by David Hughes
Shusett first encountered the twenty-three-page short story in the pages of the April 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the story, downtrodden clerk Douglas Quail visits a company named Rekall, Inc., which offers ‘false memory vacations’ which, as far as the brain is concerned, are as memorable as the real thing. As Quail is implanted with the fake memory of a secret agent’s trip to Mars, the process uncovers his true identity — not only a secret agent recently returned from Mars, but someone whose death will lead to the invasion of Earth, thanks to a deal he struck with aliens as a child. Said Shusett, “This was the first story which knocked me right out, which I knew would make an incredible movie, [albeit] an incredibly expensive one.”
Shusett paid $1,000 for the rights to the story, and invited a screenwriter friend, Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star), to help him turn it into a script. “Ronny Shusett walked into my apartment sporting a filthy old Xerox copy of Dick’s [story],” O’Bannon told Cinefantastique. “He said, ‘Dan, I was wondering if you’d take a look at this story and tell me if you think this would make a good movie.’ I said, ‘I know that story and I think it would make a terrific movie.’” Thirty pages into the script, now retitled Total Recall at Shusett’s suggestion, O’Bannon realised he had exhausted the story. “Dick’s story is short,” he said. “It ends very abruptly. You cannot take that particular story and simply inflate it up to a full-length piece.” O’Bannon realised that the story was effectively a first act, and that the second and third acts would have to be invented from scratch. “Shusett liked what I did and asked, ‘Where does it go from here?’ And I said, ‘We take him to Mars.’”
The resulting script opens with the protagonist, Quail (the name was eventually altered to Quaid to avoid references to the then-Vice President, Dan Quayle), dreaming of a Martian pyramid of which he has no conscious memory. “Quaid, Earth’s top secret agent, went to Mars and entered this [alien] compound. The machine killed him and created a synthetic duplicate. He is that synthetic duplicate,” O’Bannon explained, “[and] he cannot be killed because he can anticipate danger before it happens.” The fact that this duplicate is invulnerable leads the government of Earth to a radical solution: “Earth wants to kill him but cannot. That’s why they go to all this trouble to erase his brain to make him think he’s nobody. It’s the only way they can control him.” At the climax of the script, Quaid puts his hand on the Martian machine, at which point he achieves ‘total recall’, discovering his true identity: a Martian machine. “He is, in effect, the resurrection of the Martian race in a synthetic body. He turns and says to all the other characters, ‘It’s going to be fun to play God.’” O’Bannon’s co-writer, however, wanted a more dramatic and externalized climax. “Shusett and I never saw eye to eye on the end of the movie,” O’Bannon admitted, adding: “The end that they filmed, in my estimation, is lame.”
O’Bannon and Shusett enjoyed a more fruitful collaboration on Alien (1979), the success of which gave Shusett a development deal at Disney, where he set to work on Total Recall once again. When Disney eventually passed on the project, Dino De Laurentiis’ company DEG stepped in, with plans for Richard Rush, director of The Stunt Man, or Lewis Teague (Cujo) to direct. Yet the difficulties with the script’s third act remained; problems that De Laurentiis hoped his next choice would solve: Canadian horror director David Cronenberg, fresh from the mainstream success of The Dead Zone (1983). “At that time I was not a Philip Dick fan,” Cronenberg admitted to Serge Grünberg. “I knew about him but I had stopped reading sci-fi when I was a kid; probably sometime in the 1950s. That was when I started reading guys like Burroughs and Nabokov. So I missed the beginning of Philip K. Dick’s reign as one of the supremos of sci-fi. It was the script of Total Recall which Dino gave to me which got me interested. It had this very wonderful beginning which was pure Philip K. Dick — and then they didn’t know what to do with it. So I was intrigued because it felt very close, it felt good.”
