Discreet Machinery: Syd Mead (1987)

Five years after Blade Runner came out in theaters, Syd Mead visited New Zealand to lecture at an Auckland technical institute and I swung an interview, i.e. asked a friend of a friend whose father worked at the polytech if I could talk to Syd and Syd said, sure. The self-described 'visual futurist' turned up dressed like a TV detective in a suit and tie and a crumpled raincoat and indulged my very young person's questions; it was only as the conversation progressed that I realised Philip K Dick's fiction was a much larger part of my life than it was of his. Cult movies really were cult movies, then. I had an ex-rental VHS copy of the first cut of Blade Runner and I don't like to think of how many times I watched it.

Mead's lecture consisted of 35mm film slides of his paintings and drawings on twin Kodak Carousel projectors which he operated manually during his narration. The interview was recorded earlier in the day on a Phillips cassette deck and transcribed on a Sharp QL300 electric typewriter. This version of the story was published in the Melbourne-based magazine Tension, issue #12, December 1987. This week Terence Hogan scanned the pages and emailed them to me as PDFs which I converted to text using a free online OCR service and uploaded to Blogger. Give me a hard copy, right there.

*

The future was once a bright and happy place. Built on the social aspirations of the fifties and sixties and fuelled by seventies technology, Tomorrow was a time when two-car families became two-rocket families and holidaying couples went for picnics on Venus. Designers, writers and illustrators assured us that society would ease into the new frontier without so much as blinking.

A designer named Syd Mead, then working as a 'visual futurist' for US Steel and Ford Motors was – and still is – one of the great optimists. His paintings and drawings depict utopian futures filled with sleek transporters and vast buildings. Cities are slotted into mile-wide space-bound cylinders or, as in one future-projection of San Francisco, constructed as a single piece of "discreet machinery" to complement the size of the surrounding landscape as well as its ecology.

Last year a Tokyo company commissioned Mead to imagine a sport of Tomorrow. He suggested "120-foot high robot racing greyhounds." Another painting shows going to work: a giant Lazy Susan slides down one side of a skyscraper, collects the tenants in their cars and serves them coffee before sling-shooting them to work. And if personal transport becomes impractical in a crowded city, he still envisages the social need for a ceremonial form of transport for, say, a night at the opera. Patrons arrive in gold, wheelless tear-drops that hover inches above the ground and flood with light when opened. It's the designer's version of the American dream a thousand years on: Royal carriages for the Everyman.

"Science fiction," Mead smiles, "concerns itself with the technology of the future, and that's a kind of magic. Isaac Asimov has said that magic is just something beyond immediate belief – it's always been one of society's favourite things to indulge in.

"I call science fiction 'reality ahead of schedule' sometimes. You can perceive a trend and other professional futurists, maybe economists, spot trends Looking into the future and creating these scenarios is exciting because you can try and imagine what would happen if you rearranged the flavours in the cake-mix. This is called modelling. Now with our elaborate computers available, this modelling-prediction technique is being used extensively in all industries. Science fiction's been doing that for decades."

Syd Mead has published two collections of his Future: Sentinel 1 and 2. Chromed and rosy-hued, they catalogue every aspect of a day in the life of Tomorrow. They owe as much to the American tradition of landscape painting as they do to the people-using-a-product renditions of advertising; it's their content that's ahead of schedule, not their attitude. This is Mead's catchphrase idea: a future that's as old as it is new. His Future reflects the present with an almost paternal reassurance. There will be fast cars in 3000 AD, but no war.

It took British director Ridley Scott to darken the vision and bring Mead's ideas to a wider public. Scott was filming Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, cutting its six-word title down to only two - Blade Runner. The plot of the novel had been likewise reduced (with Dick's full approval) to a tight, simple future-cop tale, Chandler with rocket-fins, and this had placed a special premium on the look of the film. Mead was commissioned to design a flying car and ended up shaping the look of everything else.

Blade Runner is now regarded as a watershed in science fiction and much of that credit goes to Syd Mead's visual influence. It's a wry, mature fantasy of high-tech and low-life backwashed with smoke, rain and neon. The future has never been the same since. But Mead shrugs off the movie's influence, almost bored.

