Paul M. Sammon - Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner

This Labor of Love
is for

RIDLEY SCOTT,
HAMPTON FANCHER,
and PHILIP K. DICK

and

As Are All Things, For

SHERRI SIRES SAMMON

When it came to Hollywood, I had an automatic flinch reaction.

Philip K. Dick

Sometimes the design is the statement.

Ridley Scott

Having spent the past three decades excavating, verifying, and obsessively chronicling all things Blade Runner, I currently find myself grateful, amused and musing.

Amused: Never would I have thought, especially after devouring thousands of art, exploitation, mainstream, indie and foreign filmsfrom Toni Erdmann and Julie and Celine Go Boating to The Turin Horse, from Pink Flamingos and McCabe and Mrs. Miller to Toby Dammit, from Star Wars and The Avengers to Deathdream, from The Sargosso Manuscript and The 7thVoyage of Sinbad to The Seventh Sealthat one motion picture would so indelibly dominate my life. But there you are. I have, since 1980, invested 37 years (more than half of my existence) mapping BRs dystopian, shadow-clotted streets. Who knew?

Musing: Future Noir first appeared in 1996. Since then I have watched Deaths relentless tread trample family, friends, and once-vital lifestyles; terminally corrupt at least occasionally efficient governments; horrifically erase pristine natural environments. Mankinds futureits genuine futureseems as doomed as the decaying Earth backgrounded in Blade Runner. Today I sense the same creeping dread, hear the same whispers of extinction, which so darkly suffuse BR itself. Certainly more so than that young man of 198082 who, in his early 30s, was so incredibly thrilled to befriend a personally beloved science fiction author while simultaneously bearing witness to Blade Runners gloriously messy birth.

Now I am not in my Thirties. Still, a certain lightness of spirit touches me whenever I hear the words Ridleyville, replicant, or Philip K. Dick. As it does whenever I find myself watching, for the nth, uncounted time, Ridley Scotts initially rejected, later embraced, melancholic milestone.

On to the Third Edition of this book.

Those only familiar with the American history of Future Noir might be thinking, wait, the third edition? Where was the second? The latter came courtesy of Gollancz/Orion Publishing, circa 2007, as a United Kingdom-only hardcover which added 50,000 words to the original 1996 FN; essentially, to celebrate the then-25th anniversary of Blade Runners 1982 release.

A decade later, you now hold (or are digitally perusing) the Third Edition of FutureNoir. This version is as different from the Second as the Second was from the First. It sports a different cover from its older brethren; the 2017 Future Noir further incorporates corrected, edited material from the First Edition, selected text from the Second, and brand-new copy for the Third.

Specifically, The 2017 Future Noir includes a reprinting of the longest textual interview BR star Harrison Ford has yet given on the film (one that Ford told me was a total bitch), plus; all-new interviews with Replicant Royalty Rutger Hauer and Sean Young (a particularly brave conversation, this); a chapter on the history and contents of The Final Cut (the fifthsixth?but definitely definitive version of BladeRunner); an explication of the fine(st) BR documentary Dangerous Days; Warner Bros. all-inclusive 2007 Blade Runner DVD sets; and a chronological overview of the personalities, scripts, deals and intrigues which culminated in Blade Runner 2049, the BR sequel that took 35 years to make. Herein youll moreover encounter older material (like data on BRs Blimp and Deckards PKD Blaster) originally composed for the fabled 300 lost pages, which were cut at the literal last minute from the first edition of Future Noir. A book which, I am happy to report, has, since 1996, been in continuous print for the past 21 years.

Frustratingly, further data from the original 1996 and subsequent 2007 Editions had to be jettisoned from this volume in order to reach a practical length (and price point). Those elisions are not, however, lost. Thanks to the Internet, the material which I could not incorporate into this Third Editionand it is voluminouswill be incrementally available online. Some of it will deal with older issues, such as a fuller listing of the various outmoded technologies (videotapes, laserdiscs) on which Blade Runner was first offered to home viewers. Other Internet-only chapters feature fresher materialthe mini-boom of motion pictures based on the works of BR source author Philip K. Dick, a checklist of the many films, directors and authors citing Blade Runner as a major influence, and testimonials from surviving BR cast & crew members as to how Ridley Scotts enduring ode to entropy strikes them today.

Links to online Future Noir additional content can be found on Facebook at my Future Noir The Making of Blade Runner page; simply log on to Facebook, type in Future Noir etc in the serach box, and viola!

The preceding repetition of the phrase Future Noir leads us to an interesting development. Obviously, whatever popularity Future Noir-the-book has maintained is directly beholden to the greater force, and worth, of the motion picture which it dissects. But what about the termFuture Noir? That is another story.

The words Future Noir were virtually unknown prior to the 96 publication of my book. Since then, this phrase has apparently been absorbed into, and increasingly utilized by, popular culture. Websites, rock albums, academic articles, comic books (the GI JOE series of the same name) and even, amusingly, promo films (like the featurette publicizing the 2017, live-action, Scarlett Johansson-starring version of the 1996 anime Ghost in the Shell, titled Future Noir: The World of Ghost in the Shell) have all appropriated the title of this book. Future Noir, in fact, has become an increasingly mainstream bit of shorthand to allude to a very particularized subset of overwhelmingly technologized yet gritty, dystopian science fiction.

For this, I am astonished, and appreciative. Does it matter if those whove co-opted the phrase have no knowledge of its origin? Of course not. Conversely, whenever I stumble across another appearance of the words Future NoirI smile.

Which brings us to the third emotion mentioned in this Prefaces opening; gratitude.

Simply put, thank you. Thank you allfriends, fans, and strangers, academics, fellow filmmakers and writers. Your continued interest in this book is noted and appreciated. (as, of course, is your love of Blade Runner itself). I am humbled to have become a footnote to one of the 20th centurys greatest films. As I am complimented to have lived to see Future Noir dubbed, in some circles, The Blade Runner Bible.

Only... let us hope that the hopeless future BR depicts never, ever, at least in its fullest sense, comes to pass.

Paul M. Sammon

March 27, 2017

Los Angeles CA

Its only fitting that a book examining the history of one of the most compulsively detailed motion pictures ever made should spring from one writers equally compulsive obsession with that picture.

Its also somewhat ironic that, while director Ridley Scott and company took only two years to complete Blade Runner, Future Noir took fifteen.

This book, and my fascination with Scotts moody, seminal, hyper-detailed cinematic milestone, actually began before the first frame of