Latest news with #PhilipKDick
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Hiltzik: These nonfiction writers looked for the future of L.A. Did they find it?
The Los Angeles we know has long been an irresistible subject for novelists and moviemakers — so much so that they've often tortured reality to make it conform to their imagination. Robert Towne mined the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in his screenplay for "Chinatown" but moved the story ahead up by some two decades, from 1913 to the 1930s, to give his scenario its noir sensibility. Ridley Scott and his filmmaking team depicted a future Los Angeles beset with darkness and a never-ending downpour of rain for "Blade Runner" — never mind that its source material, Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," was set in San Francisco, that provincial burg some 400 miles to the north. But the task of depicting a future Los Angeles hasn't been monopolized by fiction writers. Nonfiction writers have joined them in their obsession. They include the late environmentalist Marc Reisner, author of the indispensable "Cadillac Desert," the public policy expert Steven P. Erie of UC San Diego, historians such as Kevin Starr and Carey McWilliams, and polemicists such as Mike Davis. Even most of those whose subject is or has been the L.A. of their own time have taken pains to look ahead. How well have they outlined the future of Los Angeles and Southern California? Let's see. The tone of nonfiction conjectures about the future of Los Angeles generally fall into two categories, elegiac or apocalyptic — and sometimes both: "utopia or dystopia," in the words of Davis. Read more: The 3 essential Mike Davis books that explain L.A. Davis was the avatar of the latter approach. The first of his books about Los Angeles, "City of Quartz" (1990), mostly looked back at the history of the city's development. It was his follow-up, "Ecology of Fear" (1998), that really attempted to sketch out a future for the city, based on his vision of "the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and ranch-style homes — as it erodes socially and physically into the twenty-first century." Davis drew a line from what he saw as "the current obsession with personal safety and social insulation ... in the face of intractable urban poverty and homelessness, and despite one of the greatest expansions in American business history" in the mid-1990s to explain "why fear eats the soul of Los Angeles." He wasn't far wrong. A few years later, I visited the maker of underground nuclear shelters fashioned from corrugated steel at his shop and showroom on the 5 Freeway in Montebello, where he was doing great business for models that started at $78,000 each; "Yes, paranoia does sell" was how I headlined my column. It still does: Guard dogs, surveillance cameras and sentry-protected neighborhood tracts have proliferated all around the Southland. Davis foresaw the continued development of "tourist bubbles" — theme park-like "historical district, entertainment precincts, malls ... partitioned off from the rest of the city" — think developer Rick Caruso's shopping center the Grove, opened in the Fairfax District in 2002, which presents blank or billboarded walls to the outside world, enclosing a Disneyesque landscape of shops and restaurants inconspicuously monitored by security services. ::: As opinion pollsters know, when you ask people what the future will look like, they invariably paint a picture that looks just like the present, only more so: If there's a crime wave when they're being polled, they foretell a world beleaguered by armed gangs; if there's a recession, they expect a world of unrelieved poverty; if it's a period of technological advancement, they foresee a world of flying cars. Writers projecting a future of L.A. tended to fall into the same pattern. The Slovenian transplant Louis Adamic, who had emigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in the port community of San Pedro, scrutinized Southern California with pitiless objectivity in a 1930 essay titled "Los Angeles! There she blows!" Read more: Reading L.A.: Louis Adamic and Morrow Mayo Adamic mentioned the conviction among Angelenos that their city "will ultimately — perhaps within the next three or four decades — be the biggest city in the world." And he acknowledged that "the place has many great advantages, among the foremost, of course, being Climate, and but a single drawback, which, however, is an extremely serious one — that of water shortage." Nevertheless, noting that the city's population had doubled over the previous 10 years to nearly 2 million, he confidently predicted that it would number 3 million by 1935. It didn't reach that mark until the 1980s, and it's not the first time, nor the last, that a prediction of the city's future overshot the target. His concern about water, of course, was spot-on. Another writer who extrapolated from what he saw of the Los Angeles of his time was Morrow Mayo, whose 1933 book "Los Angeles" is quoted elsewhere in The Times' Future of L.A. package. Mayo expressed the opinion that even if "the territory known as the 'City of Los Angeles'" grew from its then-population of 1.2 million to 4 million or more, he doubted that "it will ever be permanently the great vibrant, vital, nerve-center of the Pacific coast." The reason, Mayo wrote, was its climate — "meant for slow-pulsing life; a climate where man, when he gets adjusted to the environment, takes his siesta in the middle of the day. Go-getterism in this climate does violence to every law of nature." What kept Los Angeles even marginally vibrant was the steady influx of vigorous immigrants from the East and Midwest. After a few generations under the sun, Mayo concluded, "it will settle back to normalcy, and become in tune with nature, for man has never yet failed to adjust himself to the climate in which he lives." Thus did Mayo pioneer the stereotype of the laid-back Angeleno with barely a care in the world. On the other hand, Mayo quoted a fellow prognosticator as finding in the city's industrial districts "that same peculiarly contented type of workman, the same love of little homes 'across the street from the factory,' the diligence and care for the flowers in the front yard, or the fruit trees and vegetables in the rear, a total lack of the Bohemian spirit, the love of a comfortable, humble existence," that could be seen in Philadelphia. As a picture of Los Angeles, Mayo wrote, "I suspect that it is prophetic. 