboard? What's going on on Terra? What type of government is this? And what is an interplan police? It feels to me like something you would pull out of Gnosticism.

But interplan, I guess I'm thinking of the word itself, like what the heck does that even mean? Well, that's what I mean. Like the idea that there's a plan sort of internally or a plan that you can't see in some way. Oh, okay. it out as like oh my god this he's talking about the things that are happening beyond what we truly know you know like we're being told one thing and there is the interplan which is something else

Right. Got it. Oh, yeah. And that makes perfect sense. And again, he did this eight years before he had his revelations, which I just think is like, okay, he's obviously, you know, on this current anyway. Which, again, a materialist would say, well, yeah, he's always been prone to this. Of course, he's going to have visions that are like this. This is just who he is. He sees the world this way. But is it chicken or egg or something that isn't even quite as causal as that?

who knows but it's just always omnipresentness in his fiction for sure in some way or another yeah no oh it's crazy i um i i'm just so i want so much of his stuff to be in the public domain i'm terrible that way but i just i think that more of his stuff needs to be adapted and and looked at and considered um i want to ask um Jeff, do you seek out, I mean, if you're doing experimental theater, for example, isn't a huge part of that, this sort of keeping things, you know.

up in the air and letting people figure that stuff out you know what i mean like not not definitively just feeding them a story that has a beginning and a middle and end, but actually leaving people with something that might not necessarily give them the sense of ease. were it giving them a sense of dis-ease when they leave the theater to me that that yeah that works you know it does and i mean when you think about you think about somebody like uh

You know, somebody like Brecht or somebody like that, right? Who is, who, he doesn't want you to sit back deep in your seat. You know, he wants you to lean into the show. He doesn't want you to just, you know.

just sit back and enjoy the pageantry or the you know the story he wants you to think about certain things you know so when he's doing mother courage and her children you know and he wants you thinking about whatever's coming to mind probably you know, how stupid war is, but, um, you know, so, so yeah, so somebody like Brachter, there's, and there's others who, when you left the theater,

I mean, he called it the alien or somebody called it the alienation effect, right? So you didn't feel like comfortable and nice and warm when you left. You felt like, oh, geez. I've got to think about this. I've got to do something about this or whatever happens. That's oversimplified. But yeah, there's no question. You just kind of leave it out there. And throughout my career, you know, directing on stage, I...

Started out pretty traditional, and then I made my way into doing things in smaller theaters, very experimental, you know, and, you know, with even places that had like 75 seats. you know, just sitting around in a circle, you know, things like that. And it was very freeing and it was very cool and it was very, excuse me, open-ended.

so yeah i i think so and i think that that's what you get in here in a lot of ways right that's one of the things i love about uh short stories uh in contrast to novels novels by their very nature and their length, have to be a little bit more memetic. It has to be replicating something where short stories can be dreams. And experimental fiction or one-act plays can be dreams.

It can be completely abstract in ways that a longer piece can't just by the nature of having to tell a narrative in that way. 100% Lothar. And, you know, later in my career, I got a call and I got hired to do a...

To direct a 10-minute play and I didn't even know what a 10-minute play was You know and and I was intrigued by it And so they sent me to play and it was it was fantastic and I you know I did it and then I was hooked on 10-minute plays and just just that same thing that slice of a moment um and i have a bunch of audio scripts that i did just let that same thing just it's a moment you know and you just take it

for whatever it is my 10538 was like that um you know and and it was just it's just a moment it's a i mean it's 10538 it's just about 10 minutes long you know so it's my 10 minute audio play and and just to just to leave it out you know and i had when i was doing that i had a i had a think about it do i want to do i want to kind of

give the little piece at the end or do i just want to leave it and i decided to put it in because i was feeling like i needed to be hopeful in that moment um but it was it was um just to leave it and you figure out what the heck happens next according to whatever you brought to the show. So definitely. There's a great quote. Walter Kern was doing an analysis with Matt Taibbi about Edgar Allan Poe as an early writer. And he was saying, Kern was saying that, there's this quote.

The capsule portrait of the human psyche at an important moment. It's kind of his invention, meaning about the way that short stories were written at that time or any tale at that time, but sort of approaching it from that. Exactly what's going on in the in the person's mind. How is it shaping their experience? How is it shaping their reality again? That sort of dreamlike feel of what is our internal world that we're projecting onto the external world and

That does so well in what you're talking about of the shorter experimental play or stories like this, where again, what is reality? Who am I? You know, who are you is, is, you know, at our core, who are we really? And is that more real than the illusions that we get put on later of having to work in an office or whatever? There's no question. And that's why just to kind of.

You know, later in my career, I got almost totally away from doing anything proscenium-wise. And, like, when we did Fahrenheit 451, and you did the sound for it, Lothar, which was amazing. Thank you. It was a theater in the square, and then we had about 100 seats in there, and we left some seats open so that actors could sit in them.