"Maybe I did the lob too well on that one," he suggests. "The reason I got involved is that the first book I had published had just come out then. Ridley Scott had my book and Chris Foss's book and Roger Dean's but he picked my approach really just because of my industrial design background. The machines had little screw-holes and the metal looked like it was split in the right place for doors to open and things like that.

"The original story for the film was Philip K, Dick's and Dick's stories were very dreary anyway. I don't agree with that vision particularly, but I was hired to help Ridley make this as interestingly a dreary picture as possible, which we proceeded to do. We invented a socio-economic theory which would fit the story and then I invented the look of things to go along with that. It was a very classical industrial design approach to movie design, which isn't done that much. I like to design for film on a very logical basis and then mix it up or change the format to fit the dramatic necessities. Starting with a genuine design programme first hopefully gives the end result a more believable look."

Mead and Scott took their task seriously. Although Mead dryly reflects on the film's flying-cars ("It would be a nightmare. allowing the average person access to a three-dimensional traffic matrix") the city depicted in Blade Runner points at what is happening in cities now.

"For Blade Runner we just took all the trends in progress today: in Chicago, New York, areas outside of Paris, all the sections that are going high-rise because of land-use – and accelerated the trends already in place to come up with a sort of peculiar vertical society. We found that you need a second layer of streets for access to and from big buildings, about sixty feet above the real street. And this would produce a basement effect on the real street which would become filled with cabling and so forth.

"It all has to do with land use. If everyone wants to be in one space you have to build the buildings taller both to create more floor space within the same acreage and to handle the loan on the cost of construction. It's all a paper accounting game. One mile away there might be nice flat land and lots of room but nobody wants to build there because it isn't fashionable.

"In LA this is now happening in Westwood which is extremely dense. Visiting there is literally not worth the trouble, unless you drop in by helicopter.

"The grid plans of our cities, in general, are not much use for anything other than keeping track of who owns what property. In Europe, the old Medieval cities began at natural pathways and landmarks. As they grew and grew and try to accommodate street traffic it becomes an absolute nightmare. You try and arrange a traffic-light system there and it's almost impossible. Tokyo's like that – an absolute nightmare. It's high-energy! I love to go there. As long as someone else drives. I was asked repeatedly if I'd copied the high-rise look of the Shinjuku area for Blade Runner but I said no, I hadn't been there since before all the high-rises were built."

*

The Japanese zeal for scientific process appeals to Mead, who regards the Sixties hippies as the last flicker of techno-paranoia.

"The whole techno-chic appreciation of machine intricacy is certainly Japanese — they just love that approach. Their mind–set is different, culturally. They can literally pretend not to be next to someone on a crowded subway. Europeans and Americans and people with that same cultural base don't like that degree of proximity – your 'bubble' is that much larger. It's to their benefit that the Japanese allow that because there is this intense pressure in their lives to tolerate things in their work and living conditions which we wouldn't put up with. It's to their benefit right now economically but it's changing — the world is beginning to flatten out in terms of cultural exchange."

It was cultural exchange that first bought Mead to Tokyo. His work in other films (Aliens, Tron, 2010) had caught the eye of Japanese entrepreneurs who commissioned him to design the other-worldly interior of the Alpha-Turia nightclub. Club patrons can phone home from a moon-module phone box and dance below a shuttle-cockpit DJ booth.

"The idea was to create a science-fiction set where the cast changed every night. It had to have cost millions and millions of dollars to build |n Tokyo, with their land prices. So this disco is a space liner, the front end of a luxury intergalactic space-liner. We have the observation lounge where you can see duplicates of all the instrumentation – an intense, information-exchange lobby, if you will. And we have the disco floor which is to the delight of all the passengers; the place where they can look out the front of the spaceship. The owners took bits and pieces of what I had shown them in sketches and then had a production company translate these vocabularies of ideas into finished wall surfaces and fixtures."

Mead says he had a great time designing the club and dancing in it afterwards; like most of his work it was a combination of dreams and day-to-day employment. More practical patrons have made an effort to keep their commissions on par with Mead's imagination but their requests, in general, are odd.

The US Air Force, commissioned him to paint a recruiting poster depicting the Stealth bomber — a project so secret that it may or may not exist. As a result, Mead was supplied with no models or plans from which to work. He would make some drawings and show them to the Air Force officials and they would say – well, they couldn't say if it resembled the bomber which may or may not exist but could he make the fins a little bigger and move the cockpit forward a little? And he would ask, 'Is that what it looks like?' And they'd say, We can't tell you. The final, full-colour poster was printed in a special edition to meet public demand.

