Richard and Art Linklater

I'm sorry, but every time I hear director Richard Linklater's name, I think of Art Linklater. And I only know Art Linklater because, in the 80's and early 90's, he was the spokesman for the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed. All Americans my age, particularly ones who enjoyed more than 3 hours of television per day, remember the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed commercials. Linklater would stride on to a set made up to look like some old fart's bedroom, and the guy and his comely wife would be lying on a contraption that resembled a bed, except that it was contorted into an extremely odd position. The Craftmatic Adjustable Bed, to me, appeared about as sleep-inducing as a fog horn operated by Gilbert Gottfried. But then, I was not an old fart at the time. I was just a kid.

But that's not important right now. The point of this blog entry is that Richard Linklater, the Austin, TX director-guy, has a new film coming out called A Scanner Darkly, based on a Phillip K. Dick story, and it sounds awesome.

The Austin Chronicle has several stills from the film, animated in the style of Linklater's head-trip Waking Life. They call the technique rotoscoping: basically, actors and backgrounds are filmed first on digital video, then the images are loaded into computers and animated over, creating a film that is both live-action and animation at the same.

Here's my favorite image from Scanner Darkly. It's Woody Harrelson, animated as a character named Luckman.



Production company Flat Black Films said the following in the article:

Whereas our previous feature, Waking Life, aspired to a painting aesthetic, A Scanner Darkly aims to look more like a finely detailed, well-drawn comic book or graphic novel.

I'd say that's exactly what they've got. This may be my most anticipated film of 2005.