Wednesday 2 June 2010

Wild Palms - 1

Mostly forgotten this little mini-series suffered from comparisons to Twin Peaks, but was a very different animal constructed by Oliver Stone in one of his few forays into TV.

From Wikipedia

Wild Palms is a six-hour mini-series, which first aired in May 1993 on the ABC network in the United States. Written by Bruce Wagner, who (with Oliver Stone) was also the executive producer, Wild Palms was a sci-fi drama about the dangers of brainwashing through technology and drugs. It was based on a comic strip written by Wagner and illustrated by Julian Allen first published in 1990 in Details magazine. The mini-series starred James Belushi, Dana Delany, Robert Loggia, and Angie Dickinson. The episodes were directed by four people known more for their feature films: Kathryn Bigelow, Keith Gordon, Peter Hewitt, and Phil Joanou.
And a great summary of the comic from Dot What
The strip version of the story is that Harry Wyckoff, an entertainment lawyer, sitting in a posh Hollywood eatery, sees a fellow patron dragged outside and beaten up, ignored by everyone else. He learns of and then goes to work for the mysterious talent agency Wild Palms, which turns out to be the public face of a conspiracy called The Fathers, whose aims are never really clear. Their leader is Senator Anton Kreutzer, who had founded the popular religion Synthiotics. He had also killed Harry's father in the late 1960s, the real inventor of virtual reality. In the present, 2008, Kreuzer and friends control Church Windows, a VR television network that immerses viewers who buy the home projector and take a drug called Mimezine, in their favorite programs.


The writer of Dot What also draws some nice PKD parallels... in the full article


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