Total Recall (1990) – WTF Happened to This Adaptation?

We’ve recently looked at the of Michael Crichton’s best works and it got me thinking about some of the other heavy hitting sci-fi writers. One of the best who also happens to have quite a few adaptations to his name is Philip K. Dick. If you aren’t a big reader, then the titles We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep may not ring a bell, but I’m sure that Total Recall and Blade Runner are right up this audience’s alley. You guys seemed to really enjoy the breakdowns on Jurassic Park, Congo, and Sphere so lets take a look at one of the biggest action movies of 1990 and its source material and unpack Total Recall. No, not the remake. Never the remake for that one. Pull that tracker out of your nostril as we find out what happened to this adaptation.

The Movie

The road to 1990’s Total Recall is longer than you might think. Before Blade Runner in 1982, there hadn’t been any adaptations of author Philip K. Dick’s work even though he had been published since the early 1950s. In 1974, producer Ronald Shusett bought the rights to a short story of the author called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale in 1966 for only $1000. Shusett decided to rename it Total Recall, something that would happen often to Dick’s movie adaptations over the years, and got with writer Dan O’Bannon to create a script. At least one of these guys has to ring a bell as Dan O’Bannon worked with John Carpenter on Dark Star, helped bring Alien to the big screen, and gave us the most terrifying and hilarious running zombies with The Return of the Living Dead. A personal favorite of mine that he wrote the screenplay with Shusett is Dead and Buried from 1981. Shusett did Dead and Buried as well as Alien, in like the smallest sense of the word, but also stuff like King Kong Lives, The Final Terror, and Above the Law. The two ran into a problem that the short story was, well, too short and they only had 30 pages of a script. The two men disagreed on the final act of the script with Shusett’s being more dramatic and O’Bannon’s being a little more fun.

Multiple studios found the script well written and a great concept but felt it was basically unfilmable due to the intense special effects needed and the high budget based on the movie’s scenes. The two men decided to take their ball and go home and instead helped make one of the greatest sci-fi horror movies of all time in Alien which gave them a reputation and a bit of swagger. Disney of all places gave Shusett a development deal and he really started pushing for the Total Recall project which was originally given a 20-million-dollar budget. Again, third act problems, or at least how to make it work reared its ugly head and the film was stalled again before being sold to Dino De Laurentiis in 1982. Dino didn’t mess around and immediately started pre-production with his first task being to find a director. He looked at The Stunt Man director Richard Rush, Cujo director Lewis Teague, the man who brought us Razorback, Russell Mulcahy, and Fred Schepisi who did Roxanne with Steve Martin. Who he settled on would be “needs no background or introduction” David Cronenberg, who would write a dozen drafts over the next year and be at odds with Shusett and the production company.

The actors chosen for Quaid would be Richard Dreyfuss, William Hurt, Christopher Reeve, Jeff Bridges, Harrison Ford, and Patrick Swayze before the movie had to be shut down again due to bankruptcy at the studio. Arnold Schwarzenegger finally used his huge star power and friends in the business to convince Coralco to buy it and then hire Paul Verhoven as the director after he liked RoboCop. We would also get Rob Bottin in the special effects department and Jerry Goldsmith on the score. The rest of the cast would be rounded out by Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Rachel Ticotin, Marshall Bell, and Ronny Cox. Filming for 20 weeks and with a budget of 48-80 million dollars, Total Recall would finally appear on the big screen after what felt like development hell. It would be nominated for 3 Academy Awards, winning one for special effects, and bringing home over 260 million at the box office making it a wild success for all involved. It would get the video game treatment on home computers and the NES as well as a remake in 2012 and a rarely talked about TV series sequel called Total Recall 2070 in 1999.

The Book

Well, not a book but a short story. We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is a short story written by Philip K. Dick that was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April of 1966. This was far from his first story as he began writing early and was first published in 1952. Born with a twin sister Jane in December of 1928, Dick was affected for the rest of his life by the death of his sister just 6 weeks after their birth and he moved around a bit from San Francisco to Reno to Washington DC. He would end up going to high school and college in the Berkeley area while taking classes in History, Philosophy, Psychology, and Zoology. He would end up befriending a couple of famous poets who would help him develop his ideas for a Martian language because Dick was interested in both writing and science fiction. He would eventually drop out due to massive problems with anxiety but would have enough beliefs and love of stories to begin his career.

