Philip Kindred Dick may be science fiction’s greatest writer ever. His writing and ideas on reality, humanity and technology blend West Coast Utopianism, counter-culture paranoia and mystical experience. His work has been adapted into films including ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Total Recall’, ‘Imposter’, and Steven Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report’, starring Tom Cruise. His novels and stories continue to inspire and influence a generation of filmmakers, writers, technophiles and philosophers. But for the last ten years of his life, he inhabited a reality stranger than the fiction he created.
Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982 following a series of strokes, left behind a legacy of more than fifty novels, five volumes of short stories, reams of correspondence, and an 8,000 page self-examination he called ‘The Exegesis’, explaining, he hoped, the mystical experiences which inform his later fiction.
Now in this 2001 documentary, the first feature-length examination of the mind behind the science fiction classics, hear first-hand from friends, fans, fellow writers such as Robert Anton Wilson (The Illuminatus! Trilogy), Ray Nelson, Paul Williams and D. Scott Apel, about the bizarre events that shaped Philip K. Dick’s final decade: the mysterious break-in at his California home, the letter he thought would kill him, the series of visions he believed were Divinely inspired and the 8,000 page manuscript he wrote in an effort to unlock the meaning behind it all.
Director Mark Steensland states, “Whether or not you think Philip K. Dick was completely insane or whether or not you think he had a religious experience, I want this movie to make you think about what those possibilities might mean in your own life.”