Cronenberg recalls spending a year writing and rewriting his own version of the script on a Xerox 860 word processor. “It’s a good thing I had a computer because I did about twelve drafts in about twelve months,” he says. “I was constantly fighting with Ron Shusett, and meeting with him, and then at a certain point I was sitting in a room full of people, and Ron said, ‘You know what you’ve done? You’ve done the Philip K. Dick version,’ like I had done something terrible. And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘No, no, we want Raiders of the Lost Ark Goes to Mar.’ So I said, ‘Well, Jeez, I wish we’d all had this discussion twelve months ago — it wouldn’t have wasted all our time!’” Says Shusett, “I didn’t want to do it as serious as Blade Runner. I thought it needed to have a Raiders tone; not quite so humorous, but certainly closer to that than Cronenberg’s approach.” Cronenberg confirms that De Laurentiis shared Shusett’s view. “I said, ‘Dino, I think we have to stop because we’re obviously talking about two different movies, and we might as well acknowledge it now. I don’t want to make your movie. It seems that you don’t want to make my movie. We should stop.’ He was rational but he was telling me he was going to sue me. I was surprised he even cared, but it was like he had done a deal with me and... so I basically said that I would make another movie with him. I mean I obviously wanted to work with him, but that project was clearly not the right one.”
“Cronenberg quit for a number of reasons,” Shusett explained, adding that the problems began around the time Richard Dreyfuss became interested in the role of Quaid. The actor was already an Oscar winner and star of two Steven Spielberg blockbusters, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and wanted the writers to mould the character of Quaid to his ‘everyman’ persona, rather than the action hero described in the O’Bannon-Shusett version. “First of all, he and I were having a number of creative disagreements, which started about the time of Richard Dreyfuss’ involvement. [Then] Cronenberg started to feel that the movie should take on a whole new approach, different than either of the previous ones. I disagreed with him. I wanted to go either with our earlier approach... [or] the one Dreyfuss, Cronenberg and I had evolved. But suddenly David was against his own ideas.”
So how would Cronenberg’s Total Recall have looked? “First of all, I really wanted to cast William Hurt,” he says, “and the difference between Bill Hurt and Arnold Schwarzenegger probably tells you everything. I was doing something that I thought was faithful to Phil Dick and also to my own sense of the complex understanding of what memory is and what identity is. Obviously it would have been sci-fi and you would have gone to Mars, but it would have been like Spider Goes to Mars,” he adds, referring to his 2002 film starring Ralph Fiennes as a man struggling to piece his memories together, “as opposed to Raiders of the Lost Ark Goes to Mars. In a way, Spider really is an examination of memory and how it is a created thing, not sort of a video documentary of your past but something that you’re constantly upgrading, altering, changing, shifting and editing, to the extent that your memories are your identity and you’re also messing around with your identity, which certainly was something that I’d really gone into in great depth in Total Recall.”
In 1991, Cinefantastique writer Bill Florence summarised one of Cronenberg’s drafts, noting that his version diverged most significantly following Quaid’s arrival on Mars. “Quaid takes a cab driven by Benny... to the cab depot, where he finds Melina, the chief cabbie. She gives him a job as a cab driver, and he quickly avails himself of his own transportation to visit Quato [Kuato in the final film], a memory manipulator [who] has a malformed head growing out of his body... called ‘The Oracle’.” (Given Cronenberg’s fondness for physical mutation in his films, it is perhaps unnecessary to say that the idea of mutants on Mars, and of Kuato’s malformed congenital twin, were originally Cronenberg’s inventions.) When The Oracle dies while attempting to bring Quaid’s secret past to light, Quaid visits Pintaldi, a face changer, whose manipulations of Quaid’s facial structure reveal him to be Chairman Mandrell
, dictator of Earth. After a failed assassination attempt, Quaid/Mandrell confronts Mars Administrator Cohaagen, who convinces him to infiltrate Mars Fed, who suppressed his true identity, and gives him a signal generator to track his location. “When the generator explodes — meant to kill Mandrell, but killing Benny the cab driver instead — Mandrell returns to the cab depot,” Florence continued, “where an EIA doctor tries to convince him he’s dreaming, a scene almost exactly like the final film’s Dr Edgemar sequence... In the climax of Cronenberg’s script, Mandrel and Cohaagen find themselves alone on a robot-controlled tour bus, moving over the Martian desert. Cohaagen reveals that Mandrell never really existed, that Quaid is just a minor government functionary selected to fill the role of chairman. Cohaagen planned to take over, using Quaid’s Mandrell image.” A fight ensues, Quaid/Mandrell defeats Cohaagen, and assumes his place as Chairman Mandrell, with Melina at his side.