And so if you were sitting in one of the rows, you might have an actor sit down next to you and ask you a question. You know, like, are you happy? Nice. You know what I mean? Like, you know, and just looking in character, just sitting next to you. And or if they take off their helmet, like they're fighting the fire or they're starting the fire, as the case may be, you know, they take off their helmet, they walk by and they just walk to somebody and they go, here, hold this.

You know, and, you know, the person gets it. And so it's to kind of, it's to more intimate. For me, I started in theaters that were big theaters, you know, 2000 seat theaters. And I made my way down to 50 seat theaters because I just wanted to do intimate shows. We did a show called The Women of Lockerbie, which is about the Lockerbie tragedy.

um, in Scotland of the, uh, plane that got shot down and everybody, you know, those people died, you know, and it was just so intimate. It was everybody's just, you're just right there. There's no escape. Um, so yeah, I think that, I think this feels like that.

this feels intimate this this production to me i'm just thinking about this now but you know this production just felt intimate because you're in this guy's mind right i mean part of it takes place in his mind you know the guy's talking to him in his head and yeah it's you know it's how can you get more intimate than that you know so it's uh just this is brilliant stuff just brilliant stuff um

For those who want to know, 10538 couldn't be heard back in 2024 in July 10th on Wednesday Wonders. So go look for it in the Wednesday Wonders podcast hosted by the amazing Lothar Tuppen and created and written by the amazing Jeff. Jeffrey Billard, starring Vanessa Benoit, Jonah Lynn Allison, and Angela Young. Yes.

By all means, go back a year, just about a year now that it got released. It's great to listen to. It's super. Thank you. Lovely 10-minute play. Thanks for that. It is. It's just 10 minutes. There you go. It's in and out, baby.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So many of my stuff has been short for that reason. I love the scene situation, especially in a speculative fiction kind of setup.

and you know you start like in medias res right you're just already in the conversation you know when you start there's no intro there's no narration it's just you're right in the middle of a conversation and and it's just i always like that i mean i love that i remember it reading the odyssey for the first time and you know it just kind of starts man you know and um it's just it's just great and i love that kind of i love that kind of thing just just do it

or tell the story through sound, you know, and which I, which I got blown away when, you know, when Bill Holwick did, um, I've talked about this before, so I'll make it quick, but. Um, when he did the, um, Matt Hornblower, you know, the first, the first, however many minutes is just Joe Stofko's character talking, but.

It's all almost sound. You can tell what he's doing. He's walking around his house. He's picking up his keys. He's walking on the gravel. He's walking on the pavement. And he's just telling the story through sound. and i stole that for before the wind you know the beginning of that it's just awesome you know it was just

Bill definitely had a cinematic feel. And I think that's one of the things that cinema then provided for radio drama so much of like, okay, how are we going to do it to where the point of view is directly, you know, the camera itself and the camera. itself becomes a character and then we extend that and go the microphone is is taking over for the camera but um yeah it's that same sort of feel which i just you know

That's obviously what I love too. So this particular episode though, this particular show is much more audio drama than the fact that it does, there is a strong narration from Doug McQuail in that respect. How do you feel about that? centering around him directly. How different would it be if the story came in from McLean's perspective? Oh, very different. Yeah.

But one of the things that I think that when we talked about the music and the hard-boiled narration, we get into a little bit of the more subtle semiotics to where it's not just the voiceover, it's how is the voiceover done. what is the style of the voiceover? And that is what makes it work. If it was done without that music and if his voice was a little bit more, um,

normal and a little less hard-boiled, it wouldn't have worked as well. So, all of that stuff, you know, merges together into being, communicating more than just the narration itself. And there's more voices in Doug. Douglas or Doug McQuayles as well because he's got that inner voice which is different than the narrative voice right so that voice of the different personalities that are coming out from that

from the thing as well. Yeah, no, I thought, and the actor did such a good job because it did not feel affected or fake. Both of them felt like completely valid, you know, voices for that aspect of his personality. Yeah, 100%. Oh yeah, there's no question.

I think the narration would be an interesting thing to write this from McLean's point of view. Or somebody else's point of view. But the narration is... perfect in this because it does have that noir hard-boiled you know feel to it and so of course the narration is perfect and you can and you know and that sets a scene of

of you know the darkness or you know whatever grittiness or whatever you know you want to throw in there you know in a world that doesn't have apples in a world that doesn't have you know those other things we talked about um you know so i think it's i think the narration works well here but it's always cool to um it's always a cool idea i think to look at things from a different uh character's point of view like

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, right? I mean, I think it's brilliant, right? So you take Hamlet and you do it from their perspective. And, you know, just that kind of a thing is just really creative, really something that... Would be cool. And when people do that, but they, you have to change the thematic and more of the other subtle aspects because.

