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From: boyajian@akov68.DEC (Jerry Boyajian)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: re: BLADE RUNNER
Message-ID: <2810@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Jul-84 08:43:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.2810
Posted: Tue Jul 24 08:43:44 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Jul-84 07:38:32 EDT
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Organization: DEC Engineering Network
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> Whether Blade Runner was a good movie or not, it's a
> typically bad adaptation of a book, Do Androids Dream
> of Electric Sheep.  It's as if someone reduced the plot
> to 3 sentences, then handed it to someone else to expand
> back into a full length script.  Not only did they leave
> out some of the nice things in the book, but the elements
> they left in had no relevance to the movie plot.  Example:
> the empathy test that involves showing photos to the
> suspected android.  The whole point in the book was that
> all the pictures showed death or mistreatment of animals,
> and with nearly all animals on the verge of extinction,
> any human would have great empathy for the animals.  In the
> movie, the picture of the nude woman is emphasized, but
> not because she's lying on a bearskin rug, as in the book.
> If you didn't read the book, the whole scene doesn't make
> any sense.
>
> Bill Kelly

It certainly *does* make sense if you haven't read the book, because *I* haven't
read it (I tried, but I found the first three pages unreadable, so I gave up),
but I understood perfectly what was going on in the movie. Some of the details
may have changed, but the point of the test was to judge *the emotional reaction
of the subject*. The fact that some of the scenarios given had nothing to do
with mistreatment of animals doesn't change that fact. Is this a really major
point? Does is change the outcome or the focus of the whole movie? No.
	There are some who think that what an author puts into a book is sacred,
and that it is sacrilege for a filmmaker to change anything. I don't. As long as
the central point is preserved, and major details, I have no objections.
	And BTW, it so happens that Dick was generally pleased with what mater-
ial he saw from the film before he died. He felt that the feel of the book re-
mained intact.

--- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, Maynard, MA)

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