Radio Free Albemuth | |
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Directed by | John Alan Simon |
Screenplay by | John Alan Simon |
Based on | Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K. Dick |
Produced by |
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Starring | |
Cinematography |
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Edited by | Phil Norden |
Music by |
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Production companies |
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Distributed by | Freestyle Releasing |
Release dates |
June 27, 2014 (Limited/VOD) |
Running time | 110 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $9,365 [1] |
Radio Free Albemuth is a 2010 American film adaptation of the dystopian novel Radio Free Albemuth by author Philip K. Dick, which was written in 1976 and published posthumously in 1985. The film is written, directed, and produced by John Alan Simon and stars Jonathan Scarfe and Shea Whigham.
In an alternate reality, circa 1985, the United States of America are under the authoritarian control of President Fremont.
Berkeley record store clerk Nick Brady lives modestly with his wife Rachel and their infant son. Nick has been experiencing strange visions and dreams. He confides in Rachel and his best friend, science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Nick calls the source of his visions VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System).
One recurring symbol that he has been seeing is an ichthys. While he and Phil sit at a table, an orbiting satellite shoots a pink laser directly into Nick's head. He rushes his son to the ER, convinced that he has an inguinal hernia. The skeptical doctor is stunned to find that Nick is right. Nick has subsequent visions that tell him that he should relocate to Los Angeles, where he lands a job at a record label.
Philip is visited by two members of FAP (Friends of the American People). They press him for information about Nick's visions. The female FAP agent returns and sleeps with Philip. After their liaison, she pretends to be underage, hoping to coerce him into revealing what Nick is seeing from VALIS. Philip refuses to divulge anything about Nick.
Meanwhile, Nick has a dream where a woman is singing. During the dream, someone comments that there is something about her singing that seems subversive. Eventually, the woman turns up at Nick's record label, looking for a clerical job. She introduces herself as Sylvia, and Nick just assumes that she is a singer. Sylvia gradually reveals that she also receives visions from VALIS. She explains that there are several thousand people who receive transmissions from the orbiting satellite, and they are very loosely organized as a secret society.
The Russian government blows up the orbiting VALIS satellite, and Sylvia explains that it will take another 100 years for a replacement satellite to arrive. She writes a song with subliminal lyrics about VALIS. Nick forces The Fisher Kings to record the song, despite their total lack of interest in it. When they debut the song at a club, Nick explains to Philip how the subliminal messages are encoded in the recording.
FAP arrest Nick and Philip. They waste little time in executing Nick, as well as Sylvia. The film ends with Philip in prison, writing about Nick's VALIS experience. While he is working in a field one day, some teenagers gawk at the prisoners and laugh. Their boombox is playing Sylvia's subliminal song, and Philip realizes that the secret society found a way to get the song out, despite FAP's best efforts.
In February 2004, Utopia Pictures & Television acquired the rights to three novels by science fiction author Philip K. Dick, including the 1985 novel Radio Free Albemuth, considered to be a semi-autobiography of the author. Producer John Alan Simon was attached to produce film adaptations based on the novels, including Radio Free Albemuth. [2] Simon became the writer and director for the film adaptation for Radio Free Albemuth, and filming began in October 2007 in and around Los Angeles. [3]
Simon said that the film may be titled VALIS upon release. He explained, "The script is based at this point almost entirely on Radio Free Albemuth. The financiers like the title VALIS better - so that's the tentative title. Since Radio Free Albemuth is essentially the first draft of VALIS, we ended up with rights to both from the estate of Philip K. Dick." He further commented that "if Radio Free Albemuth is successful, VALIS the book would form the basis for the sequel to VALIS the movie. In other words, the story of VALIS would form the basis for VALIS 2." [4]
The film screened as a work in-progress on February 27, 2010, at the Sedona International Film Festival.[ citation needed ] The world premiere was at the Gotham Screen International Film Festival in October 2010. [5]
A trailer for the film was released on March 2, 2011. [6]
The film was released in select cities (in addition to VOD) on June 27, 2014, by Freestyle Releasing. [7] [8]
Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 36% of 11 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 4.4/10. [9] Metacritic rated it 35/100 based on six reviews. [10] Jeanette Catsoulis dismissed the film's "stiff staging and so-so special effects" in The New York Times before concluding, "The excellent Shea Whigham, as a science-fiction writer, is our guide and narrator, but even his gravitas won't keep you from laughing at an extraterrestrial who thinks that hiding subliminal messages in pop songs is the way to start a revolution." [11] Richard Kuipers of Variety called it "an engrossing adaptation" that "operates successfully as a study of enlightenment and a straight-ahead conspiracy thriller". [12] John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Though it echoes A Scanner Darkly in a few pleasing ways, Albemuth is a substantially less satisfying affair, one whose longueurs and (deliberately?) cheesy effects work will alienate all but Dick's hardcore devotees." [13] Gary Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times called it "a sluggish, often cheesy sci-fi thriller". [14]
Philip Kindred Dick, often referred to by his initials PKD, was an American science fiction writer and novelist. He wrote 44 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. His fiction explored varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against elements such as alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. He is considered one of the most important figures in 20th-century science fiction.