'Los Angeles — the Philadelphia of the West.'" Read more: Contemplating the 'Cadillac Subdivision' Such miscalculations point to another pitfall facing those who would dare to predict the future of Los Angeles: Change has come so rapidly that any prediction can be confounded within the lifetime of its author. Thus Carey McWilliams, that indefatigable chronicler of the California pageant, wrote in his book "Southern California Country: An Island on the Land" that the aircraft industry was "likely to remain in the region and even to expand production." McWillliams wrote those words in 1946; by 1980, when he died, the industry had crashed in Southern California, entering a long period of retrenchment that ended with Boeing's closing of the region's last commercial aircraft manufacturing plant in 2005. The Long Beach plant's 300 workers were transferred to Boeing's military aircraft assembly line, but that was shut down in 2015, ending an era, as The Times observed, in which the region was. "once synonymous with the manufacture of aircraft." The trajectory of the Los Angeles ecology, and by extension that of Southern California and the entire state of California, was the subject of Reisner's 1986 book, "Cadillac Desert." He viewed the water politics of the region, quite properly, through the prism of winner-take-all economics. Water was wasted by farmers and urban residents because it was almost free. That was already beginning to change in his time, he observed, but the process would need years, even decades, to play out — if it ever could. "The West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth," he wrote in the closing pages of "Cadillac Desert." Reisner looked ahead, hopefully, to a West that "might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states' rain .... A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more — in revenues, in jobs — than water taken out of the rivers." "At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future than forward to the past." Regrettably, Reisner, who died in 2000, didn't live to see that happen. Whether his hope will ever be fulfilled remains an open question. Perhaps the most penetrating look at the future of Los Angeles and its state came from Peter Schrag, a former editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee. In his 1998 book "Paradise Lost," Schrag sought not simply to foretell the region's future, but to explicate how its future foretold what was in store for the country as a whole. (Its subtitle was "California's Experience, America's Future.") When he wrote the book, California was in one of its boom phases. It was again "the driving engine of national economic growth and likely to remain in that position until well into the next century .... Because of foundations laid forty years go ... it is at the forefront of the world's leading-edge technologies and of its creative energy." (He was right about that, at least up to this moment.) But Schrag also pointed to the state's "increasingly dysfunctional governmental and fiscal public institutions, the depleted state of its public infrastructure, services, and amenities, the growing gaps between its affluent and its poorer residents, and its pinched social ethos," which "hang like dark clouds in the sunny skies." California had exported to other states the facile low-tax policies of Howard Jarvis and Ronald Reagan's view of government as "the problem, not the solution." In addition, Schrag saw that the emergence of social media "may insure against the power of Big Brother to dominate communications, but they also amplify the power of shared ignorance .... What used to be limited to gossip over the back fence is now spread in milliseconds." And he foresaw how the changing demographics of California would be replicated nationwide: "The new kids now crowding into the schools and universities of California — black, brown, Asian — will constitute the majority of the state's workforce, and a good part of the nation's, in the next decade, and forever after," he wrote. Schrag had his finger on an essential truth about Los Angeles and California that remains true to this day: They're the subject of unending curiosity for readers of history and current affairs no less than for consumers of novels and movies. That has been true since the vision of a land of gold — El Dorado — drew the Spanish conquistadors to these shores. The world wishes to know what L.A. and California are, and where they are headed. Kevin Starr, writing in 1995, understood how that impulse would play out in the decades to come. "The United States is testing its future through California," he said in an essay for the website of the California State Library, which he served as state librarian from 1994 to 2004. Establishing California as a "bellwether state," he wrote: "The American people are asking a series of questions which now become the California challenge .... Can the American people turn to positive effect the cultural diversity of a nation in the process of being transformed? ... Can the American people maintain their standards of living and education?" Starr's answer to the questions he posed was a resounding yes! "In recent times," he wrote, the American people have turned to California and asked it to create a technology revolution, and California responded .... The American people have turned to California for new models of lifestyle, new ways of enjoying and celebrating the gift of life, and California responded with an outpouring of architecture, landscaping, entertainment, sport and recreation." The confidence that Starr projected 20 years ago may have faded, and may fade further in the future in Los Angeles and up and down the state. But one thing that probably will remain true is that the region's path into the future will inspire writers to keep peering into their crystal balls, cloudy as they are. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword
Times
02-08-2025
- Times
Precrime profiling is no longer a fantasy
