The Lathe of Heaven (film) - Behind The Scenes

Behind The Scenes

Directors David Loxton and Fred Barzyk were pioneers in the early video art movement; 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.

With a two-week shooting schedule, 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. 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.

The film was shot at locations in Dallas, Texas, rather than in Portland, Oregon. These included the Dallas City Hall, the Tandy Center, Hyatt Regency Dallas and Reunion Tower, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and a vacated Mobil Oil Building in Fort Worth. 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.

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 ... 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 financing was awarded as the result of an earlier grant by 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.

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

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