A Scanner Darkly is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published in 1977. The semi-autobiographical story is set in a dystopian Orange County, California, in the then-future of June 1994, and includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use. The novel is one of Dick's best-known works and served as the basis for a 2006 film of the same name, directed by Richard Linklater.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a 1968 dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where Earth's life has been greatly damaged by a nuclear global war, leaving most animal species endangered or extinct. The main plot follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who has to "retire" six escaped Nexus-6 model androids, while a secondary plot follows John Isidore, a man of sub-par IQ who aids the fugitive androids.
Radio Free Albemuth is a dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, written in 1976 and published posthumously in 1985. Originally titled VALISystem A, it was his first attempt to deal in fiction with his experiences of early 1974. When his publishers at Bantam requested extensive rewrites he canned the project and reworked it into the VALIS trilogy. Arbor House acquired the rights to Radio Free Albemuth in 1985. They then published an edition under the current title, prepared from the corrected typescript given by Dick to his friend Tim Powers.
The Man in the High Castle (1962), by Philip K. Dick, is an alternative history novel wherein the Axis Powers won World War II. The story occurs in 1962, fifteen years after the end of the war in 1947, and depicts the life of several characters living under Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany as they rule a partitioned United States. The eponymous character is the mysterious author of a novel-within-the-novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a subversive alternative history of the war in which the Allied Powers are victorious.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is a 1982 novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. As his final work, the book was published shortly after his death in March 1982, although it was written the previous year.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a 1974 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The novel is set in a futuristic dystopia where the United States has become a police state in the aftermath of a Second American Civil War. The story follows genetically enhanced pop singer and television star Jason Taverner who wakes up in a world where he has never existed.
Alanis Nadine Morissette is a Canadian and American singer, songwriter, and musician. She began her music career in Canada in the early 1990s with two dance-pop albums. In 1995, she released the alternative rock album Jagged Little Pill, which sold more than 33 million copies globally and propelled her to become a cultural phenomenon. Morissette won the 1996 Grammy Award for Album of the Year among other accolades, and the album was adapted into a 2018 rock musical. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has Jagged Little Pill on their 200 Definitive Albums list, and it appeared on various editions of Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" guide. Its lead single, "You Oughta Know", was also included on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list.
Valis is a 1981 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, intended to be the first book of a three-part series. The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, Dick's gnostic vision of God. Set in California during the 1970s, the book features heavy auto-biographical elements and draws inspiration from Dick's own investigations into his unexplained religious experiences over the previous decade.
The VALIS trilogy is a set of science fiction/philosophical novels by author Philip K. Dick which include VALIS (1978), The Divine Invasion (1980), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). Dick's first novel about the VALIS concept originally titled "VALISystem A", was published as Radio Free Albemuth after Dick's death in 1985.
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is a 2011 non-fiction book containing the published selections of a journal kept by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, in which he documented and explored his religious and visionary experiences. Dick's wealth of knowledge on the subjects of philosophy, religion, and science inform the work throughout.
The Divine Invasion is a 1981 science fantasy novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is the second book in the gnostic VALIS trilogy, and takes place in the indeterminate future, perhaps a century or more after VALIS. The novel, originally titled Valis Regained, was nominated to the BSFA Award.
The Owl in Daylight is a novel Philip K. Dick was writing at the time of his death in 1982. He had already been paid an advance for the book by the publisher and was working against a deadline. After his death, his estate approached other writers about the possibility of someone completing the novel based on his notes, but that proved to be impossible, as he had never formally outlined the story. Dick viewed the novel as his Finnegans Wake. The idea was inspired partly by an entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Beethoven that referred to him as the most creative genius of all time, partly by traditional views of what constitutes the human heaven, and finally by the Faust story.
"The Eye of the Sibyl" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was written sometime around 1975, but not published until 1987 when it was included in volume 5 of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, and has been reprinted since in other editions of this book such as the U.S. edition The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Stories.
Science fiction opera is a subgenre of science fiction. It refers to operas whose subject-matter fits in the science fiction genre. Like science-fiction literature, science-fiction operas may be set in the future and involve spaceflight or alien invasion. Other science-fiction operas focus on a dystopian view of the future. Like Lorin Maazel's opera 1984, they may be based on a previously written science fiction book.
Utopia Pictures & Television is a production company and film distributor whose credits include the three movies based on the novel, Shiloh. On February 1, 2004, Variety announced that they had acquired the rights to produce three of Philip K. Dick's works: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth. Declan O'Brien is President of the company.
Radio Free Albemuth is the debut solo album by bassist Stuart Hamm, released in 1988 on Relativity Records. Hamm is backed up by guitarists Allan Holdsworth and Joe Satriani. The title of the album and many of the songs were inspired by the novels of Philip K. Dick.
Jonathan Scarfe is a Canadian film and television actor, director, and producer.
Shea Whigham is an American actor best known for portraying Elias "Eli" Thompson in the drama series Boardwalk Empire. He also appeared in the first season of True Detective and the third season of Fargo and in numerous films, including Wristcutters: A Love Story, Take Shelter, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, Kong: Skull Island, First Man, Vice, Joker, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. He has appeared as Agent Michael Stasiak in Fast & Furious, Fast & Furious 6, and F9.