He would first sell a short story called Roog but unfortunately most of his works would go unrecognized and he wouldn’t make much money off of his stories. He published frequently and won awards but was so unhappy and abused drugs for so long that he even attempted to end his own life after a woman he loved ended their relationship. Married 5 times and a father to 3, Philip K. Dick would die after two strokes, the second causing brain death, in 1982. That year, Blade Runner would come out and eventually become one of the defining sci-fi films of all time while a multitude of other stories written by him would be made including Total Recall, Minority Report, Knowing, Imposter, A Scanner Darkly, and The Adjustment Bureau while The Man in the High Castle would run for 3 seasons on Amazon. His influence is still felt today, and his stories will continue to be adapted, remade, or have sequels like Blade Runner 2049.

What is the same?

A man by the name of Douglas lives a relatively mundane life and dreams of going to Mars which is far too expensive for him to afford. He decides to go to a company called Rekal which specializes in implanting fake memories in their clients to give the illusion of fun adventures. Douglas chooses a memory of being a spy and at first everything goes fine until Rekal finds out that he actually did something similar to what he is being implanted with. They erase his memories of coming to their business but when he gets home, he is approached by men who know that he knows and he is forced to escape his home while figuring out what he really did.

What is different?

Well apart from the last names being Quaid and Quail which made that last paragraph particularly difficult to write, a whole heck of a lot is different. It’s probably easiest to first go through the short story and call out some of its differences there before going into the second and third acts of the movie that just plain don’t exist in the story. Doug, who I’ll call that so I don’t have to keep changing between the last names, is a construction worker in the film and a mid-level business dude in the story. When he goes to Rekal and they screw it up, he remembers and realizes in the cab on the way home before getting a full refund instead of the film that has him have a major freak out in the office. When Doug gets home, he has artifacts and trinkets from his journey that are similar to the ones that are supposed to be planted by Rekal, and a couple of soldiers show up after being able to read his mind. When movie Doug exits the Rekal center he is attacked in an alley where they try to kill him.

Story Doug escapes but eventually talks his way back into the Rekal center where the agency agrees to erase everything and implant new memories. In the second twist of the story, the twist of him saving the world is implanted but again it is a real thing that happened and messes with the process. The company decides to leave him alone as he saved the world and if he dies, the aliens he saved the world from will return in full force. The similarities end when Doug gets back to his apartment. Instead of a peaceful resolution, it turns out that Doug’s wife, played by Sharon Stone, is an agent assigned to effectively babysit him and a whole team is sent to kill him. Movie Doug had a past life as a bad guy and that guy wants his life back while the new Doug wants to get to mars and figure out why he has had dreams of a specific woman and clear up the rest of the images that flash while he sleeps.

Everything else in the movie is completely made up for the screen. While the story does discuss an assassination that Doug did on mars, we don’t get any details about an oppressive colonizer who holds down the poor sections of the colony or alien artifacts with the ability to bring oxygen to the whole planet. There are no big action sequences or villains like cohagen or Richter, there’s no love interest besides Doug’s wife or any other side characters like the mutants or cab driver. The multiple screenwriters, hell there was something like 20 drafts of the thing, took the concept and ran with an expansion that is ultimately wildly different and somehow very familiar, just like the Rekal memories the characters receive.

Legacy

The story, like many of the authors’ works, is a stone-cold classic. It’s short and clever like the best of the twilight zone or outer limits episodes and is a very easy read. Unfortunately, people know Total Recall a hell of a lot more because it’s one of the best action sci fi movies of all time. We didn’t even really talk about stuff like the body count, gore and FX, and three boobed aliens but that movie is incredible and infinitely rewatchable. It’s a testament to the movie that neither its remake nor its source material hold a candle to what so many people brought to life over the course of nearly 20 years. The story is good, the movie is quite simply perfect.

A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Happened to This Adaptation? can be seen below. To see the other shows we have to offer, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!

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