Ubik script questions
Things to decide while working on the first draft (a list in progress):
- How long should it be? The book is 227 pages long, which comes out to about 2-1/2 hours, which is what Will was anticipating, but that seems a bit long to me. I think it would be better cut down to 2 hours for cleanness and clarity... any more and it might lose its hallucinatory tone.
- Do we want a narrator? I'm pretty sure we can get away without one.
- How serious should it be? Definitely has potential for humour or not. Will see what Will wants.
- How to differentiate characters? There are a lot of main characters (the average radio drama has about three. Cabin Pressure gets away with four, but it is very tightly written. Hitchhiker's Guide has more, and I often lose track of who's talking), and characters who are important later in the book don't appear at the beginning and vice versa. Keep the focus on Glen Runciter and Joe Chip; everyone else is tertiary.
- When should it be set? The book is set in the 1990s, but a futuristic 1990s as envisioned from the 1960s when Dick wrote it. To maintain the futuristic setting now, it would have to be set in our future, say 2050 or so.
- When should they regress to? In the book they regress to 1939, but other periods would be easier to identify audially: say WWII, Vietnam War or 1969 (moon landing). Will says: "for me now that you have read it, i can say this now... the idea of doing a radio play came mostly as an inspiration by the idea of this time travel back to 1939. which is sonically very interesting because it was around the golden age of radio... so in my mind i was thinking about the production sound itself shifting back to 1939, but this also means that the actors language and so on would change as we go back in time.. the music of course too, lots of strange music throughout."
- What should we do with the Ubik ads that open every chapter? Will says, "the commericals for me are super important. each one of the chapters has the ubik commericial and I want to do a bunch of those, like every 15 minutes or so...and have those change and go back in time... so that by the end the radio play should sound like it's coming out of an old record player, with the hum and so on. and then ubik reverses that, and then it ebbs..." But: The characters can't hear them, so I'm afraid that putting them in would confuse the audience, and break up the flow of the story. Also: Ubik seems to exist only in the half-life, so putting them in before that would really confuse things. Perhaps put just them in the post-explosion part of the story?
- How to communicate the little notes that Joe finds in the half-life? Will says, "Ubik is gnosis... salvation through the "trash" of the world, messages from scraps in the gutter, parking tickets, graffiti, commercials, etc... the only way that the "true" god can communicate with the parts of itself stuck in time, without rousing the suspicion of the demiurge... so the idea of trash, and truth communicating with us through trash is very important with pkd..." Have Joe read the notes out loud?
- What purpose does each character serve? Which characters can be consolidated?