Future Noir Revised & Updated Edition: The Making of Blade Runner

Quem é apaixonado por este filme clássico, tem aqui, o maior número de informações a respeito da obra e em edição atualizada com algumas informações do filme mais recente 2049. O livro é considerado a Bíblia do Filme Blade Runner. É completo, das origens ao culto do filme com o passar do tempo. A única queixa é que por um livro de tamanha importância a qualidade do papel é duvidosa e merecia edição em capa dura!

An excellent book: it is really the "bible" of Blade Runner! I have found it very interesting, with unexpected surprises...

I had the previous edition, but so enthusiastic was I about this book by Paul M. Sammon that I bought its latest edition right away! Going once again through this Blade Runner experience, its information, insights, reflections, the voices of all of those who contributed to this all-time masterpiece was just thrilling. All the credit to (the talent of) Paul M. Sammon who makes this incredible journey so enjoyable and fascinating! For a movie that deals so much with the question of what is a human? what makes us human? The making of Blade Runner was such a human adventure indeed! Future Noir is a must have for all Blade runner's fans. It's a must have for anyone who loves (great) movies. And to Mister Paul M. Sammon: "You've done a man's job sir!"

(Note: this review is of the 2007 Orion edition, updated and revised for the 25th anniversary of the release of the film) Paul M. Sammon's Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner is not merely a must-have book for any fan of the film - it is _the_ must-have book, both for Blade Runner fans and for anyone interested in thorough and quite readable account of how a film comes to be made and the incredible number of things that influence the evolution of a film as it goes from original idea to finished product. Future Noir is clearly a labor of love for Sammon, who started following the project from its early inception and has continued to follow it through its evolution and ultimate release - and its later re-release and multiple revised cuts - and the long-term impact it has had on the scifi film genre. First published in 1996 - some fourteen years after the film's original release - he has gone back and updated it to coincide with the film's 25th anniversary and the release of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: The Final Cut which is supposedly the director's ultimate and last word on the film. The revised edition of the book does in fact contain a great deal of new material which makes it worth finding and reading over the original edition. In reading Future Noir, one quickly becomes aware of just how thorough Sammon has been, having interviewed seemingly _everyone_ who had any involvement in the making of the film, from Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel on which Blade Runner was based, to Charles Lauzirika, the DVD producer who was instrumental not only in the production of the Special Edition DVD set for the Final Cut of the film but also in locating an enormous trove of "lost" film from the original production without which the Final Cut would never have happened. And in between of course are quotes from extensive interviews with director Ridley Scott; screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples; _all_ of the actors, from the major ones (Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah, Brion James, Joanna Cassidy, Edward James Olmos, William Sanderson, Joe Turkel) to the minor ones (M. Emmet Walsh, James Hong, Hy Pike, Morgan Paull and others), and dozens upon dozens of people involved in the more technical aspects of the film. Sammon's prose is both wonderfully descriptive and engaging, as can be seen in this bit on what makes Blade Runner so significant as a film: "Blade Runner presents one of the most elaborately visualized fictional environments ever constructed for an American film; each frame is bursting with an obsessive accretion of detail. Still, it's not a pretty sight. Ridley Scott's twenty-first century is a decayed, jaded, mutated place, a cheerless landscape whose meager humanity is being ground down by the microchipped jackboot of a ruthless technological zeitgeist. Its mean streets teem with hundreds of oddly dressed citizens (mostly Asians, some punks, street gangs, Hare Krishnas, and the ever-present police). All scurrying ratlike through concrete canyons whose confines are constantly bombarded by ubiquitous neon advertising, by the blare of unctuous announcers hawking pristine 'Off-world colonies,' from huge, insanely graphic-heavy blimps, and by the sodden, perpetual downpour of a numbing acid rain. --It is exactly this deluge of details -- the striking costumes, the fantastic flying cars, the atmospheric ethnicity, the moody music, the lavish, lived-in sets -- which makes Blade Runner such addictive eye-candy. And it is to this bewitching visual surface which most viewers repeatedly return. Like its industrial counterparts in the worlds of high fashion and architecture, Blade Runner is a form of ultrasophisticated 'designer cinema', one whose astonishingly complex visual field has, despite a subsequent decade's worth of futuristic/alternate world spectaculars like Time Burton's Batman tilogy or Judge Dredd, remained the high-water mark against which all other big-buget SF entertainments are measured." In addition to Sammon's narrative attention to detail, Future Noir is also lavishly illustrated with hundreds of production shots taken during the making of the film giving the reader an intimate feeling of what it must have been like to witness the making of Blade Runner. My only quibble with the book (at least the 2007 edition that I read) is that it lacks an index. It's still a great read, but the lack of an index makes it hard to look up particular points of interest if you're trying to do research or answer a specific question. Highly, highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Blade Runner as a film or in how the film-making industry works in general.

I didn't expect to read this book from cover to cover. Thought I'd just dip in here and there to answer some queries I've harbored about the film over the years. But once I started reading chapter one I found it hard to put down. There's so much detail all of it interesting and much of it eye opening. There's everything in this book from how the idea was conceived through the various screenplays and rewrites to how the producers, director, cast and technicians became involved, to how individual sets and props were created and used, to how just about every scene was shot. And so much more! If like me you're a Blade Runner fan its a must. If your a film student its a must. If you want to discover the trails and tribulations of getting a film made from conception to completion...its a must. Superbly written too . The only downside perhaps is that the pictures are all black and white and not all are particularly well reproduced. But then its not and "art of ...." book so I'm not going to knock a star off. Brilliant.