He’s producing a new 4-hour miniseries based on Dick’s The Man In The High Castle for the BBC. Howard Brenton, the British playwright who’s also written for Spooks/MI-5, is adapting the Hugo Award-winning novel. Headline Pictures is also producing with Electric Shepherd Productions, the production arm of Philip K Dick’s estate, and Scott’s production company Scott Free. Fremantle Media, which handles The X Factor, will sell the 4 hour-long episodes overseas. Dick’s novel is a science fiction alternate history, depicting a world in which the Axis powers — Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany — triumphed over the Allies in the Second World War. Fremantle is developing the TV miniseries for BBC1. Dick, who wrote 40 novels and 125 short stories during his brief 54-year life, has become one of the most popular authors for Hollywood to mine today. Sony Pictures is developing a remake of Total Recall, while Disney is developing King of the Elves. March sees the release of Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. And of course, there was Scott’s Blade Runner, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and the original Total Recall. These rich Hollywood deals strike me as bitterly ironic given that Dick was so poor during his own lifetime he resorted to eating dog food.

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