Product Description

The 1992 release of the "Director's Cut" only confirmed what the international film cognoscenti have know all along: Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's brilliant and troubling SF novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, still rules as the most visually dense, thematically challenging, and influential SF film ever made.

Future Noir is the story of that triumph.

The making of Blade Runner was a seven-year odyssey that would test the stamina and the imagination of writers, producers, special effects wizards, and the most innovative art directors and set designers in the industry.

A fascinating look at the ever-shifting interface between commerce and the art that is modern Hollywood, Future Noir is the intense, intimate, anything-but-glamerous inside account of how the work of SF's most uncompromising author was transformed into a critical sensation, a commercial success, and a cult classic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #219100 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-01
• Released on: 1996-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

About the Author

Paul M. Sammon's distinctive career can best be described by the film industry expression "hyphenate."

As a writer, Sammon has published numerous articles, short stories and books. His many film journalism pieces have seen print in The American Cinematographer, Cahiers du Cinema, The Los Angeles Times, Omni, Cinefex, and Cinefantastique. Sammon's fiction has appeared in Peter Straub's Ghosts (1995), and he recently edited both the 1994 "dead Elvis" anthology The King Is Dead plus the "no limits" anthologies Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror and Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge (1995).

But Paul M. Sammon does not only write about movies--he works in them as well. He first entered the industry as a publicist in the late 1970s, before moving on as a second-unit director, special effects coordinator, still photographer, electronic press kit producer, and Vice President of Special Promotions. Some of the scores of motion pictures on which Sammon has labored include RoboCop, Platoon, Blue Velvet, Conan the Barbarian, and The Silence of the Lambs.

By the late 1980s, Sammon was working in Japanese television, where he coproduced popular entertainment programs like Hello! Movies for the TV Asahi network. By the 1990s, Sammon had served as Computer Graphics Supervisor for RoboCop 2; he recently was Digital and Optical Effects Supervisor for 1995's XTRO: Watch the Skies.

Despite this background, however, Sammon still likes nothing better than sitting down with a good movie. And Blade Runner remains one of his favorite films.

Customer Reviews

You want detail!!!
Being a big fan of the film I found this book easy to read and full of extremely interesting detail. This book gave me a greater understanding of what Ridley was trying to acheive. I will never be able to look at the film the same way again. If your a fan. Buy it.

Must have for a "hard core" Blade Runner fan
If you just appreciate Blade Runner like every other movie, this book is not for you. But if you are indeed hooked on it and want to confirm that what you've seen in the movie is for real, get this book!

I had the priviledge to watch Blade Runner in the movie theater when it first came out. I've bought the VHS and watched it over and over with increasing attention to detail, memorized lines, researched Philip K Dick and the whole nine yards. I've once thought of writing it all down so I would not forget.

More than a decade later, I saw this book at Amazon and gave it a shot! Everything that I've deemed interesting is in it: from the "mistakes" (we actually will never know if they were on purpose or not!) of a relatively inexpensive production (you can see wires that were not supposed to be seen, lips moving that do not match the lines, cheap wigs falling from stunts heads etc.

By the way, the Voigt-Kampff test is here!

Tabloid Trash
At best, this book should be looked at if you're interested in the facts behind the production of the film and you're able to look past Sammon's masturbative narrative.

While the book is informative on what happened and the difficulties behind the making of the film, the author's writing ability is about the same as someone standing next to you with a bullhorn. Self-aware and bordering on narcistsic, Sammon's dirt-basic writing ability has a constant feel of "Hey! I was here to see all this!" attitude that really undermines his attempt at objective writing.

Frustrating and amatuerish, "Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner" is an unworthy footnote and a worthwhile coffee coaster.