One of my favourite writers is Philip k. Dick, a psychadelic California based Sci-fi writer who produced most of his work in the 60s and 70s. He wasn't very successful in his time and owes much of his current day fame to Hollywood. Adaptations of his work became somewhat of a staple after his death from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Spielberg's Minority Report and the Man in the High Castle TV show. The marriage between PkD and Hollywood feels like an obvious one to me, his books feel very visceral and immediate, despite how conceptual they can get. That being said, the adaptations of his work that I've seen, just don't hit the spot for me, the ultimate example of this for me being Blade Runner. BR is missing the world building elements that make the original book interesting, namely the mood organs and the social attitudes towards animals, it almost feels like a dune adaptation thats just worms, no spice, no cults, just worms. But despite how dissapointed I've been by PkD adaptations in the past, I do think theres potential for a very good movie based on one of his books, and to demonstrate I want to refer to some movies that arent necessarily based off a PkD book, but do seem to pull it off.
The first film that comes to mind is the Truman Show, and its certainly the first film that comes to mind when anyone tries to explain the plot of Time Out of Joint. Both the film and the book feature a protagonist who lives in a 1950s-esque idyllic suburban town only to find that the entire thing is a facade. Granted, the ending is quite different, and I do think that would be the point at which the film loses people, much like in Bugonia, but the rest of the book follows largely the same plot beats as the Truman show; Main character is happy & oblivious in his manufactured suburban life, things start feeling wrong(Time is out of joint-- Hey thats the name of the book!!), there are a few failed escape attempts and then finally all is revealed. Its not the strangest film you could compare to PkD, but I think it makes a good case for a PkD for the masses. I often think that the consensus on PkD is that they are somehow difficult to understand, and this may ring true for his later works, but if you can buy the Truman Show, you can buy Time Out of Joint.
Going from the most accessible immediately to the least, I present: Anomalisa. Now Kaufman has brushed with PkDs works before, having wriiten a screenplay for A Scanner Darkly(a project later taken over by Richard Linklater, going on to receive mixed reveiws), which is why I wanted to mention him, and his films more than anyone else do really scratch that itch for me. Anomalisa is a bit of an odd pick, its by far his least popular and least renowned film, but it captures something that I think nothing else has captured, it captures what pagemelt(blogger and youtube essayist) calls "the new americana". In their words: "what we call 'liminal space images' on the anglophone internet are really images of 80s 90s and 00s suburban american infrastructure". This americana is pervasive throughout anomalisa, it being set in a hotel, one you could imagine containing(a description of Heat I really like from Capitalist Realism) "interchangeable designer kitchens" and “featureless freeways and late night diners”. Philip k. Dick novels also tend towards these kind of american settings, suburbs, airports, etc. Similarly to PkD, Kaufman protagonists are often defined by their occupation, the puppetmaster who ends up puppetteering John Malkevitch, the playright who writes a play so elaboreate he's unable to discern it from reality, the customer service guru unable to tell people apart. Reading anomalisa as postmodern a lá Fisher, we can infer that one of the first, and greatest postmodern writers would make a good fit for Kaufman.
Finally theres Lost Highway. Lynch is a filmmaker who I've been somewhat obsessed with and as far as I've gone, Lost Highway is my favourite of his. The similarities between the two has been documented much better than I could in a blog I found by Salvador Bayarri. The long of the short of this post is that from a psychoanalytic angle, to psychadelic narratives, the two share numerous thematic and methodological similarities. I find that of his films, Lost Highway captures these similarities the most, It features the paranoia and metaphysics of a PkD novel, someone literally becomes another person. Lynch is also famous for his capturing of americana, and Lost Highway is the most futuristic incarnation of Lynchian americana, the first 20 mins of the film is filmed in his house, which feels as bare as the "liminal space images" that pagemelt calls the new americana, and the locations in the rest of the film feel about as anonymous as the locales of PkD's ouvre.
Consider, its the late 70's and Michael Deeley, producer of the Italian Job, is trying to get a science fiction film made, he's competing with the equally shitshow of a production that is Dune for a director, and through some cosmic mix-up, instead of the reality we got, Dune is directed by Ridley Scott and Blade Runner by David Lynch. What changes? Its really hard to tell, was Dune a failure because of Lynch, was outer space just not territory that Lynch was comfortable in? Or was it that, as its defenders suggest, that Darn Studio Meddling ruined David Lynch's masterpiece? I don't have an answer for these, what follows is a bit of an alternate history, because I thought it would be fun! but also because maybe considering this alternate history can help me understand two artists that I really like.
First we could speculate as to whether Scott's Dune would have the impact that his Blade Runner did have. It may have not been the time fore Dune, it is of course, very difficult to adapt Dune without the cinematic language of islamophobia that Villeneuve had access to thanks to the 00s. Dune also feels inextricabaly opposed to LotR, maybe the Dune movies would only have made sense as a response to the LotR movies. I think that without a doubt, cyberpunk wouldn't be the way it is now without Scotts Blade Runner, the blend of noir aesthetics with orientalist neon cityscapes is famously cited to take direct inspiration from Blade Runner. Despite a similar ambiguously dystopic quality, I don't think Dune would inspire an entire genre like this because the thing that makes cyberpunk so interesting is the cityscape of it all.
But enough about Dune, how would Lynch handle Blade Runner? To start it would probably be much more suburban, inkeeping with the book. Lynch has a reputation for ambiguity but I think he doesnt over-play it like Blade Runner does either, I think the "is Deckard an android" question would take a side line. What interests me the most is the ommissions in Blade Runner: Penfeild Mood Organs, the attitude towards animals, Mercerism, and the ending(which sort of ties these all together). While I can see the former two take a side line in a Lynch Blade Runner, I think the latter would be emphasised if anything else, in fact the final plot point of Deckard Fusing with Mercer is eerily similar to the final plot point of Lost Highway, of Fred and Pete seeming to fuse. Then of course, Lynch didn't write the script that was being shopped around in the late 70's and he quite famously didn't get final cut on Dune, so its difficult to say how much of this film would be "Lynch's Blade Runner".
As for how Lynch's Blade Runner would be recieved, I really couldn't say, as alluded to earlier, it could be that Blade Runner would be a better thematic fit for Lynch than Dune, but this only means it would be a better movie, not neccessarily a more popular one. Dune was such a pivotal movie for Lynch precisely because of its bad reception, but its not like the original Blade Runner was recieved well on release either. This may feel like a cop out, but I propose that nothing changes, both Dune and Blade Runner flop to later become cult classics, cyberpunk proliferates as a slighly more suburban flavour of sci-fi neo-noir, the only thing thats really different is that we get better 80s sci-fi movies.