According to Ron Miller (Dune), engaged as production illustrator by DEG during the period of Cronenberg’s involvement, it was more than just the story that might have been different: Miller recalls Martian creatures called ‘Ganzibulls’, originally created by Shusett, but retained in Cronenberg’s drafts. “They were creatures that lived in the sewers of the Mars city, called Venusville,” he told Cinefantastique. “In Cronenberg’s version, they were mutant camels. In Ron’s original script, the Martian colonists used camels as pack animals, and the camels wore oxygen masks... Cronenberg elaborated on the camels idea by having the monsters in the sewers be mutant camels.” Miller also remembers working with art director Pier Luigi Basile (Conan the Destroyer) at DEG’s studios in Rome, where “nothing much happened. We just drew all day for weeks on end. Cronenberg finally was hired, and he gave us more direction, more purpose. Bob Ringwood was going to do the costume design for the Cronenberg version, so he was there, on and off, for a couple of weeks and did a few sketches.”
Cronenberg recalls that, several years down the line, De Laurentiis offered him the project again, his way. He declined. “It’s dead for me now,” he told the producer. “I can’t get back into that now. I just can’t go back to working with Ron and fighting the same old battles and doing all that stuff.” Cronenberg was mostly unimpressed by the finished film. “I thought it was a bad movie,” he told Serge Grünberg, “although there were one or two moments that were true Philip Dick moments in it — they were good. But they weren’t good because it was Schwarzenegger still: first of all as an actor for that kind of role, and secondly as that character. The whole point of that character was that he was a unique, shy, mild character. They tried to compensate by making him a construction worker, but they gave him this beautiful Sharon Stone wife.” This, of course, was a deliberate move on the part of director Paul Verhoeven (who would soon make Stone a star in Basic Instinct), who understood that Quaid’s low-grade employment was as far as possible from secret agent, while his beautiful wife was designed to keep him satisfied with his otherwise average lifestyle. As Verhoeven explains, “With Arnold Schwarzenegger in the main part, [an audience] would not want him to dream. So to a large degree by choosing Arnold, there was a preference in reality.” Nevertheless, Cronenberg had other reservations: “I thought it was very visually tacky and messy,” he said. “Verhoeven didn’t do a good job with all the effects and the mutants and all of that stuff. They went for the action stuff purely and that was it: it was an action gimmick. So I didn’t really like the movie and I didn’t think much of it. But by the time I saw it, I didn’t care. I was over it.”
Although Cronenberg was the first director involved with Total Recall, his would certainly not be the last name to be stencilled on the director’s chair before Paul Verhoeven’s was allowed to dry. “As I recall it was seven directors,” says Shusett, “most prominently Richard Rush, who’d directed The Stunt Man. He and Dino couldn’t agree, because Richard liked our third act of Total Recall — Mars gets air — and Dino didn’t. Richard Rush said, ‘It’s wonderful, Dino. It’ll work perfectly.’ And Dino said, ‘Rick, I can’t go with you as director. I don’t even want to go to Mars.’ And I said, ‘Well, you can’t take that out, it’s in my contract.’ Dino said, ‘It’ll never get made,’ and I said, ‘Fine, I’d rather never make it.’ I said, ‘Mars is in it, and Mars gets air, it’s the first ending that’s worked, Dino. Show it to another director.’ So one day I get a call from Dino, he says, ‘Ron, I love you so much I could kiss you on the mouth! You saved me! You’re so goddamned stubborn, you saved me! I showed this script to Bruce Beresford... [and] I say, ‘Take out Mars, take out air.’ He says, ‘Dino, you full of shit!’”
Beresford, a two-time Academy Award nominee best known for the acclaimed dramas Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, soon found himself in his native Australia, with Dirty Dancing star Patrick Swayze in the lead of what Shusett has described as a less gritty, more fun, ‘Spielbergian’ version of Total Recall. The next thing Shusett knew, however, “Beresford called us and said, ‘The movie’s off! Dino’s gone bankrupt! He’s fired eighty people and they’re tearing down the sets as I look out the window.’”
