I’ve always had a thing for trippy Sci-Fi headscratchers. Its one of my favorite genres. I can’t be sure if my taste for such things is a consequence of seeing The Lathe of Heaven at a young and impressionable age, or if my intense memories of The Lathe of Heaven were because I already primed to enjoy such stuff. Either way, this was a formative movie experience.
The year was 1980, and I was ten. This was a made-for-TV feature produced by PBS affiliate WNET’s “Experimental TV Lab,” and I remember it screened several times between 1980 and 1981 in my area. I was already a devotee of Doctor Who, and so I was a regular PBS viewer who payed close attention to their schedule. Back in those days PBS actually mailed a glossy illustrated magazine to its viewers (or at least those who donated at pledge drive time) with the local schedule. I remember the tantalizing write-up for Lathe of Heaven and how I circled it on the schedule, to be sure to see it. (I wish I still had that thing. It might be a collectors item today, or at least a nostalgic souvenir. But I cut it up to cut out all the pictures of Tom Baker as Doctor Who. I was 10, remember).
And man did that movie burn its way into my skull. It’s been haunting me ever since.
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To appreciate why The Lathe of Heaven is such a fabulous piece of awesomeness, I need to first explain some of the premise. It’s set in what appears to be the not-too-distant-future (perhaps next Sunday A.D.). There’s a young man named George Orr (played by Bruce Davison in the 1980 film, and Lukas Haas in the less awesome 2002 remake—don’t worry, we’ll come to that version in a bit). George’s dreams change reality.
For example, let’s say he goes to sleep one night and dreams you die in a car wreck. When he wakes up the next morning, you died in a car wreck. Now, let’s be clear on this point—I don’t mean that he wakes up and then you die. That’s just precognition—where’s the fun in that? No, I mean when he wakes up, you died in a car wreck a long time ago—and all the things you did are now undone, and your friends never met you.
As superpowers go, this is pretty crappy. People don’t have control over their dreams—that’s where all the subconscious impulses roam, and nobody wants their uncontrolled subconscious impulses to control who lives and dies, or what happens in the world. There’d be nothing worse than discovering you were literally incapable of waking up from your worst nightmares.
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So George seeks chemical solutions to his problem, overdosing on powerful drugs to try to stop himself from sleeping, or dreaming, or if necessary, living. This gets him arrested and sent to a sleep therapist, Dr. Haber (Kevin Conway in the 1980 version, James Caan in 2002). Haber is a bit of a megalomaniac, though, and once he sniffs out that his patient is not insane but actually can do things he says he can, Haber starts trying to wield George’s dreams as a tool to reshape reality according to his principles. Of course, any fan of Monkey’s Paw-style stories know that using imprecise tools to change reality is just asking for trouble.
There are countless magical aspects to this film, but I’ll single out a few. One is that some of the most interesting ideas inherent in the premise are allowed to work as subtext rather than being openly fleshed out. It’s a heady existential notion, but rather than dwell on the philosophical aspects openly, the story proceeds along a fairly linear plot-driven path—while along the way, allowing the brainteasing aspects to fester like mold in the corners. For example—George is (for a while) the only one to realize when reality has changed. From a plot-driven perspective this is a problem for him because no one believes him, which makes him even more of an isolated loner than he was already. But the unspoken aspect is that his mind is getting crowded with competing memories of incompatible realities—he remembers too many discarded pasts, and this contributes to his apparent madness.
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Or this: George enlists the aid of civil rights attorney Heather LaLeche (Margaret Avery in 1980, Lisa Bonet in 2002) to help him escape Dr. Haber’s manipulation. She ends up witnessing enough reality-warping transformations from the ground level to mostly believe him, and he absolutely falls in love with her. When Haber uses George’s dreams to end racial strife, the actual end result is a human population that is uniformly gray. LaLeche disappears from the story during this stretch—and on one level, these scenes need to be focused on the growing conflict and complicated relationship between Haber and George, and she would be a distraction. So, plotwise, she’s offscreen for a while. But thematically, her absence is telling—her blackness is a part of her character, too much a part of her character for her to still be the same person if that skin color were robbed from her.
