The Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is gorgeous.
Classic theaters throughout Central Pennsylvania are being renovated and put back into service as community arts centers, mostly by independent citizen groups working with funds raised locally and small government grants.
The Majestic is a large vaudeville theater dating from 1925, elegantly restored in 2005. The main auditorium, which seats about 1200 is used mostly for live performance. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire was recently presented there.
The Majestic also features two cinemas, both with modern stadium seating. The larger one doubles as a black-box space for live performances. The smaller of the two is dedicated to film.
These cinemas screen art-house fare, which is rare here in rural Pennsylvania. Yesterday my wife and I took advantage of
the beautiful weather to take a leisurely drive over to Gettysburg and see Richard Linklater’s film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 
‘A Scanner Darkly’.
I loved it. It was great. The casting was perfect. The rotoscoping, which made the whole film look like a moving graphic novel, was just the ticket for creating the paranoid, off-center ambience of the book.
The soundtrack, by Graham Reynolds and The Golden Arm Trio, was superb. It was unobtrusive, yet creepily atmospheric in just the right way. There were no cliches — no low, rumbling tones to signify ominous foreshadowings, no keening crescendos to telegraph emotional peak moments.
The film sent me back to my bookshelves for my 1977 Ballantine Del-Rey paperback. I read this for the first time sometime in the late 1970’s. I remember being blown away by it. It was probably the first thing by Philip K. Dick that I read. I’d read Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clark, Wells, etc. as a kid, but lost interest in Science Fiction around my 16th birthday. Ten years later, Philip K. Dick brought me back into the fold. I quickly worked my way back through as much of Philip K. Dick as I could find and put my hands onto. Much of it was in the Ballantine Del-Rey editions, and all of it is still on my shelves today.
Starting in 1982, seven of Dick’s short stories or novels have been made into films. Of these, I’ve seen ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Total Recall’, ‘Minority Report’, and ‘Paycheck’.
I liked all of them, to varying degrees and all of them had a hint of the flavor of the novels and short stories. Even the wooden Ben Affleck couldn’t ruin Paycheck for me.
I have TiVo wish lists on ‘Screamers’, Confessions d’un Barjo and ‘Impostor’ so I’ll have to reserve judgement on these until DirecTV serves them up and I have time to watch them.
But for my money, ‘A Scanner Darkly’ is the first film to come close to communicating the feel of the novels and the world of Philip K. Dick. I’ll definitely watch it again, several times.
Another great resource for P.K. Dick fans is Emmanuel Carrere’s ‘I Am Alive And You Are Dead, A Journey Into The Mind of Philip K. Dick’. Not everyone agrees with me on this one — some smart, knowledgeable people hated it — but I think it’s well worth the read.
Also, check out the official Philip K. Dick web site here.