Mead's commissioned work includes designs for customised private airplane interiors. Clients such as King Hussein and King Fahud of Oman enjoy travelling in style and the designer panders unashamedly to their aesthetic lunacies. The interior of one 747 was modelled to resemble an l8th century English manor, complete with marble floors and oak doors. Another 747 sports its own jacuzzi with jewelled star-charts on the ceiling. "It's the upper end of the market," Mead says.

*

The things that will really matter Tomorrow, he insists, are the things about which we're becoming the most blasé: electronics, computers and information.

"The manipulation of information – we haven't been able to do this before on this massive a scale. You can take a computer and produce theoretical designs for industry and then do part-trial breakdown runs, all in theory. You can design a part, run it through its tests in, say, an operating engine and have a very real feeling for how it is going to operate without actually making anything at all. Thirty years ago that would have been magic.

"We tend to live, unfortunately, with all the results of the mistakes of the past to date. You can't get rid of everything at once, short of a natural disaster, so you have to adapt. So you can think up a whole new concept and apply it or you can do a clever lob of retro fitting.

"For instance, maybe people can go to work not by cars but by electronics. Which isn't a new idea but it's becoming more possible because of the way we're organising work. Other than manipulative labour, work is tending to be the processing of information that's available from within a closed network, which is what a corporate system is. You can work from anywhere that you happen to be as long as you have access to that network. So if you have middle-management people working in judgemental positions, they really don't have to go to work. All they have to do is tap into the network and they can do their lot. That, for instance, might also be a way of getting rid of so much traffic."

The thought of a 21st century society still plagued with traffic jams: it's that same blend of past and future again. Syd Mead, 54, leans back in his chair and contemplates the futureworld nine-to-five with relish.

"People have been the same for thousands and thousands of years," he concludes. "They just use different tools. The nice use of technology would be to keep the human side of things a little bit nutty, a little bit random and let machines take care of the drudgery – that would be the most ideal, optimistic track. A writer like Philip K Dick predicts things going wrong, but you really do have to take that chance."

-- December 1987

The egg hatched... and a hundred baby spiders came out

Ridley Scott will direct a Blade Runner sequel. For me this is like hearing Stanley Kubrick has only been playing dead. Intrigued as I am by the Prometheus / Alien rerun, Blade Runner is the world I'd really like him to take a second run at: the one I want to see again.

Before he died in 1982 Philip K. Dick saw the movie that would bring his writing to the mainstream:

"All I can say is that the world in BLADE RUNNER is where I really live. That is where I think I am anyway. This world will now be a world that every member of the audience will inhabit... Once the film begins, you are taken from this world into that world and you really are in that world. And I think the most exciting thing is that it is a lived-in world. A world where people actually live. It is not a hygienically pristine space colony which looks like a model seen at the Smithsonian Institute. No, this is a world where people live. And the cars use gas and are dirty and there is kind of a gritty rain falling and its smoggy. It's just terribly convincing when you see it.

"Seeing Rutger Hauer as Batty just scared me to death, because it was exactly as I had pictured Batty, but more so. I could have picked Sean Young out of a hundred different women as Rachael. She has that look.

"Of course Harrison Ford is more like Rick Deckard than I could have even imagined. I mean it is just incredible. It was simply eerie when I first saw the stills of Harrison Ford. I was looking at some stills from the movie and I thought, this character, Deckard, really exists. There was a time that he did not exist, now he actually exists. But he is not the result of any one individual's conception or effort. He is to a very large extent, Harrison Ford's efforts. And there is actually, in some eerie way, a genuine, real, authentic Deckard now."

When the third version of the film was released in 2007 Ridley Scott talked to Wired about creating the future:

The future that I had seen portrayed to that particular point — without being specific or mentioning names, because that means I'm getting really critical — all of the urban films until that moment had been pretty ordinary to not very good. So, it was a challenge to say — it's the same as trying to do a monster movie it's, like, Aliens is a monster movie. Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think. So, in this instance, my special effect, behind it all, would be the world. That's why I put together [industrial designer] Syd Mead and people like that who were actually serious futurists, great speculators, great imagination, looking to the future, where the big test is saying, draw me a car in 30 years' time without it looking like bad science fiction. Or draw me an electric iron that will still be pressing shirts in 20 years' time without it looking silly. That's the stretch, that was the target: that I wanted the world to be futuristic and yet felt — not familiar, because it won't be — but feel authentic. I could buy it. One of the hardest sets to design was his kitchen. It's not Tyrell's room, which is easy because we fantasize about a giant super-Egyptianesque, neo-Egyptianesque boardroom. But the idea of saying, what is his bathroom and kitchen like in those particular times — that's tricky.

