The Lathe of Heaven

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The Lathe of Heaven
Cover of the 2000 video/DVD release of The Lathe of Heaven (1980)
Directed by	David Loxton and Fred Barzyk
Produced by	David Loxton, Carol Brandenburg, Fred Barzyk
Written by	Diane English, Ursula Le Guin (novel), Roger Swaybill
Starring	Bruce Davison, Kevin Conway, and Margaret Avery
Music by	Michael Small
Cinematography	Robbie Greenberg
Editing by	Dick Bartlett
Distributed by	Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
Release date(s)	9 January 1980
Running time	120 minutes
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$250,000

The Lathe of Heaven is a 1979 film (released in 1980) based on the 1971 SF novel The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin. It was produced in 1979 as part of New York City public television station WNET's Experimental TV Lab project, and directed by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk.^[1] Ursula Le Guin, by her own account, was involved in the casting, script planning, re-writing, and filming of this production^[2].

The film stars Bruce Davison as protagonist George Orr, Kevin Conway as Dr. William Haber, and Margaret Avery as lawyer Heather LeLache.

Plot

The Lathe of Heaven is set in a near-future world increasingly devastated by war, overpopulation and global warming. George Orr, a draftsman living in Portland, Oregon, nearly overdoses on uppers that he has taken to keep himself from sleeping deeply enough to dream; he ends up under the care of psychiatrist William Haber. Orr's explanation of his drug abuse is incredible: he has known since childhood that his dreams change reality, and tries to prevent himself from dreaming because he fears their effects.

Haber initially considers this explanation an elaborate metaphor expressing a deeper neurosis or psychosis. But when he realizes that Orr is telling the truth, Haber begins to use Orr's "effective dreams" to reverse the planet's deterioration, as well as aggrandize his own power and prestige. Haber suggests utopian scenarios during their treatment sessions -- which involve hypnotizing Orr so that he can sleep and dream on demand -- while never admitting to Orr that he believes in Orr's power.

Orr turns to lawyer Heather LeLache for help in getting out of his government-mandated treatments with Haber. LeLache doubts George's sanity, but agrees to help him, eventually becoming his closest ally.

Haber's attempts to direct Orr's dreams seem to change the world for the better, but at a price: devastating unintended side effects that drive Orr to despair. Orr seems to be a passive man, but he must eventually find a way to confront and stop Haber.

Cast

• Bruce Davison as George Orr
• Kevin Conway as Dr. William Haber
• Margaret Avery as Heather LeLache
• Niki Flacks as Penny Crouch
• Peyton Park as Mannie Ahrens
• Vandi Clark as Aunt Ethel
• Jo Livingston as George's Father
• Jane Roberts as Grandmother
• Tom Matts as Grandfather
• Frank Miller as Parole Officer
• Joye Nash as Woman on Subway
• Gena Sleete as Woman on Subway
• Ben McKinley III as Orderly
• R.A. Mihailoff as Orderly

Behind the scenes

Directors David Loxton and Fred Barzyk were pioneers in the early video art movement^[1]; they met in 1968 at WGBH TV in Boston, and collaborated for over 20 years, until Loxton's death in the early 1990s. The first science fiction drama they created together was a 1972 film called Between Time and Timbuktu, based on the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.^[3]

With a two-week shooting schedule^[4], and a lean budget of about $250,000, Loxton and Barzyk had to get creative to effectively convey the novel's deeper meanings and sometimes grand science fiction scenarios. ^[1] In an interview in 2000, Barzyk said,

David and I had a unique working relationship. We were co-producers, co-directors. If you really cut it down, I would run the set, and David would run behind-the-scenes. But when it came to content and the actual physical structure of the set, we had equal input. The reason that was important, especially on Lathe, is that we had a very limited budget, and we were moving into science fiction ... and let's face it, some of Ursula's ideas were pretty big. I mean, how the hell do we possibly even begin to portray the attack of aliens or the wiping out of billions of people with the plague? What it came down to was, we had to find metaphors. We had to find things that didn't cost that much money and still led to maybe the same kind of emotional impact.