This week the UK government introduced an 'artificial intelligence violence predictor' into the prison system, a tool to analyse factors such as criminal record, age and behaviour, to calculate which inmates are most likely to resort to violence so officers can intervene before they do. With attacks on prison officers increasing, AI profiling of inmates is the latest example of so-called precrime technology, based on the dubious theory that science can foresee individual criminal behaviour and prevent it by disrupting, punishing or restricting potential law-breakers. The idea was popularised in the 1956 Philip K Dick novel The Minority Report, adapted by Steven Spielberg into a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise, in which teams of psychic 'precogs' exercise foreknowledge of criminal activity, including premeditated murder, to identify and eliminate persons who will commit crimes in the future. • Prisons get 'Minority Report' AI profiling to avert violence In the film, set in 2054, the chief of the Precrime agency explains the advantages of pre-emptive justice: 'In our society we have no major crimes … but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.' Thirty years ahead of schedule, instead of clairvoyance as a crime prevention tool, we have AI. The theory of precrime dates to the early 19th century and the Italian eugenicist Cesare Lombroso, who is purported to have invented the term 'criminology'. Lombroso believed that criminals were born lawless, inheriting atavistically villainous characteristics and physiognomies. Criminal anthropometry, the precise measurement of faces and bodies, he argued, could be used to identify crooks and stop them from committing crimes. This 'positivist' school of criminology claimed to recognise criminals not only by biological characteristics but also through psychological and sociological forms of behaviour. 'Born criminals', nature's psychopaths and dangerous habitual offenders, could thus be eliminated using capital punishment, indefinite confinement or castration. The sinister notion that a system might detect the mere intention to offend is echoed in the 'thought crime' of George Orwell's 1984. Richard Nixon's psychiatrist, Arnold Hutschnecker, advised the president to run mass tests for 'pre-delinquency' and confine those juveniles to 'camps'. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hutschnecker insisted these would not be concentration camps but holiday camps in a 'pastoral setting'. In the 1970s, the University of California, Los Angeles attempted to set up a Centre for the Long-Term Study of Life-Threatening Behaviour, using scientific data to predict 'dangerousness'. It planned to 'compile stocks of behavioural data to understand crimes that had not yet occurred but were 'in formation'.' The project foundered when it was suggested the centre intended to use 'psychosurgery' to modify behaviour. • Conned by the Tinder Swindler: how his victims took revenge But precrime is not some sci-fi fantasy or a wacko theory from the fringes of eugenics; it is already here. 'Predictive policing' — using data to forecast future criminal activity — is expanding rapidly. The UK Ministry of Justice is said to be developing a 'homicide prediction project' using police and government data to profile individuals with the aim of forecasting who is more likely to commit a murder. The project, revealed in April by the investigative group Statewatch, will 'review offender characteristics that increase the risk' and 'explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide'. In the US, the software system Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is used by police and judges to forecast the risk of recidivism among more than one million offenders. The software predicts the likelihood that a convicted criminal will reoffend within two years based on data that include 137 of each individual's distinguishing features as well as criminal or court records. This is where actuarial science (mathematical and statistical methods used to assess risk in insurance, pensions and medicine) meets crimefighting and sentencing guidelines: a technological tool to predict the risk of reoffending by rating factors such as type of crime, age, educational background and ethnicity of the offender. In Chicago, an algorithm has been created to predict potential involvement with violent crime to draw up a strategic subject list — or 'heat list' — of those the algorithm calculates to be the city's most dangerous inhabitants. Precrime is most obvious and advanced in the context of counterterrorism to identify threatening individuals, groups or areas, but inevitably invites conflict between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the needs of national security. In the traditional justice and criminal system, the law attempts to capture and punish those responsible after crimes have been committed. AI could invert that equation by meting out punishment or imposing surveillance where no crime has been committed — yet. As the chief of the Precrime agency in Minority Report observes: 'We're taking in individuals who have broken no law.' Critics fear that precrime techniques could remove the presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of the justice system, and increase guilt by association since an individual's known contacts would influence any risk assessment. It also threatens to dehumanise individuals by reducing people to the sum of their accumulated data. Latter-day predictive policing already deploys data analysis and algorithms to identify higher risks of criminality, triggering increased police presence in certain areas and communities. Critics argue that this leads to increased racial profiling, with certain populations disproportionately flagged as high risk. If the data pool being 'learnt' by AI is already racially biased, then its predictions will be similarly skewed. Until the digital age, crimefighting was based on solving crimes or catching criminals in the act. In the age of AI, the sleuth will rely on machine learning to uncover clues to crimes that have yet to be perpetrated. 'It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data,' said Sherlock Holmes. In the brave new world of precrime, the data will take over from the detectives.