It was at this point, around 1987, that Shusett’s co-screenwriter Gary Goldman first encountered the project. “I was asked to do a polish,” says Goldman, who read the script, and liked it, but turned down the job because he had just started working with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven — fresh from his first Hollywood success, the sci-fi satire RoboCop — on his own project, coincidentally an out-of-body action film that Goldman co-wrote and was producing, entitled Warrior. “This was set up at Warner Brothers, and I wanted to work with Paul, whose work I had long admired, and who had just come off RoboCop, which I loved.” Although the pair worked together for several months, they were unable to reach a point where Verhoeven was ready to direct Warrior. In the meantime, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been circling Total Recall since Swayze’s departure, learned that his Conan collaborator Dino De Laurentiis was in financial difficulties in Australia, and that the production had all but collapsed. Schwarzenegger called De Laurentiis and asked if his company would sell the rights to Dick’s story. When De Laurentiis agreed, Schwarzenegger called Carolco co-owners Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar, for whom the actor had made Red Heat, and suggested that they buy it. The asking price: $3 million. Says Schwarzenegger, “Within a few hours, they owned the movie.” Next, Schwarzenegger claims to have cornered Dutch director Paul Verhoeven at lunch, and insisted he take a look at Total Recall.
Incredibly, Verhoeven was the director Ron Shusett had originally had in mind when he was trying to set the film up at Disney: “In 1981, eight years before I got the movie financed, I wanted Paul to direct it,” he reveals. “I’d just seen Soldier of Orange, and I said, ‘That’s the guy I want.’ His agent said she gave him the script, but that he doesn’t like science fiction. Then, about seven years later, he fell in love with science fiction and made RoboCop.” When Verhoeven did eventually read the script, Shusett recalls, “he didn’t even have to finish reading it before he had committed to it. He said he’d got as far as the scene in the hotel where Edgemar says, ‘You’re not really here, you’re asleep in the chair at Rekall,’ closed the script, called his agent, called Schwarzenegger, and said, ‘I’m in!’” Adds Goldman, “I told Paul the ironic story that I had turned down the chance to re-write Total Recall in order to work with him. He asked my opinion of the screenplay. I told him. He said that we saw it the same way, and that he would try to get me the job to rewrite it. And he did.”
By this time, there had been dozens of drafts — Verhoeven remembers “about thirty” — variously credited to Shusett and O’Bannon, Shusett and Star Trek: The Motion Picture screenwriter Jon Povill, and Shusett and Steven Pressfield (Freejack). Goldman says that Verhoeven read them all, and sent him the ones he wanted Goldman to read. “The story of the first half was almost exactly as it is in the movie,” he explains, “but there was general agreement that the second half of the movie wasn’t working — that is, everyt
hing after the Dr Edgemar scene. I had to adjust everything in order to make the second half work adequately. I also had to reconfigure the movie to fit Arnold, [because] in the short story and in all previous drafts, Quaid was a mild-mannered guy who suddenly discovered that he was a high-powered secret agent.”
According to Goldman, several fundamental decisions determined most of the changes. Firstly, Verhoeven wanted to make the movie as if Dr Edgemar might be telling the truth in the hotel room, so that from the point that Quaid undergoes the procedure at Rekall, everything you see is Quaid’s fantasy. “Everything we have seen before, in the last forty-five minutes, is all fantasy,” Verhoeven explains. “It’s a dream. Which is disturbing to the audience because they don’t want that, of course. They want an adventure story, they don’t want a fake adventure story. So they are on Arnold’s side trying to believe that it’s all true, while [Dr Edgemar] is trying to tell him that it’s not true.” As Edgemar asks rhetorically, “What’s bullshit? That you’re having a paranoid episode triggered by acute neurochemical trauma? Or that you’re really an invincible secret agent from Mars who’s the victim of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think he’s a lowly construction worker?” Quaid, of course, shoots Edgemar, thereby choosing to continue the fantasy — if, indeed, it is a fantasy.
