(Note: this review is of the 2007 Orion edition, updated and revised for the 25th anniversary of the release of the film)
Paul M. Sammon's Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner is not merely a must-have book for any fan of the film - it is _the_ must-have book, both for Blade Runner fans and for anyone interested in thorough and quite readable account of how a film comes to be made and the incredible number of things that influence the evolution of a film as it goes from original idea to finished product.
Future Noir is clearly a labor of love for Sammon, who started following the project from its early inception and has continued to follow it through its evolution and ultimate release - and its later re-release and multiple revised cuts - and the long-term impact it has had on the scifi film genre. First published in 1996 - some fourteen years after the film's original release - he has gone back and updated it to coincide with the film's 25th anniversary and the release of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: The Final Cut which is supposedly the director's ultimate and last word on the film. The revised edition of the book does in fact contain a great deal of new material which makes it worth finding and reading over the original edition.
In reading Future Noir, one quickly becomes aware of just how thorough Sammon has been, having interviewed seemingly _everyone_ who had any involvement in the making of the film, from Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel on which Blade Runner was based, to Charles Lauzirika, the DVD producer who was instrumental not only in the production of the Special Edition DVD set for the Final Cut of the film but also in locating an enormous trove of "lost" film from the original production without which the Final Cut would never have happened. And in between of course are quotes from extensive interviews with director Ridley Scott; screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples; _all_ of the actors, from the major ones (Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah, Brion James, Joanna Cassidy, Edward James Olmos, William Sanderson, Joe Turkel) to the minor ones (M. Emmet Walsh, James Hong, Hy Pike, Morgan Paull and others), and dozens upon dozens of people involved in the more technical aspects of the film.
Sammon's prose is both wonderfully descriptive and engaging, as can be seen in this bit on what makes Blade Runner so significant as a film:
"Blade Runner presents one of the most elaborately visualized fictional environments ever constructed for an American film; each frame is bursting with an obsessive accretion of detail. Still, it's not a pretty sight. Ridley Scott's twenty-first century is a decayed, jaded, mutated place, a cheerless landscape whose meager humanity is being ground down by the microchipped jackboot of a ruthless technological zeitgeist. Its mean streets teem with hundreds of oddly dressed citizens (mostly Asians, some punks, street gangs, Hare Krishnas, and the ever-present police). All scurrying ratlike through concrete canyons whose confines are constantly bombarded by ubiquitous neon advertising, by the blare of unctuous announcers hawking pristine 'Off-world colonies,' from huge, insanely graphic-heavy blimps, and by the sodden, perpetual downpour of a numbing acid rain.
--It is exactly this deluge of details -- the striking costumes, the fantastic flying cars, the atmospheric ethnicity, the moody music, the lavish, lived-in sets -- which makes Blade Runner such addictive eye-candy. And it is to this bewitching visual surface which most viewers repeatedly return. Like its industrial counterparts in the worlds of high fashion and architecture, Blade Runner is a form of ultrasophisticated 'designer cinema', one whose astonishingly complex visual field has, despite a subsequent decade's worth of futuristic/alternate world spectaculars like Time Burton's Batman tilogy or Judge Dredd, remained the high-water mark against which all other big-buget SF entertainments are measured."
In addition to Sammon's narrative attention to detail, Future Noir is also lavishly illustrated with hundreds of production shots taken during the making of the film giving the reader an intimate feeling of what it must have been like to witness the making of Blade Runner.
My only quibble with the book (at least the 2007 edition that I read) is that it lacks an index. It's still a great read, but the lack of an index makes it hard to look up particular points of interest if you're trying to do research or answer a specific question.
Highly, highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Blade Runner as a film or in how the film-making industry works in general.
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goes straight through all facts and shines brilliance on this mythical best sci fi film ever made.
An amazing tome about Blade Runner (1982), the best sci fi film ever made written by someone with justifiable knowledge and worthiness as he himself is in the movie business, and a media journalist who had visited the movie's set numerous times while under production. Paul k Sammon, then writer for Cinefantastique amongst other high brow movie magazines from the early 1980s, takes us on a direct voyage into the atmospheric poetic noir and existential future film from its earliest conception as a novel through to its development as a script and of course in order, a scene by scene making of account. When not using his own material (interviews etc) he cites from various media sources to fill in the gaps. His prose is never overly witty and requiring a dictionary...this pro writer digs up ghosts from the movie's past with exclusive interviews with actors, directors and producers to tell the story of the film. Subjects also tackled are the press screenings, the differences of all the cuts out there, the psychology of the film (including the moods of the actors and crew) and special effects rundown details. This is the definitive edition of Future Noir, large yet a page turner. Everything you want to know from laser disc edition differences to what was stewing in the mind of ace director Ridley Scott on set and in retrospection. And never does the boom come across as some fanatics salivatory attempt at over glorifying his/her subject. For the non hard-core fan of the film, it is still a passionately detailed well written book about how a film is conceived, made, then marketed and its impact on society. Something for everyone.
Top reviews from other countries
Marco M.
One of the best book about Blade Runner
Reviewed in Italy on December 17, 2022