Irish Times
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Why the EU's plan to access our phones and data is daft
Precognition, an idea examined by Philip K Dick all the way back in 1956, is the latest misguided plan to make us all feel safer. In Dick's The Minority Report, better known for its Tom Cruise big-screen adaptation in 2002, crimes could be stopped before they happened. Dick's method was precogs, a psychic trio of people that could recognise when a crime was going to happen. The European Commission has a different approach, decryption through its Protect EU plan, which has noble motives. It aims to combat child sexual abuse material by giving law enforcement authorities access to encrypted data . The method would involve scanning private communications, including on platforms well-known for end-to-end encryption like WhatsApp or Signal. READ MORE [ Have EU laws to protect our privacy online worked? Opens in new window ] The way of doing this would be to scan messages on the client-side before they are encrypted, essentially checking what the user plans to send before it gets to the encryption stage that happens during the process of sending. For context, these are infinitesimally small amounts of time in which the actions would occur. This would make it easier for law enforcement authorities to access the communications of those that distribute illegal content. It rather feels like the European Commission missed the point of Dick's work. Well, maybe not everyone involved. The proposal was announced on April 1st after all. The methods outlined in ProtectEU undermine the strong cybersecurity stance the EU itself wishes to push There are layers of terrible to this awful idea, which is basically shielding itself in the argument that it's for the greater good. Before the matter of user privacy rights, there are obvious cybersecurity challenges. The backers of ProtectEU are missing the most obvious issue with their plan: any attempt to weaken encryption weakens everyone's security. While criminal actors benefit from it, it also impacts pretty much everyone else from journalists through doctors, law enforcement itself, businesses, whistleblowers and, rather importantly in this context, the victims of crime. [ How businesses can help protect themselves from cyber attack Opens in new window ] Any tool that would create a means to weaken encryption, even if the tool was created for the purposes of doing good, can be exploited by criminals and other bad actors. Even Lindsey Graham, the US senator and a noted hawk when it comes to anti-terror measures, agrees on this. Graham was one of the loudest calling for Apple to find a way to access the iPhones of the culprits in the San Bernardino terrorist attack in 2015. He changed his tune to the opposite when the risk this would create was made clear to him. As it happened, the phones in question were later accessed by targeting a zero-day vulnerability, or security flaw. The methods outlined in ProtectEU undermine the strong cybersecurity stance the EU itself wishes to push. Governments across the bloc, along with agencies within it, constantly push for greater digital resilience yet this measure would erode the strongest protection it has at the front line of security. Then there's the matter of the would-be good actors that would have access to such a system. Between the tech companies that would need to comply and the law enforcement agencies involved, the amount of people with potential legitimate access to such a backdoor would easily number in the tens of thousands. Simply assuming these would all be good actors, even with the most rigorous of vetting processes is laughable. That puts to bed the classic argument of 'if you have nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear.' ProtectEU would essentially be prosecuting the intent not the attempt We all have lots to hide, every one of us. Sadly, most of it isn't even that interesting. Personal information regarding our finances and the likes would be the most obvious example. That's why the privacy issue is so entangled with the cybersecurity one here. Even if encryption isn't removed, scanning before it acts nullifies its very purpose. This in turn would enable less democratic regimes to point to the EU – meant to be a bastion of democracy – as justification for their own efforts to outlaw or inhibit encryption. A successful implementation of ProtectEU would effectively have the Commission doing the hard work for totalitarian states in designing a mass surveillance system. Europe wouldn't use it, I think, but plenty of others would. Yes, it really is that bad an idea but it somehow gets worse. Let's assume the method for scanning pre-encryption, as ProtectEU plans, occurs and, implausibly, no cybercriminals or anyone else ever misuse the new means of attack. In that instance, when should law enforcement authorities act on the information? If they act the moment they know the person has illegal digital material in their possession then that actor has clearly got possession of illegal material and could probably be proven to have intent to distribute. Likewise the intended recipient could potentially be charged with intent to receive, where such laws exist. Yet they couldn't be charged with actually distributing it, while the would-be recipient would not yet have committed the crimes related to receipt and possession. If authorities act immediately, then they are limiting what they can charge and likely who they can charge as well. If they wait, then they get to add on more charges but have knowingly failed at preventing a criminal act. It's quite a dizzying moral puzzle. ProtectEU would essentially be prosecuting the intent not the attempt. The Minority Report was meant to be a warning not an instruction manual.
