Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner

The 1992 release of the "Director's Cut" only confirmed what the international film cognoscenti have know all along: Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's brilliant and troubling SF novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, still rules as the most visually dense, thematically challenging, and influential SF film ever made.

Future Noir is the story of that triumph.

The making of Blade Runner was a seven-year odyssey that would test the stamina and the imagination of writers, producers, special effects wizards, and the most innovative art directors and set designers in the industry.

A fascinating look at the ever-shifting interface between commerce and the art that is modern Hollywood, Future Noir is the intense, intimate, anything-but-glamerous inside account of how the work of SF's most uncompromising author was transformed into a critical sensation, a commercial success, and a cult classic.

Paul M. Sammon's distinctive career can best be described by the film industry expression "hyphenate."

As a writer, Sammon has published numerous articles, short stories and books. His many film journalism pieces have seen print in The American Cinematographer, Cahiers du Cinema, The Los Angeles Times, Omni, Cinefex, and Cinefantastique. Sammon's fiction has appeared in Peter Straub's Ghosts (1995), and he recently edited both the 1994 "dead Elvis" anthology The King Is Dead plus the "no limits" anthologies Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror and Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge (1995).

But Paul M. Sammon does not only write about movies--he works in them as well. He first entered the industry as a publicist in the late 1970s, before moving on as a second-unit director, special effects coordinator, still photographer, electronic press kit producer, and Vice President of Special Promotions. Some of the scores of motion pictures on which Sammon has labored include RoboCop, Platoon, Blue Velvet, Conan the Barbarian, and The Silence of the Lambs.

By the late 1980s, Sammon was working in Japanese television, where he coproduced popular entertainment programs like Hello! Movies for the TV Asahi network. By the 1990s, Sammon had served as Computer Graphics Supervisor for RoboCop 2; he recently was Digital and Optical Effects Supervisor for 1995's XTRO: Watch the Skies.

Despite this background, however, Sammon still likes nothing better than sitting down with a good movie. And Blade Runner remains one of his favorite films.