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The film was co-produced and co-directed by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk, who were given all of 2 weeks and a mere $250,000 to make their film. To put this in perspective, that’s about twice as much money and half as much time as the BBC used to allocate to a comparable amount of screentime for Doctor Who at the same time. The script was derived from Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1971 novel of the same name (LeGuin allegedly collaborated extensively on adapting the screenplay, choosing the cast, and managing the production—she and her family appear as extras in the movie but otherwise her exact contributions were uncredited). That script called for such epic moments as: a worldwide plague, an alien invasion, and an apocalyptic world-threatening climax. There was nowhere near enough money to approach any of those ideas directly—so, they took a page from the Doctor Who playbook and opted to be creative about how things would be represented onscreen.
That ingenuity about how to use a very economical visual shorthand to efficiently express big, costly set-pieces without the big costs was not only itself an aspect of joy—it had other, knock-on effects too. Put simply, yeah, you can get away with having a bright white light offscreen and some ominous sound effects while your lead cast look horrified, and use that to sell the audience on the idea of a worldwide epidemic that you otherwise can’t afford to show. But if you do that cost-saving stuff only where it counts, and then have everything else filmed normally, it just looks like you’re cheating.
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By way of comparison—look at Edgar Ulmer’s Detour. He had the same problem—a story spread across the county (New York to LA) and a budget that barely covered bus fare to the studio. He made “New York” out of a fog machine and a single streetsign—but that visual economy worked because he used the same Spartan aesthetic throughout. If anything the “New York” stuff looks more classy and expensive than a lot of the rest of the film, because at least it had the fog machine.
So Loxton and Barzyk use this off-kilter visual style throughout—everything seems just barely sketched in. The result leaves an enormous amount to the audience’s imagination—this, in a film that is designed to prime that imagination with intriguing ideas.
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One of the pleasures of The Lathe of Heaven is that practically every scene is set in a different reality. The sets and costumes change constantly (sometimes in the middle of scenes, depending on when and where George has been induced to dream), but moreover—the characters change. The person you are is the end product of a series of experiences—how your parents treated you, what happened at school, the influences of your friends, where you’ve traveled, etc. The nurture part of the nature/nurture divide. If some Sci-Fi mumbo-jumbo is used to completely rewrite all those experiences, some aspect of you will change too. The cast in this film are doing exemplary, subtle work, playing their roles slightly differently in each scene.
I’m not the only one who fell in love with this. It was one of the top 2 highest rated programs that PBS ran that season. And fans started clamoring for it to be rebroadcast, maybe released on home video somehow… and the years passed.
There was a problem. That $250k was enough to get clearances from the cast for a set of initial first-runs and reruns on PBS, but nothing else had been negotiated. And the film used a Beatles tune in several key scenes, back when licensing from the Beatles was a doable thing. Jump forward a couple of decades and the DVD market had changed the economics significantly, making those actors’ releases more expensive to obtain; and ownership of the Beatles’ catalogue had passed into the hands of parties whose response was simply, “No.”
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Relentless fan pressure however convinced PBS to figure out a solution. The Lathe of Heaven was one of the most requested programs demanded by audiences—so they found a way. Bruce Davison was so proud of his work on the film he spearheaded the effort to get the clearances needed. And a cover version of “With a Little Help From My Friends” worked satisfactorily in place of the original, at a fraction of the cost.
The one problem that couldn’t be overcome, though, was the state of the materials. The surviving broadcast master was in an obsolete video format that had deteriorated. Even with state of the art digital clean-up, the thing looks… smeary, fuzzy, indistinct. Like a low-quality VHS copy of a copy of a copy.
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And that was the impetus behind A&E’s 2002 remake. If audiences wanted this thing so much, and having it was inherently unsatisfactory because it looked so poor, then why not remake it with contemporary technology and make it look nice?
Well, the main reason “why not” was one I articulated above—part of the power of the 1980 original is its need to overcome absurd budgetary restrictions. That led to some creative decisions that gave it a quirky, unique feel. Setting out to make it without those same restrictions removes the need to make it weird, and without the weirdness it loses some of its steam.
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That’s not to say the 2002 version by director Philip Haas is bad—it has its charms, too—but it is less likely to burrow its way behind your eyes and fester in your memory in quite the way the original did.
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