Time of India
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Can AI lay claim to human rights?
By Jug Suraiya Science fiction has an uncanny way of becoming science fact. And this appears to be happening today, when the world is trying to come to terms with the seemingly limitless evolution of AI. Indeed, the very term Artificial Intelligence is already being challenged as a misnomer in that, in many ways, AI which has learnt to learn from itself, may be deemed to be more authentically autonomous of thought than human intelligence. The scenario is eerily reminiscent of the 1982 science fiction film, Blade Runner , based on the 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep by Philip K Dick. In the guise of a sci-fi thriller the novel can in hindsight be seen as a prophetic morality play that raises ageless questions of the relationship between the creator and the created. The film is set in a futuristic Los Angeles where an enforcement officer called a Blade Runner is tasked with tracking down and 'retiring', a euphemism for 'executing' a rebellious 'replicant', an advanced android, created as slave labour and indistinguishable from humans in all respects. The Blade Runner tracks down his quarry who, before being 'retired', asks his executioner: Why did you create me and endow me with free will to make my own destiny if that is a crime for which I must be destroyed? The anguished plea echoes the cry of Salieri in the film Amadeus when, overshadowed by the idiot-savant Mozart, the lesser composer demands of his Maker: Why have you given me the passion to worship you with my music without giving me the ability to do so? Today, when the gathering, and apparently unstoppable, momentum of large language AI is increasingly blurring the distinction between man and machine, are we reaching a flexion point when the created calls into question the supremacy of the creator? The theoretical question has been raised as to whether the self-thinking and self-conscious systems of cognition can lay legitimate claim to protection under the rubric of human rights. Organisations like PETA advocate the ethical treatment of animals. By the same yardstick can AI, which is capable of thought processes infinitely more complex than those of any animal, justifiably demand protection from exploitation and repression? Is AI entitled to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the emblematic beacon and guiding light of democracy? Such questions resonate with the branch of theology called theodicy that seeks to explain why an omnipotent and benevolent God would allow evil to exist in the world, why such a divine being would permit bad things to happen to good people. The most commonly adduced reason for this is that the consequences of evil, pain, and suffering are the price we pay for free will, the exercise of choice which gives us moral agency, and makes us human, and not puppets of a divine dispensation. In the case of AI, such arguments get stood on their head, whereby a future android, a human-like robot, might ask of its creator, the computer scientist: Why have you created me in your image if you deny me what your creator has given you, the free will that makes you human? What will be our answer to that? Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Telegraph
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Arnie and Sharon Stone's trip to Mars: The ultra-violent saga of Total Recall
Thirty-five years since Total Recall landed in cinemas, screenwriter Gary Goldman has a memory of director Paul Verhoeven pulling out a huge box. 'Paul scared me!' Goldman says, remembering the writing task that lay ahead. The contents of that box – a pile of scripts – represented Total Recall's agonising, stop-start journey. It was the summation of everything that kept the film – based on Philip K Dick's 1966 story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale – at various levels of development hell for 15 years. Multiple writers and directors had produced some 40 drafts, which included – most curious of all – a David Cronenberg version that would have starred Richard Dreyfuss and a pack of sewer-dwelling mutant camels. Total Recall had done the rounds so often that it came on Goldman's writer-for-hire radar on three occasions. Now his job was to crack what no previous writer could: a satisfying conclusion. 