I interviewed Syd Mead when he came to New Zealand, I think late '80s. Of course I don't have a copy of it now: it's on paper in a stack of publications somewhere.*

The script for Blade Runner was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Fancher started it:

I guess I was approaching it on my own obscure level, thinking that I was making something commercial. 'This is science fiction--people will flock to see this.' Of course, I had themes I was working with that I loved and I was intrigued with. But still I thought of it as a commercial venture... They hustled my script, my fifth or sixth draft, out to all the studios in Hollywood. And so everybody read it. I mean, important people read it, in terms of studio honchos... I was flavor of the month for about two years.

David Peoples (who also wrote Unforgiven) was bought in without Fancher's consent:

I didn't know about it. That was a secret, because I wasn't cooperating with Ridley... I came back at the end, because they called me. They needed something for the rooftop scene. They just had a couple days to shoot and they wanted me to look at rushes. I came back and I wrote some stuff for them. I hated the dailies. They sold this film down the tubes. It's not gonna work. It's not anything like I wanted.

In 1992 Peoples told the LA Times:

Hampton Fancher was the key writer. He optioned the book and made it happen. Though I like the current director's cut a lot better than the original, I have no proprietary sense about the movie. In fact, I get lost trying to figure out where I am in it.

*UPDATE: Found it! The December 1987 version of my interview with Syd Mead is here.

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Darragh McManus dusted off his old copy of Shirker for the Guardian's 2011 Halloween Reading List:

Set in New Zealand, this tale of one man cheating death is one of the best crime novels I've ever read. Beautiful artful prose, a great, twisting noir story, and a seriously spooky, sexy atmosphere. You'll feel all sorts of chills running along your spine.

Respect. The news went out on Quote Unquote, Crime Watch and Beattie's Book Blog – hat-tip to Stephen, Craig & Graham and big ups to Darragh. My thanks.

(I remember when I was small listening to the Beatles' 'Paperback Writer' and thinking, what other sort is there?)

Bad writing

Friends from both sides of the Atlantic had been on to me about Breaking Bad. I resisted because I was already following Ronald D Moore's BSG remake, Mad Men and the first three seasons of Burn Notice, which could have been and still might be the new Rockford Files, and three TV series in your life is already too many.

Breaking Bad came out around the same time as another what-would-you-do series, Hung which tailed off (sic) in the first season and I imagined Bad would go the same way. The premise seemed obvious, and cancer storylines are depressing. (1970s TV characters were usually felled by a heart attack which finished things quickly.)

When I finally caved I discovered what I liked most about Breaking Bad was that the premise was obvious. The second thing I loved was the scripts. Series creator Vince Gilligan discussed the writers' approach to the show to Robin Kelly:

"I look for good visual storytelling. We take pride in our dialogue, but TV and movies, this is visual storytelling. It's the difference between a play and a screenplay. A stage play is all about the dialogue, and I've seen and read some wonderful ones, but that's not what we're doing here. We're telling a story through the images. I specifically look for visual writing, which is to say not the dialogue on the page, but the action lines, the scene description. How much is the writer getting across through a look, through a bit of body language, the omission of an action or the action itself? Versus a writer who gets everything across verbally. Because in real life, very often we don't say what we mean; very often we say the opposite, or we don't say anything at all."

Series DOP Michael Slovis talks about the arc to the LA Times' Josh Gajewski:

"The other thing that 'Breaking Bad' has in its favor, which is very interesting to me, is time... There is no need to rush anything in 'Breaking Bad' because it's an ongoing story, so you don't really have to re-explain things visually or storytelling wise, so we have time to actually let people move through spaces, down halls, into homes, in a very sort of European storytelling way."

