Hacker Cinema
The Lathe of Heaven
1980 · Film · 104 min
Directed by Fred Barzyk, David R. Loxton
Science FictionFantasyDramaThrillerTV Movie
George Orr, a man whose dreams can change waking reality, tries to suppress this unpredictable gift with drugs. Dr. Haber, an assigned psychiatrist, discovers the gift to be real and hypnotically induces Mr. Orr to change reality for the benefit of mankind --- with bizarre and frightening results.
8 positive2 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
For the fictional take on that see Ursula K. LeGuin's wonderful novel _The Lathe of Heaven_ --- the PBS movie version is unexpectedly quite good.
The WNET film of "The Lathe of Heaven" was wonderful. It was low-budget, and at times looked it, but captured the book well. It was unavailable for quite a while because of a scene centering around the Beatles' "With A Little Help from My Friends"; it was too expensive/complex to re-license it.
Never read the book or saw the film but I do remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven_(film)
As usual with these "underrated" lists, it feels more like "a list of movies you might want to watch if you haven't". Think I'll start replacing "underrated" with that from now on.
Personally I have "Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea"[1] and "Time after time"[2] from the 70s on my watch list. If we stretch the definition a bit, I'll include "The Lathe of Heaven"[3] (1980) and "Icarus XB 1"[4] (1963).
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213322/
[2]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080025/
[3]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081036/
[4]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122111/
If you can find a copy 'out there', [2] the 1980 film version [1] of LeGuin's novel 'The Lathe of Heaven' has something of the BR 'feel' to it. (Made by WNET it was aired on many PBS stations at the time.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven_(film)
Interesting trivia: that Dick and LeGuin both graduated from the same Berkeley High School in 1947.
[2]Edit: of course [480p largest] ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8VRbaVNvSA
Lathe of Heaven has to be one of my all-time favorite ANYTHING book.
When it was recommended to me, at first I thought it was a bad joke or something because the first few chapters were so "middle school-ish" in quality.
Towards the end I both wanted to find out what happened next and stop reading altogether because I didn't want the story to end.
The closest thing I found to the experience was the anime Space Dandy where the first few episodes were excruciatingly painful to watch in a "WTF is this crap?!?" disbelief sort of way ... only to progress very quickly to be one of the best entertainment experiences I can remember in a long time.
It was a kind of weird closing of the circle for me. I'd seen the TV movie (jeez, 1992, my guess was way off for when that came out) as a young teenager (perhaps 13 or 14) and the story stuck with me, but I absolutely could never remember the name. Being pre-Internet (for me, we went online a few years later in our house) there was no easy way to find it again. Then I discovered Le Guin's writings after another TV movie (Lathe of Heaven (2002)) and started reading her fiction works. In 2014, I saw the Ishi books on my girlfriend's (at the time) bookshelf and realized that was the name I had been trying to recall for 20 years. Borrowed them, read them, then found out (because it's non-obvious, Kroeber and Le Guin are not the same name) when doing a bit more research that the author was her mother, and her father was the man who worked with Ishi. It made a lot of her writing (especially the Hainish cycle) more interesting to me as I realized it all possessed this anthropological bent in how it explored the worlds and their peoples.
Lathe of Heaven can be seen on youtube here: [1]
Those who haven't seen it should be prepared for a very low-budget film which definitely feels like a 1980 period piece, but I personally enjoyed it anyway.. and conceptually it's way better than a lot of much higher budget, newer movies.
It's for people who prefer to watch something that makes them think, instead of the usual scifi fare of effects, explosions, fights, and people running around in skin-tight outfits.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8VRbaVNvSA
The 1980 film The Lathe of Heaven is wonderfully done, especially when you consider it was made as a PBS project for $250,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven_(film)
"The Lathe of Heaven" has been made into film - twice! Both were made-for-TV movies [1]. Most people (and I agree) believe the earlier version made by PBS to be the better one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven#Adaptations