'Paul gave me six or seven drafts and showed me the things he liked in them,' says Goldman. But Verhoeven and Goldman had a not-so-secret weapon, a name that would become a byword for cinema's, bicep-bulging, bankable brand of action – Schwarzenegger. The Austrian superstar – whose muscles were matched by a sharp mind for box office and marketing – had pursued the Total Recall script as determinedly as his T-800 Terminator once pursued Sarah Connor. Arnold Schwarzenegger saved the Total Recall script from bankruptcy, and the film was retooled specifically for him. But Total Recall isn't just any old Schwarzenegger vehicle. Total Recall is the ultimate Schwarzenegger film: a near-future, off-world fantasy that cranks up all the Arnie-isms to a hyper degree. It's all there – everything that was specific to Schwarzenegger's appeal at that time – in the fabric of Total Recall's not-quite-a-dream, not-quite-reality. The gruesome violence and bad language. The knack for dispatching villains with creative panache and a quip (' Screw you! ' he shouts as he runs one chap through with a giant drill). Also, the weirdly recurring idea of Arnold's dual identities and – continuing from The Terminator – the sense that he's somehow more than human, as rendered by Total Recall's Oscar-winning special effects. See Arnold emerging from beneath the gurning visage of a 'fat lady' disguise; yanking a golf ball-sized bug from his lively nostrils; and – the film's best remembered scene – choking on the surface of Mars, eyeballs being sucked out. Schwarzenegger plays Doug Quaid, a construction worker who dreams about going to Mars. To satisfy his urge, he visits tech company Rekall and has an 'ego trip' implanted – an artificial memory of being a secret agent on Mars, where he saves the planet and bags the brunette of his literal dreams, Melina (Rachel Ticotin). But the procedure uncovers a suppressed memory. He really was a secret agent on Mars, his real identity has been erased, and his beautiful-but-deadly wife (Sharon Stone) isn't his wife at all. To find out who he really is, Quaid goes to Mars and joins a mutant rebellion against Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), the oxygen-hogging Mars governor. Producer and writer Ronald Shusett first optioned Philip K Dick's short story back in 1974 for $1,000. 'I knew it would be an incredible movie,' Shusett later said. 'An incredibly expensive movie.' Shusett began writing with Dan O'Bannon (the same duo also created Alien) but they ran out of story to adapt by page 30. In Dick's version, the character never makes it to Mars. The story ends with an abrupt punchline about an invasion of alien field mice. For Shusett and O'Bannon, the question was where to take the character next. O'Bannon suggested a solution (though an ultimately expensive one): 'We take him to Mars.' Shusett tried to develop the film with Disney before Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis picked up the rights. David Cronenberg then developed his version under De Laurentiis and Shusett. Beginning in 1984, Cronenberg produced 12 script drafts over a year. By that point Total Recall was already notorious as one of the great unmade scripts. 'The thing that would not die,' said Cronenberg, though he had to concede 'because it had a terrific premise.' Cronenberg went to De Laurentiis's studio in Rome to prep the film with Richard Dreyfuss in the lead – Cronenberg actually wanted William Hurt – but the director clashed with Shusett and walked away. 'You know what you've done?' said Shusett about Cronenberg's serious, more intellectually probing script. 'You've done the Philip K Dick version.' 'Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing?' replied Cronenberg. 'No, no,' said Shusett. 'We want to do Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.' Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger was tracking the project but De Laurentiis – who executive produced Arnold's Conan films – didn't see Arnold in the role. Total Recall came close to production again in 1987, this time in Australia with Driving Miss Daisy director Bruce Beresford and Patrick Swayze. This version, said Shusett, was more 'Spielberg-ish'. But just 60 days before production was set to begin, De Laurentiis's company filed for bankruptcy. Beresford called Shusett with the bad news. The director watched his sets being torn down as they spoke. Seeing the bankruptcy news, Schwarzenegger called Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, the executive producers at Carolco Pictures. Carolco, an independent studio, was known for spending big money and giving film-makers relative freedom. Carolco had hit big with Sly Stallone in Rambo and with Schwarzenegger in their stable – the next big thing in action –– they snapped up Total Recall for a reported $3-5 million. Mario Kassar laughs looking back at the deal. De Laurentiis, ever the salesman, had upsold them to include his already-paid-for production materials. 