part of what makes this work is that we're seeing it from quail's point of view and it's what's happening to him it's his reality what is the truth of him if we did it from mclean's point of view if you couldn't really focus on that. So it'd have to be, okay, how does McLean feel being, you know, capitalist business owner in this particular world or something else. You'd have to change the thematic content or else it's just going to fall flat because, you know, he's not dealing. I mean,

Yeah, he could maybe think a little bit about what is the nature of reality in people, but then he'd have to apply it to himself in his own situation, not just quails. Yeah, it would be much more… uh uncertain as to whether or not this was truly happening or if this was just somebody having some kind of schizophrenic embolism in that respect right he would be much we'd be much less tethered to the truth of the inner voice of quail

for that reason except there's one thing and i think this is really interesting in this in in both uh dick's version and this is that it's actually from mclean and his um uh you know assistant that we get the empirical evidence that this is actually

the reality behind things they're saying like well it couldn't be this way so actually they're the ones that are providing the proof they have actually no question about it right it you know but i mean from the listener's point of view you would be listening going this guy's nuts And it would be that much more shocking when the news came that they're telling you, no, this is the facts. And it'd be much more, it would be almost more disconcerting if it came from outside of him because.

At least to me, I think, because once you it's like that third person effect, if you don't know what the thoughts of the person that you're trying to to focus on, it becomes this bigger puzzle.

and you're wondering if you're being lied to in some clever way by the author, right? So... um so but yeah i'm not saying it he he should have done it that way i'm glad he did it the way he did i'm just wondering if it was done in a different manner how difficult like what what would that change our ability to buy into it and what kind

of like you said how different would the tone be and and the set so yeah and it's interesting too because mcclain takes off right he's like i'm out of here yeah and you know He's afraid. I think he's afraid of the agents coming to get him or something, you know, so it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. He just wants to run his business, you know, make a profit. Yeah. It's crazy. Alrighty.

Anything else before we wrap up? No, I'll just say I'm glad you brought this because it was really interesting and I really enjoyed it and it's really prompted me to look more into Philip K. Dick's work. And I think that's a testament to sometimes what we try to do here. Just, okay, hey, listen to this and go out and find it for yourself. So I think it's great to spread the wings and go, oh. You know, this is cool. And to look beyond the film adaptation and to go back to the primary source.

which I need to do now. So I need to go read it now. So thank you very much. There's a couple versions online that you can find pretty easily. If you do a search for that with PDF after it. Did you find out anything from the composer, Paul Ahn? I'm always fascinated, but I couldn't find anything else he did necessarily for BBC, but I didn't have much time to do a deep dive.

No, I did not. Because there was just some interesting subtle music choices there that I'm not sure I would have pegged as going in the same kind of sci-fi area as it was. So... um you know i mean like you can there's more of a futuristic feel in a lot of philip k dick's stuff and and so that whole electric dream stuff is kind of almost what i expect to hear mirrored in the music and it wasn't in this case it was very straightforward but interesting dreamlike almost yeah I think

Yeah, exactly. I think it fit the tone of the sort of action and noir-ish things and this and that, but no, it did not lean into the sci-fi, just like you said. Cool. All right. I loved it. Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing it. I like, you know, me, I said, Philip K. Dick is literally my favorite science fiction writer. I think he's tied with Ray Bradbury. I think.

the two tops in my head that I really, I love the most to be able to read from that era. So, yeah. Yeah. And Harlan Ellison too. Oh yeah. You know, those are my, my big three, but yeah, there's so many, but you know, it's, uh,

I think this was going to be the last one that I bring that we can't actually have played in the show. At least I'm going to try and do that. But Jack, I think you're up next. I am. So I am really, I want to go back to some of the more cheesy ones and have that kind of fun. But I think next time around, I'm going to go and hit Rod Serling's zero hour.

So Zero Hour was an interesting series. Now, this wasn't, again, this is not old-time radio, old-time radio. This is more 70s stuff. But it's a mutual audio network. So our mutual radio broadcasting, I should say, series. And it was hosted by and partially directed by. Rod Serling himself. So there's some really interesting shows in there that I, I'm going to pick one and we'll all get a chance to listen next time around.

Cool. Yeah, I'm used to most of the Zero Hour that I've heard, which I have not heard all of it by any means. It was mostly like crime and, you know, interpersonal drama stuff. So I'm curious as to what sci-fi stuff you had there, because that's going to be excellent. Yeah, there's one with William Shatner that's going to that that that maybe. be our choice so it'd be interesting it's a nice sci-fi one there too so that's kind of cool yeah

All righty. Well, thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jack. And thank you everybody out there for listening. And I hope you guys all go out and listen to that YouTube video recording of the BBC's we can remember it for you wholesale because it's great. Sure is. It'll all be in the show notes. We'll see you next time. Yes. Exactly. Take care, brother. Adios, amigos. Adios, man. This has been an Electric Vicuna production.