In an interview with J.C. Freñán for Slant Gilligan talked about the difference between writing for movies and TV:

Slant: You've worked in both television and feature films. Do you have a preference for either one?

Vince Gilligan: I would have to say television, because once you are on a writing staff, or once you create a television show, for as long as that show exists you know that you're writing, you know that your work will get produced. The same can't be said for writing for features, unfortunately. Write a movie script, you can put your heart and soul into it for months, for years, and peddle it around Hollywood and ultimately it may well go nowhere. I've experienced more heartbreak in the movie business than in the TV business.

Slant: Is there anything about the format of serial television itself that influences the way you write, that you have a preference for? Is it easier to write a one-off film than it is to sustain a season at a time?

VG: They're both hard, but I suppose that the saving grace about writing a television show is that you don't have to wrap up everything plot-wise at the end of every episode, and you can leave certain questions unanswered. You can leave certain emotional issues not quite completely tied up. In a movie, on the other hand, you have to tie up every loose end that you have set for yourself, and you have to wrap things up emotionally in a very satisfactory manner, and you have to complete the plot in that two-hour segment of time that you're allotted. Endings are just very tough for a writer, at least speaking personally.

In 2010 Gilligan talked to Slate's Noel Murray about ending season three:

My writers and I sit around and dream this stuff up and then we see it executed a week or even days later, and it's a wonderful feeling and it's magical. Especially in moments like that one, which was a great example, because I had high hopes for that scene and then seeing what Adam Bernstein the director did with ['Half Measures']... He exceeded my expectations. That moment was thrilling to watch in the editing room for me. I've never had children but it must be akin to the pride you feel watching your children grow or be born or something. I don't know. I don't have that background in my real life. But it's an intense pride. And it's not a pride of "I did this," it's a pride of "we did this," because it really is a group effort. There's no one person doing it all in television or in the movies. It's always a collaborative effort and anyone who tells you otherwise is awfully pumped about their own contributions to the endeavor. But it's a great feeling, a great collaborative feeling, and it's wonderful.

Lock the parents out, cut a rug, twist and shout

Whenever I hear the song 'Santa Baby' I always think 'spider baby,' like that head in John Carpenter's The Thing, i.e.

Spider Baby, slip a sable under the tree for me
Been an awful good girl, Spider Baby
So hurry down the chimney tonight...

And so on, until the authorities are called in with their flame-throwers.

There was a trailer for the Thing remake in the movie theater last night: the kids in the audience kept talking over it and didn't notice. But when Paranormal Activity 3 started they went quiet – no texting – and then they all screamed, a lot. The movie includes one gag specifically from Halloween and some tricks Carpenter employed very effectively in Prince of Darkness (still one of his scariest). The pan-and-scan sequences put me in mind of the long, unblinking cabin shots in Friday the 13th, and there is a nice pay off that improves on The Blair Witch Project, a movie which is now so old that many in the audience would have only seen it on the small screen. It made no difference: the kids were shitting themselves. Paranormal Activity 3 is scary but above all harrowing. Despite the faux-casualness – handheld is the new sprezzatura – it makes you sit and watch. Loved it.

Amy Winehouse died from drinking too much. This is old news but still depressing. Some editorials are trying to paint her music as part of her suffering but it wasn't, which only makes it the more tragic. She didn't suicide: she just didn't cope. Being so physically small can't have helped.

I'm forcing my way through Stieg – a better translation this time, but his obsession with detail undermines his own plot. In contrast to the oddly entertaining details about sponge cakes, sandwiches and coffee – Blomkvist is a man who always knows where the next snack is coming from – it drives me crazy that in twenty years, nobody thought of trying a Bible code. A row of numbers, anywhere, anytime, that's the first thing anyone reaches for either in the real world or fiction. On the other hand the Hedestad sequence with the photos is great – Antonioni's Blow Up via De Palma's rock-and-roll editing suite sequence in Blow Out. Salander is not Pippi, she's Hannibal: the NeXT Lecter. Anyway, I'm making myself finish it this time so I can be up with what the young people are skimming.

Just one last thing

Television, I dare you.

Auckland on air

This Sunday France Culture will broadcast a documentary about Auckland featuring in situ readings from my novels Departure Lounge, Shirker, Electric and The Church of John Coltrane along with interviews with Auckland artists, musicians and general creative types. You can read about the broadcast and the podcast at the France Culture site.