by Rudy Rucker
A Way Out?
For the years 1990–2001, my novel Software was under option to a series of film companies, ending up at Phoenix Pictures. Every year someone would renew the option, and I’d get a few thousand more bucks. It was an exciting run, with dozens of ups and downs, and I went to a bunch of meetings with Hollywood people. For awhile I felt quite sure that my books would start being movies—and everything would change.
I took Rudy Jr. down to Hollywood with me one time in March, 1997, to see Scott Billups, who was for a time slated to direct the film. Scott kept telling us about a helicopter skiing trip he’d taken, going on and on about the “long lines of powder,” which seemed like a bad sign. He had a connection with Mike Medavoy, the studio head at Phoenix Pictures.
“Mike’s got a new wife, and she’s running him ragged,” Billups told us.
“Is she beautiful?” I asked.
“Whatever she didn’t have, Mike bought her,” said Billups.
Medavoy wasn’t liking the script that Billups’s writer had come up with, so Phoenix hired the screenwriters from Toy Story, and gave them strict instructions not to read my book, but to work only from the existing scripts—there were four prior scripts by now, one of them by my cyberpunk friend John Shirley.
The fifth script was horrible, and they kept getting worse—soon we were up to version eight. By now Billups was being edged out, but Medavoy stayed active. I went down for another meeting in January, 1999, and everyone was really encouraging. For a day or two, I actually thought I was going to get a lot of money.
One of the assistant producers and I went to strip club after that meeting. Sylvia couldn’t believe it, me in a strip club with a producer.
“What a sleaze-bag that guy must be!”
Actually, if the truth be told, it was my idea to go see the strippers. To my tiny mind, this seemed like a reasonable way to celebrate my (imagined) big score in Hollywood. And it was convenient to hit the club, as it was right next to the LAX airport. It was a well-lit airy place. Naturally the women were hard, robotic, and street wise. They seemed more like social workers or dental hygienists than like prostitutes.
I didn’t want to dive into the gutter and go mad with guilt. So rather than getting a lap dance for myself, I paid a woman to take my assistant producer upstairs and give him a lap dance. Even though I’m sober, I still know how to throw out money in a bar. Especially when I think Hollywood’s about to shovel hundreds of thousands of bucks into my lap.
The illusion of getting a big payday went away and the scripts kept getting worse—we were up to version ten before long. The film agent I was using then, Steve Freedman, told me that by now Phoenix had spent over a million dollars on discarded screenplays. I was alarmed that they’d thrown out so much money on such shit. But Steve said it was all good.
“The million dollars makes Medavoy pregnant,” insisted Steve. “If he tries to back out, I say—No, you’re pregnant, you’ve got to make the film.”
I had one last meeting with Mike Medavoy in August, 2000. He finally wanted my advice on how to doctor the script. They flew me to LA first class, and a limo picked me up at the airport. Like so many people in LA, the driver was talking about the Business, and she was happy to hear I was going to a script meeting.
Outside the Phoenix building, I met Steve Freedman. He wasn’t a big-time agent by any means. I’d hired him more or less at random. He looked more feral and weasel-like than I’d remembered from our earlier meetings. He was wearing a Mexican wedding shirt with the tail hanging out. I was wearing black silk pants, black silk sport shirt, black silk jacket and wraparound black shades. Mr. Cyberpunk.
Steve had been somewhat manic during our recent phone conversations, so I warned him not to be throwing in extra story ideas of his own. He agreed readily, and claimed that at the end of the meeting he’d corner Medavoy and get us our final deal.
We cooled our heels in a side room for a half hour, chatting with an assistant producer. Medavoy was stuck in a meeting, running a little late.
“So who’s he meeting with?” I asked the assistant producer.
“Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
The Terminator! Right here! Arnold was starring in film called The Sixth Day that Phoenix was to release in a few months. Soon Arnold walked by with his body guard, coming out of his meeting. He was short, as the big stars so often are. He glanced over, checking us out.