'Dino said, 'I've made all these special effects,'' remembers Kassar. ''I'll give you all the effects [for an increased cost]. It was a box of toys! Train and car miniatures... a few little Dinky toys! It was all part of his salesman speech.' With the script secured, Schwarzenegger enlisted Verhoeven. The pair previously met at an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills. Schwarzenegger went over to tell Verhoeven how much he had enjoyed RoboCop, which opened in 1987, and they made a loose, gentlemanly agreement to find a project together in the future. Schwarzenegger called Verhoeven a few months later. 'I have the project,' he said. Verhoeven was sold on one particular scene, in which Dr Edgemar (Roy Brocksmith) comes to Quaid and explains – quite convincingly – that his adventure is just a delusion, the exact secret agent fantasy that Quaid purchased at Rekall. Edgemar, who claims to be a safeguard within the artificial reality, offers Quaid a red pill to return to the real world (a decade before The Matrix handed out reality-awakening red pills). But when a bead of sweat dribbles down Edgemar's brow – proof (or is it?) that he's real after all and one of Cohaagen's goons – Quaid shoots him dead. It's the point of no return for Quaid. It was also the point at which every previous script draft had fallen apart. 'There were no more twists and turns,' remembers Gary Goldman. 'My goal was, let's keep this smart and surprising, if possible, all the way to the end.' Verhoeven also insisted that they keep the film ambiguous. Is Quaid's adventure real? Or is it just the Rekall-induced dream? There are details throughout that suggest it could just be the fantasy. Edgemar, for instance, plainly spells out the final act. 'We figured out ways to do it – to keep it on this razor's edge,' adds Goldman. 'Ultimately, we decided to make it work both ways, so there's no definitive answer that it's one or the other.' Total Recall was filmed in Mexico City and made use of the suitably futuristic architecture. The Mars colony – an alien mine-turned-industrial estate–turned sleazy red-light district – was constructed across nine soundstages at Churubusco studios. For Goldman, another challenge was to make Total Recall a Schwarzenegger film, and to get around the inherent ridiculousness of Arnie – with his distinctive accent and Mr Universe-winning physique – playing an agent in deep cover. (See also: the least inconspicuous undercover cop/kindergarten teacher of all time.) In Philip K Dick's original story, the character was a meek office worker – 'a miserable little salaried employee'. The Arnie version of Total Recall required lashings of Arnie-sized violence: skewering someone through the head with a steel bar; slicing off Michael Ironside's arms in a nasty elevator mishap; using an innocent bystander as a pulpy flesh-shield during a shootout. The violence – way more extreme than most modern action films would have the guts to serve up – was carefully scripted to deliver creative kills. Indeed, ultra-violence was one unifying factor in what feels, on the surface, like a melding of The Terminator and RoboCop – the T-800 storming through a RoboCop-like world of dark science-fiction, sleaze, and smirking satire (the commercials for Rekall easily sit alongside RoboCop's news bulletins). Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven were a perfect pairing for the moment. Arnold was blowing away bad guys and snapping necks all over the place. Meanwhile, Verhoeven's sense of obscenity, sleaze, and knowing silliness manifests as one of Total Recall's most enduring images, the triple-breasted mutant hooker (Lycia Naff), a character so deeply ingrained in the film's memory that she was updated for the (ironically forgettable) 2012 remake starring Colin Farrell. Mel Johnson Jr, who plays Benny, a mantis-armed mutant cabbie with five kids to feed, recalls being accosted by a gang of teenagers after the film was released. After asking him some rudimentary questions, one of them blurted out, 'Were the three breasts real?!' 'You just knew that's the question they really wanted to ask!' Johnson says, laughing. Johnson had actually auditioned for a Sylvester Stallone film before Total Recall. 'It was just horrible, the character was so stereotypical black,' he says. He read the Total Recall script the very next day and remembers that Benny was described as a 'jivester', which read like another blatant stereotype. 'I just took the script and threw it across the room,' he says. 'I was fed up.' Johnson gave Benny another chance and was hooked by the twist: Benny is an undercover villain and tries to squish Quaid and Melina with a mole drilling contraption. Selected for the role by Verhoeven's daughters, Johnson killed time on set by learning to drive Benny's double steering-wheeled taxi. He became so adept behind the wheels that he had to take over from the stunt driver and take a tricky corner at high speed. When Schwarzenegger's double went to sit in the back, Arnie stopped him. 