Dick's UBIK begins production early 2009

Back in October, it was announced that The Halycon Co. (the guys behind the new Terminator series of films) had struck a massive deal with the Phillip K. Dick estate to have the option of bringing each and everyone of the popular author's unpublished works to the big screen. However that deal must have never been finalised because Variety today report that Ubik, Dick's 1969 novel which was to be the first adapted from The Halycon Co. has been put into development at Celluliod Dreams and should begin pre-production early next year.

The novel actually set in the early 90€™s is one of Dick's most famous un-filmed works and has become almost notorious because of a big screen attempt in 1974 when French film-maker Jean-Pierre Gorin was set to direct an adaptation based from a screenplay that Dick was said to have written in ONE drug filled night, but it never got off the ground. The beginning of a massive long plot synopsis is below, but you can read the rest from Wiki€

The protagonist is Joe Chip, a debt-ridden technician for Glen Runciter€™s €œprudence organization,€ which employs people with the ability to block certain psychic powers (for instance, an anti-telepath can prevent a telepath from reading a client€™s mind). Runciter runs the company with the assistance of his deceased wife Ella, who is kept in a state of €œhalf-life,€ a form of cryonic suspension that gives the deceased person limited consciousness and communication ability.

The cryogenic suspended state is similar to the idea used in Vanilla Sky and is said to deal with notions of reality and what it means to be real. With the right director and the right crew, Dick's novels have the potential to be some of the greatest works of cinematic sci-fi history (Minority Report, Blade Runner). Would love to see either Spielberg or Scott return to the genre for this but it ain't never gonna happen sadly.