And now it was our turn with Mike Medavoy. It was him, me, Steve, and a couple of assistant producer guys. One of these two appeared to be wearing foundation makeup and lipstick. Or maybe he was made of plastic. My focus was on Medavoy. He was an Irish-looking guy, in preppy clothes.
He said he was worried about the project, and that he was embarrassed to have spent over a million dollars. He longed to hear a decent plot line, clearly broken into three acts.
I’d been preparing for this. By now I understood the Hollywood obsession with three acts. I began pitching my version, talking for five or ten minutes, but I went too slow.
Medavoy interrupted, weary and impatient. “Tell me the second act before I have to kill myself.”
Flop sweat. I rushed through the second act, but I only got in a few words about my third act before Medavoy cut me off.
“Hard to make all that work,” he said, dismissing my ideas.
And then he told how he envisioned the movie. A thriller. Lots of chase scenes. An epic battle for the spaceport, with American soldiers against robots. A general and a colonel for the lead characters.
“Big base on the Moon,” continued Medavoy. “It’s called, I dunno, why not the Octagon?”
I was flabbergasted, horrified, uncomprehending. “Octagon?”
“Like the Pentagon where the military is. I was just there on a tour last week. They have two war rooms now. It’s great.”
I glanced over at Steve Freedman. He was grinning ear to ear with his head nodding Yes like a plaster dog with its head on a spring. He’d never actually seen Medavoy before. He was in paradise just sitting at this meeting. There was no way Freedman was going to corner this studio head and tell him he was pregnant.
And then Medavoy’s underlings were hustling us out. Steve and I walked across the street and had lunch in the SONY cafeteria, a couple of Hollywood losers, cheering ourselves with thick sandwiches and staircase wisdom. I started rapping about pumping up the third act with a flying robot mosquito loaded with a mind-virus to sting the President. I picked up the frilly toothpick from my sandwich and zoomed it around, menacing Steve with it, and he was laughing. He told me his father had been a Hollywood agent too.
The Software project was dead. A couple of months later, in the fall of 2000, Phoenix Pictures sent the new Schwarzenegger movie, The 6th Day, into the theaters.
The 6th Day carries strong echoes of my Ware books. The two central idea in the movie are to record someone’s brain software and to load this digitized personality onto a tank-grown clone of that person.
These happen to be a pair of ideas that appeared, arguably for the very first time, in my novels Software (1982) and Wetware (1988). It took me some years of thought and effort to come up with these twists. They hadn’t been at all obvious or “in the air.” But by the year 2000, cyberpunk was old news, and my books had been kicking around the Phoenix offices for a decade.
The villain in The 6th Day wears horn-rimmed glasses just like mine and is called “Drucker.” Might the film-makers have been driven by a Raskolnikov-like compulsion to confess their crime?
“Yes, I killed the old woman with an axe! Yes, I stole Dr. Rucker’s ideas!”
So did I sue? Well, Mom always said it’s tacky to sue. I’m a writer, not a lawyer. And, after all, I had picked up a fair amount of money from Hollywood by repeatedly rolling over those option agreements for ten years. Why bite a hand that might feed me again?
Hollywood did indeed come back to me a couple more times—the most exciting was when Master and Space of Time was under option to the di
rector Michel Gondry, who’d recently scored a hit with The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The cartoonist and screenwriter Daniel Clowes, known for Ghost World, was working on a script of my novel for Gondry. Jack Black and Jim Carrey were going to play my characters Fletcher and Harry. But apparently Gondry couldn’t get the necessary funding.
In an interview I saw on the web, Gondry gave a kind of explanation, speaking for himself and Clowes: “It’s very hard, because all of the reasons why we both like the book are reasons why the studio would not do a movie. It’s quirky, it’s unpredictable, it’s absurd, it’s funny, and it’s not slick at all. It’s rough and grotesque.”
When I got my first Philip K. Dick award, I felt sure they’d be making movies of my novels. Now I’m not so sure. It could be that the window for that has closed for good. I don’t put much emotional energy into speculating about Hollywood anymore. If a film is ever made, great, but there’s no point letting a long-shot dream dominate my thought. Just staying in print is hard enough.