'Arnold goes [adopting a Schwarzenegger accent], 'Oh no, if Mel is driving the car, I'm getting in the car, too,'' recalls Johnson. 'Everyone was going, 'Oh Jesus, what if he crashes the car?!'' Arnold, says Johnson, was 'witty, funny, no muss-no fuss, no entourage, none of that stuff.' Johnson also remembers the film's most impressive special effects creation: Kuato, a parasitic twin that emerges from the stomach of its big brother (Marshall Bell). Looking like a hideous-but-nonetheless-wizened baby, Kuato imparts psychic advice. The effect was created by putting Marshall Bell in a body prosthetic, alongside other shots of an animatronic recreation of the actor. 'Rob Bottin had to build an entire robot,' says Johnson. 'Paul didn't want it, he said it would look fake. So, Rob built it, shot a scene, and showed it to Paul. Paul was furious and said to Marshall Bell, 'When did you shoot this without me?!' Marshall said, 'I didn't do it!' Paul realised it was a robot and he couldn't tell the difference!' Between the mutants, fake Arnie heads, and the recreation of Mars, Total Recall is one of the great last gasps of pure practical effects, though it features some early CGI, as Quaid walks through an X-ray machine and we see his full skeleton. Filmed over six months, Total Recall was an immense production – one of the most expensive films ever at the time. The actual budget was never confirmed though. Mario Kassar puts the budget around the $30-$40 million mark, though reports at the time said $60 million. Verhoeven guessed $50 million. 'It went a little bit over, like every movie,' says Kassar. 'We went to Mexico to try and save as much money as possible. You're in the hands of your director. There's not a week that you don't argue about the budget with Paul. He's such a creative talent, he's not thinking about numbers, he's thinking about the movie… I've never heard of a director who wants less!' According to Goldman, Schwarzenegger used his star power to champion their vision – no matter how expensive it was – and when Carolco wanted to send Ronald Shusett home, because Shusett argued against budget cuts, Schwarzenegger stood up for him. 'He said, 'If you send Ron home, I'm going too!'' says Goldman. Thirty-five years on, Kassar gives Shusett, who died in 2024, his due credit. 'Without Ron there would be no Total Recall,' Kassar says. 'He was also a very opinionated man. But he came up with the idea. You've got to give him credit.' Mel Johnson Jr witnessed Schwarzenegger flex some backstage muscle during a publicity meeting with marketing executives. 'It was obvious to me that these execs were patronising him a little, as if he didn't know about marketing,' says Johnson. Arnold chomped on a cigar as the suits made vague PR promises – 'We're gonna do this and that for you,' Johnson remembers them saying – but Arnold stopped them and calmly reeled off a list of actors and all the magazine covers they got to publicise films. 'Now, are you getting those for me? Are those things happening?' Arnold said. 'The whole room changed,' says Johnson. 'He was on his game. He didn't raise his voice, didn't do it angrily. He just said these are the facts and I know the facts, so don't talk to me like I don't know what's going on. I had great respect for him.' Elsewhere, Schwarzenegger was a gregarious prankster. When the crew held a fancy dinner to mark the midpoint of the shoot – an 'almost halfway there' party – Schwarzenegger arranged for baskets of Styrofoam balls to be delivered. The dinner erupted into a Styrofoam snowball fight. 'The crew was throwing them at their crew chiefs, the actors were throwing them at Paul,' says Johnson. 'When we exhausted it, we were all just hysterically laughing. It was the biggest release and coming together. That was all Arnold.' Yet Total Recall might not have hit its eventual $260 million box office without that ever-elusive satisfying conclusion. To fix the longstanding problem, Goldman proposed an inspired twist: in chasing down his past and true identity, Quaid discovers that his old self – Carl Hauser – was, in fact, in cahoots with Cohaagen and wants his identity restored. The real man, the film's MacGuffin, is a villain; the fake identity – an artificial construction – comes out of it as the hero. 'It's the good Arnold having to give his body back to the bad Arnold,' says Goldman. Total Recall opened on June 1, 1990. Schwarzenegger's films had grossed $1 billion in the Eighties, but Total Recall was his biggest box office film to date. The following year, Terminator 2 – another Carolco production and an even bigger hit – solidified him as a cultural juggernaut. The question of whether it's all a dream or reality still works – 'The answer to that question,' says Mel Johnson Jr, 'is however you feel about it' – but real or not, Total Recall is as strong as peak Schwarzenegger gets.