...Our special effects in Lathe were not done the way they were because that was necessarily the direction we wanted to go. It was the direction we had to go. We didn't have enough money to be able to do these things, so we were constantly trying to figure out ways in which we could shoot something in half a day and imply vast amounts of impressions to the audience. For example, when everyone gets wiped out by the plague, we came up with the idea of putting people around a table and just constantly circling the table and making them distorted and growing older to imply all those people being killed. That was partly because we couldn't think of any other way to do it within the constraints of our budget. But we were also influenced by video artists. There was one artist who had taken fishwire and wrapped his face, for example, and so I used a variation of that in this scene. We grabbed from the art director the dust and the smoke and the cobwebs, and in effect we wound up using some of David's English heritage with the candelabras and the rest, which kind of went back to Great Expectations.^[3]

The film was shot at locations in Dallas, Texas, rather than in Portland, Oregon. ^[5] These included the Dallas City Hall, the Tandy Center, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and a vacated Mobil Oil Building in Fort Worth.^[6] Le Guin, her husband, their fifteen-year-old son, and her husband's eighty-year-old Aunt Ruby appear as extras in a scene where Heather and George talk over lunch in a cafeteria. ^[7]

According to a 1978 article in The New York Times, during the process of funding a prospective series focused on "speculative fiction, a category of fairly recent vintage applied to...'the most thoughtful and provocative works of science fiction...[such as] Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Anthony Burgess and Robert Heinlein," Le Guin was one of several authors whose novels were considered for adaptation: "The [$750,000] financing was awarded as the result of an earlier grant by [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] to research and develop such a series. After much study with a team of consultants that included critics, authors, editors, publishers and professors, a list of candidates for the series was compiled, from which Miss LeGuin's novel was selected" to be the series pilot.^[8]

At the time this funding was given, it was thought the film would be shot in Portland, Oregon, where the story takes place.^[8]

Loxton and Barzyk hoped that Lathe would be the first production in a public television series exploring science fiction literature. ^[9] They created one more telefilm together under this rubric, 1983's Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, based on a short story by John Varley.

Reception and awards

When it first aired in 1980, The Lathe of Heaven became one of the two highest-rated shows that season on PBS, drawing 10 percent of the audience in New York and 8 percent in Chicago, according to Nielsen ratings.^[10]

The Lathe of Heaven was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The screenplay was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for writers Roger Swaybill ^[11] and Diane English^[12]

In 1998, Entertainment Weekly magazine named Lathe one of the top 100 greatest works of science fiction.^[13]

Of the 2000 re-release (see below), TV Guide wrote, "Unlike much current science fiction, it's driven by ideas rather than special effects, and Davison's subtle performance as George, who turns out to be a far tougher character than he at first appears, is a highlight."^[14] In Cinescape, a reviewer praised the film as

"an instant classic...a film of ideas rather than action...[W]hile the minuscule budget didn't grant the filmmakers the grandeur of some of Le Guin's set pieces in the novel, such as the alien invasion or the melting of Portland, the film's strength comes from its performers and the suspenseful concepts in the writing."^[15] And Time magazine wrote:

Nineteen years before The Blair Witch Project, this classic sci-fi film showed that you can make an arresting fantasy with hardly more than the change under your couch cushions...[S]ome of the no-budget effects haven't aged well--at one point the earth is visited by alien ships that look like electric hamburgers. The provocative exploration of consciousness, though, is priceless.^[16]

2000 re-release

After its initial broadcast in 1980, Lathe was occasionally shown over the next eight years. PBS' rights to rebroadcast the program expired in 1988. The Lathe of Heaven went on to became the most-requested program in PBS history.^[1]

Fans were extremely critical of WNET's supposed "warehousing" of the film,^{[citation needed]} but the budgetary barriers to rebroadcast were high. In a 2000 article, Joseph Basile, director of program rights and clearances for WNET, said, "'Lay people don't understand that to take a program out of mothballs, we have to pay for and clear rights with all participants in the program...It's a difficult and time-consuming and expensive endeavor."

Basile also had to negotiate a special agreement with the composer of the film's score, and deal with the Beatles recording excerpted in the original soundtrack, "With a Little Help from My Friends," which is integral to a plot point in both the novel and the film. A cover version replaces the Beatles' own recording, "which would have taken too long to clear and cost 'an arm and a leg.'"^[17]

Once rights issues were resolved, the film was cleaned up from two-inch quad masters^[4]. In 2000, Lathe was finally rebroadcast and released to video and DVD.^[1] In addition to the film, this release features an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin by Bill Moyers, which initially aired along with the film's rebroadcast.

WNET has not said how much it cost to re-release Lathe, stating simply that it "wasn't cheap," and that hopefully royalties would help recoup the expense. ^[17].

Pop culture impacts

Bruce Davison guest-starred in a 1995 episode of the television show The Outer Limits titled "White Light Fever" which features a visual homage to Lathe: a "tunnel of blue light" effect very similar to a special effect used near the end of the film. (An image from this sequence is featured on the cover of both the mass market paperback edition of the novel that was issued with the film's premiere, and the 2000 video/DVD release).

The novel was again adapted as a telefilm by A&E Networks in 2002, titled Lathe of Heaven. It was poorly received by critics. Le Guin herself called it "misguided and uninteresting."^[2]

References

External links

• Thirteen/WNET's The Lathe of Heaven web site
• Lathe production stills at Bruce Davison's Official web site
• The Lathe of Heaven at the Internet Movie Database