The summer after I turned fifty, in 1996, Sylvia and I took a trip to the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. Why Tonga? I was looking for a way to get off the grid. And my Autodesk cyberspace programmer friend, Eric Gullichsen, happened to be living in Tonga. He’d ingratiated himself with the Crown Prince there, and he promised we’d be given a royal welcome.
To some extent, this came true. We were met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven limousine, which was ours to use during the time we were on the main island of the Tongan archipelago. The driver was a burly guy called Whitten, nearly six and a half feet tall. He wore a straw skirt.
Tonga was more primitive than I’d imagined possible. Most of the roads were dirt or gravel. Now and then you’d see something like a fireworks stand, an open-air counter with a few shelves. Turned out those were the food stores. There were any number of rangy, irritable pigs roaming free. The outer walls of all the little houses were muddy to a height of three feet—due to the pigs rubbing against the houses to scratch themselves. In the evenings, we’d hear the thock of axes as pig-owners split coconuts to feed their herds. Due to the coconut diet, the pigs’ flesh was watery and oily.
On the first day, we had to get a visa, so we proceeded to the two-story Foreign Ministry building. The elevator had a marble floor. It was the only elevator in Tonga, manned by a man in a tie and a blue serge skirt.
“Hello,” I said.
“Malo e lelei,” said the elevator operator firmly. “You must learn to say hello in the Tongan way. Malo e lelei.”
Later we found Gullichsen asleep in a hammock on a porch. He was proud of the bicycle he’d brought to Tonga—all the parts were stainless steel to resist the sea air. He got us invited to the Crown Prince’s house—which was the only big suburban-style home around. It was guarded by guys with machine-guns.
Prince Tupou was an eccentric, plump man with a British accent. He’d studied at Oxford, and had brought an English taxicab back with him to serve as his limo. He showed us his computers—the desktop bore an image of the actress Gong Li. He’d tried to get in touch with her, but she wasn’t interested. He offered me a job tutoring Tongan high-school students in the use of computers.
“We would not provide a salary,” said Prince Tupou. “Perhaps I could eventually reward you with Tongan citizenship.”
I politely said I’d think about it. Leaving his house I had a paranoid moment that we were about to be cut down by a hail of gunfire.
Sylvia and I settled in, drifting from island to island in the Tongan archipelago. One day on Vava’u we set out to climb the highest peak in the kingdom—Mount Talau, a hill some four hundred feet tall. On the way, we encountered an old man walking down the dirt street. His shirt had several buttons missing, many of his teeth were gone, and he was carrying a small aluminum tub holding a big steak of fish flesh.
He struck up a cheerful conversation with us, very much at his ease, talking about his sister in California. His name was Lata Toumolupe. He invited us into his home to look at his shells. We took off our shoes, sat on his couch, and he brought out his treasure, a little plastic bag with tied handles and some paper in it wrapped around the nice, shiny shells that he’d gathered and had played with for years. He insisted that we take some. We selected a big whelk, two brown cowries and two tooth cowries.
“It was so touching, him offering us his prize possessions,” said Sylvia outside. “You should send him something nice.” When we got home I mailed him a diode flashlight, a Swiss knife, and some Pop Rocks candy.
Atop Mount Talau, I found a giant bean pod, pale green and easily three feet long, dangling from an overhead vine. I picked it, and then wondered if it was wrong to make off with the giant bean. I tried to hide it in my knapsack, but it wouldn’t fit completely—it peeked out at the top.
When we got back to the tiny village center and sat in a snack bar, I put my hat atop the knapsack, and the waitress thought the pack, bean and hat were a baby. Odd, that. Was the bean coming to life?
Sylvia’s personal supplies were in the knapsack too, so she borrowed it to take to the post office while I relaxed in the shade of the snack bar.
“That bean is getting us into trouble,” she told me when she came back.
“What do you mean?”
“A woman asked me where I’d gotten it.”
“Was she mad that we took it?”
“No, she just wanted to know where we got it, so she could find one. She said it was used for Tongan ceremonies.”
“I stole the ceremonial bean?”
