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Patreon Preview: Blade Runner

Note: This is a preview of “From Electric Sheep to the Final Cut: The Evolution of a Blade Runner”, my 2007 essay on the evolution of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel across twenty-five years of cinematic re-edits. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It Came from the Morgue…” level.

Cover art by Harry Sehring.

Like many cinematic adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s literary output, Blade Runner takes its hook from the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but uses the book as a starting point to develop the ideas in a new direction. Blade Runner, as adapted by writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples and realized by director Ridley Scott, inverts much of the novel’s intent by altering the nature of the story’s protagonist and the audience’s viewpoint on the world where he lives.

Written in 1966 and published two years later, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? told the story of bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his pursuit of renegade androids in a feel-good consumer culture occupying a dying Earth of 1992. Dick’s book presented a society wherein citizens flaunted their empathy by caring for an ever-decreasing supply of live animals, or pretending to do so, in the case of the eponymous electric sheep. The depleted state of livestock was the result of a radioactive cloud that constantly eroded the genetic code of those who remained on Earth rather than emigrating to its prosperous off-world colonies.

If the prospect of eventually being classified as “a special”—too gene-damaged to reproduce or hold down a worthwhile job—wasn’t reason enough to leave Earth, the deal was sweetened by a free custom-designed android for every colonist, but these slaves were illegal on Earth. It was Deckard’s job to “retire”—a euphemism for “kill”—any that make their way to the homeworld.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

Patreon Preview: J. Michael Straczynski

Note: This is a preview of “The Write Place with J. Michael Straczynski”, my previously unpublished 8,700-word interview with J. Michael Straczynski. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $10 “Fresh copy!” level.

“The best part of it is knowing that it wasn’t due to personality, lord knows,” said J. Michael Straczynski of his writing success. “It was due to making black marks on a piece of paper. Over and over again. For thirty or forty years. Somewhere along the line, you learn something. That’s how you become a writer. You sit down at a keyboard, and ten years after, when you stand up again, you’re a writer.”

“They’re exquisitely arranged black marks,” I said. “They’re not just tossed out there.”

“One certainly hopes so,” said Straczynski.

This career-spanning interview from 2008 focuses on the craft of writing in general, but makes reference to the challenges of showrunning Babylon 5 (1993–8), the frustrations of Crusade (1999) and Jeremiah (2002–4), as well as Straczynski’s success with Changeling (2008) and the difficulties he faced in adapting World War Z (2013) and the unproduced They Marched Into Sunlight.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

Patreon Preview: MirrorMask

Note: This is a preview of “The Men Behind MirrorMask”, my 2005 interview with Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. To read the full interview, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It Came from the Morgue…” level.

With fifteen years of award-winning collaborations in the comicbook industry, writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean embarked upon a new phase of their respective careers with the creation of MirrorMask, a film produced by the Henson Company, co-plotted by Gaiman and McKean, with the former writing the screenplay and the latter directing the film.

“The first real conversation about it was between [producer] Lisa Henson and Neil Gaiman, because Lisa knew Neil,” said Dave McKean.

Gaiman continued, recounting Henson’s initial approach, “Would you like to write a family fantasy film? You’ve got a four-million-dollar budget and it could be anything.”

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

I’m passing the virtual hat…

Welcome to Humanity Is My Business, the online home of the Jason Davis.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing for Creative Screenwriting, Cinescape, or Collider; my work for Babylon 5 Books or with Harlan Ellison; or my books, Writing The X-Files, the Babylon 5 Encyclopedia, or the behind-the-scenes saga of my forthcoming making of Babylon 5 books, I invite you to take a look at my newly launched Patreon account.

I’ve been a freelance writer since 2003, and much of my early work—interviews with writers, including Guillermo Del Toro, Rockne S. O’Bannon, and J. Michael Straczynski; essays on Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Godfather; and other oddities I’ve likely forgotten I wrote—has been unavailable for years. I’ll be exhuming a couple of these every month in “It came from the morgue…” at the $5 level.

First up is “Knocking Over the Candy Shoppe”, the essay I wrote for the now-out-of-print Archive edition of The Deadly Streets by Harlan Ellison. You can read the first couple paragraphs here to see if it takes your fancy.

For patrons who join at the $10 level, there’s “Fresh copy!” These are newly written pieces—some based on older works, but completely re-written or expanded by more than 50%, or both—that allow me a creative outlet beyond the aforementioned Babylon 5 project that consumes most of my waking hours.

The initial offering is a 2007 interview with Steven Moffat, discussing his writing for Coupling, Doctor Who, and his then-forthcoming series, Jekyll. A bit of this was published in CS Weekly, the long-defunct online companion to Creative Screenwriting, but it’s more than doubled in length. I went back to the original interview recording and got every bit of writing advice the future Doctor Who showrunner had to offer.

You can see a few paragraphs of the Moffat piece here, to see if it’s your cup of tea.

For those who don’t want to go the Patreon route, but appreciate my work and want to offer a digital tip, I’ve also established a Ko-Fi account.

Whether you found me via Creative Screenwriting, Cinescape, Collider, Babylon 5 Books, HarlanEllisonBooks.com, Writing The X-Files, the Harlan Ellison Books or Babylon 5 Preservation Project, Patricia Tallman’s B5 Events, or my Write Your Story workshops, I appreciate you taking time to explore my anarchic little website.

Thank you for your interest.

If you find my work worthy of a contribution via Patreon or Ko-Fi, thank you for the support. It is appreciated more than you know.

Be well,
JASON DAVIS

Patreon Preview: Steven Moffat

Note: This is a preview of “The Strange Comedy of Doctor Who and Mister Moffat”, my 3,300-word interview with Steven Moffat. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $10 “Fresh copy!” level.

“I always wanted to be a writer,” said Steven Moffat, thumbing a goodnight text to his wife—eight hours in our future and headed for bed—into his Blackberry. “There was never a time where I wanted to be anything else. I can’t recall any other ambitions, quite honestly.”

It was Saturday, 17 February 2007, and we were sat in a quiet corridor of the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, the din of a nearby convention underscoring our conversation.

“The very first things I wrote were an adaptation—a very bad one, as you’d expect from a seven-year-old—of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and endless Doctor Who stories. I have the distinction—this year—of writing my own new version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Doctor Who; hurray, I’ve really made progress there.”

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

Patreon Preview: The Deadly Streets Essay

The Deadly Streets by Harlan Ellison (Edgeworks Abbey Archive, 2020). Cover photograph by Steven Barber.
The Deadly Streets by Harlan Ellison (Edgeworks Abbey Archive, 2020). Cover photograph by Steven Barber.

Note: This is a preview of “Knocking Over the Candy Store”, my 2,000-word article on Harlan Ellison’s first short story collection, The Deadly Streets, originally published in the now-out-of-print Archive edition of that book. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It came from the morgue…” level.

On 5 March 1958, editor Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Book wrote to U.S. Army PFC Harlan Ellison in Elizabethtown, Kentucky about the possibility of purchasing his long-delayed novel, Web of the City, from Lion Books, which was selling off its properties and going out of business. While Pyramid Books would have the honor of publishing Ellison’s first novel—as Rumble (1958), much to the author’s chagrin—Wollheim suggested Ellison assemble a 60,000-word collection of juvenile delinquency stories for publisher A.A. Wyn. Within five days, Ellison’s first book of short fiction, The Deadly Streets, had been assembled and shipped off to New York.

Subtitled “a collection of stories about juvenile delinquency,” only eight of the thirteen tales originally earmarked for inclusion made the final table of contents…

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer / Editor