The Billiken's Bluff

This film finished shooting last June and will be released sometime in ’05. I'm a big fan of its director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused. Waking Life. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset). Linklater based the screenplay for this film on Phillip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly. Dick wrote the stories that were adapted to the screen for such films as Total Recall, Blade Runner, Paycheck, and Minority Report. Three summers ago after watching Waking Life for the 4th time I read that Linklater was working on bringing Phillip Dick’s A Scanner Darkly to the big screen.

I really enjoyed the novel, but didn’t have any idea as to how it would work as a film. The novel takes place in America sometime in the near future. Fred is a DEA agent of sorts investigating this lethal new drug called Substance D. As the novel unfolds we learn that Substance D causes the user to develop a split personality. Fred starts investigating Bob, a notorious drug kingpin. Fred and Bob turn out to be one in the same. Fred ends up setting up a sting to catch himself.

Although the novel is science fiction, it really does a good job portraying the paranoia, and mania that accompany drug addiction. Fred is so far gone (D'd up, if you will) that he is performing surveillance work on himself (I know, we’ve all been there). I didn’t have any idea how you would present this on the screen.

Linklater decided to use what looks to be the same animation technique (interpolated rotoscoping) that worked so well Waking Life. Film live actors and then take the film and have graphic designers animate over the frame. In Waking Life this animation added to the dream-like quality of this junket through philosophy/religion/literature/ politics/microbiology/etc./etc./etc. It also made what could have been a 2 hour-long college lecture into a truly innovative, enjoyable film.


"And on particularly romantic nights of self I like to go salsa dancing with my emotions. Beware. Beware. And Beware."- Timothy 'Speed' Levitch during his Brooklyn Bridge diatribe. [This New York icon (pictured above) actually deserves a post of his own. He works as a Tour Guide on one of those double decker red buses that shuttles out-of-towners around Manhattan. After seeing Speed Levitch in action these tourist must want to get on the first bus back to Ashtabula, Arkansas. But I digress...]

I’m really looking forward to A Scanner Darkly which has a star-studded cast including, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder. My only concern is that Keanu is playing Fred/Bob. He was solid in Matrix, but that movie was carried by the special effects and innovative camera work. This is a different type of science fiction film and I would think it requires more range of facial expression than Keanu is capable of. His repetiore basically only covers the “Confused Look" to the “Whoa Look" portion of the spectrum. Hopefully a little interpolated rotoscoping will do Keanu some good.



Whoa.