At the hotel desk a woman told us more. “It is called a lofa bean. If you let it ripen and get brown, the lofa bean seeds can be used for—dancing.” She made a gesture, miming castanets.
Back in the room I continued to admire the bean. I wondered out loud if it might be the larva of an alien centipede. After all, the bean’s vine had seemed to hang down from nowhere.
“What if it splits open and eats my brain tonight, Sylvia?”
“It would get a small meal.”
Diving along the plunging undersea walls beyond the Pacific island reefs was like dream-flying across the steep mountain meadows of Zermatt. The walls were covered with chubby coral that was rubbery instead of hard. This soft coral was chartreuse, lavender, and pink. It came in a wondrous range of shapes, as if Mother Nature were diddling the parameter dials on a fractal generator.
Once I went down a wall covered with hard and soft coral and drifted with the current. Out in the open sea were big sharks, considerably larger than me, some of them. Not all that far away. I was about seventy feet deep. About fifty or a hundred feet below us was a swirling whirlpool of big-eyed trevalleys, each of them trying not to be out on the edge where the sharks were. The school was like a slow cyclone, making a shape like a nest, with every now and then a bright flash as one of the large fish turned onto his side to wriggle deeper into the core.
On another dive I saw some very fine manta rays. We dropped down to a sandy crushed-coral bottom at about fifty feet, crept up near some coral, and there they were, two large mantas, twelve feet across, one of them dark all over, and the other one light on the top. They were hovering over the coral heads to be cleaned by some wriggly finger-sized fish called wrasses—this spot was called a cleaning station.
The mantas were just as alien as I might have hoped, incredibly streamlined, with a geometry determined by curvature and flow and torsion. They had oval bodies, and the classic meaty triangular wings, with a rudder fin and a long spike in back. They were close enough to me that I could have touched them, had my arm been twice as long.
Their eyes were in protruding knobs at either side of their heads, not that they really have a separate head. They had slit mouths that opened up big and round when they sucked in water—I think they feed by filtering out plankton and other little things. The mantas had pairs of little steering appendages sticking out of the sides of their heads, fleshy and oar-like, rather than fin-like.
&nbs
p; Truly these dives were visits to alien worlds, and I’d use these scenes in my novels such as Spaceland and Hylozoic.
Sylvia and I snorkeled as well as doing SCUBA. Around us were clouds of little butterfly-like fish, yellow and white and fluttering like confetti. Over and over, looking ahead, we’d barely notice things disappearing—zip!—into hidey-holes. Eventually, with much patience, we were able to see that the little phantoms were bright-colored, fringed cones—like tiny, spiral feather-dusters. A local told us these were the feeding organs of creatures called Christmas tree worms. They lived in the coral, and they grew themselves hinged trapdoors like thumbnails to cover their holes.
I thought once again of my old idea of there being forms of life that move so fast that we never quite see them. Why not? Only a few centuries ago, we were unaware of the microscopic creatures that are invisible to the naked eye.
In January, 1997, I decided to write another Ware book, this one to be called Realware, with much of it set in Tonga. Realware continues along a path I followed throughout the Ware series, that is, the process of expanding the range of things that we might regard as being patterns of information.
To recapitulate: Software (1982) suggests that your mind as a software pattern that could run on a robot body, Wetware (1988) points out that DNA is a tweakable program so you can in fact grow a new meat body for your software to live in, and Freeware (1997) proposes that aliens travel as radio signals coding up the software for both their minds and their bodies. As a final step, in Realware (2000), the characters obtain a device which creates arbitrary physical objects from their descriptions. In 2010, the four novels would be reissued in a single volume called The Ware Tetralogy.
I structured Realware as a love story—over the years I’d come to understand that it’s almost always good idea to have romance at the heart of a novel. And I included a scene with my main character hugging his estranged father and seeing him off to something like Heaven. At the end of the novel, my character Cobb Anderson achieves an apotheosis as well. In writing these two scenes, I felt as if I were laying to rest the specter of my last painful argument with Pop in 1994. One of the virtues of writing is that you get to revise your past.