Ridley Scott's Blade Runner took two years to complete, while Sammon's exhaustive document of its inception was finished over a period of one-and-a-half decades. The author admits that his book, like the movie, is "compulsively detailed"; Future Noir's appendices alone--which include a thorough interview with Scott, fussy comparisons of Blade Runner's multiple video incarnations, confirmed continuity slip-ups, soundtrack information, a directory of related websites, and a full credits list--occupy sixty-six pages! (In fact, the only information Sammon fails to provide is his own credentials.)

Blade Runner began with Phillip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Considered unfilmable by nearly everyone who flirted with the project, the foreboding future Dick hypothesized nevertheless proved too tantalizing for screenwriter Hampton Fancher and director Scott to resist. When Dick got ahold of an early draft of their adaptation, he was less than impressed--his material had been reshaped into something more prosaic and drained of its satiric sting. Dick responded by publicly denouncing the screenplay as well as Scott's most popular work, 1979's Alien.

To be sure the studio knew of his feelings, Dick sent these published lamentations directly to Warner execs! The filmmakers were not amused. (The prolific writer later conceded to Sammon: "Alien was an effective film for what it tried to set out to do, but I would have preferred more conceptual or intellectual content. I also thought the ending was weak. The monster lost simply because it was a monster. The same thing was going on in Fancher's script...At the end of this long fight between Deckard and Batty, the human won and the android lost simply because this conformed to that godawful generic convention which states that good must inevitably triumph over evil.")

The eventual participation of (the brilliant) David Webb Peoples (whose "The William Munny Killings"--the basis for Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven--garnered attention from Francis Ford Coppola around this time) in the rewrite process appeased Dick substantially, although the prickly author was hardly the only hurdle the Blade Runner team would face.

Sammon basically divides Future Noir into three parts: pre-production, production, post-production. Each was plagued by setbacks, particularly the shoot. According to Sammon, Scott employed a "managerial style" to cope with the complexities of filming on Blade Runner's megalopolis set; he was an often merciless taskmaster. Exhausted teamsters subsequently rebelled, waging a "T-shirt war" towards the end of principal photography. (Scott had admitted to a newspaper his preference for (subservient) British crews. His comments were picked up by folks at the Stateside Blade Runner location, and Scott soon found himself facing dozens of angry American grips wearing shirts that read "Will Rogers never met Ridley Scott," and other similar sentiments. The director responded by printing up Ts for himself and his backers that read, "Xenophobia Sucks.")

The book is filled with other like gossip. For instance, Sean Young and Harrison Ford didn't get along during their love scenes; Joe Turkel, who played billionaire genius Tyrell, was incapable of memorizing his dialogue, which necessitated draping the rooms with large cue cards; the snake that replicant stripper Zhora uses in her routine is Joanna Cassidy's own python; etc. "The Shoot" is probably Future Noir's best chapter, as it examines the picture on a sequence-by-sequence basis; each section contains a series of point form notes, some of them comments from cast and crew made in 1982 or more recently. Chapter ten, "The Special Effects", is very long but never tedious; it looks at the challenges large and small faced by head-F/X designers Douglas Trumbull and David Dryer, from Blade Runner's breathtaking cityscape shots to the infamous "Voigt-Kampff" machine.

Sammon's text also dispells many of the myths surrounding the film, namely that the official 1992 "Director's Cut" is not the same edit labelled as such for midnight screenings in L.A. the year before. (That was the fabled "workprint," discovered by a sound preservationist while on his search for a 70mm blow-up of Gypsy. Sammon's summary of that fateful day is amusingly portentous: "What he found instead would alter film history.") Scott also sets the record straight on the 'DC''s unicorn shot: this is not an outtake from Legend; it was shot specifically for Blade Runner during its post-production process and discarded just prior to the original release.

The "narration scandal" is also given its due: Deckard's awful voice-over was recorded at the insistence of producer Bud Yorkin, the cinematic genius who would later helm Arthur 2: On the Rocks.Future Noir's cover declares itself "The fascinating story behind the darkest, most influential SF film ever made." I tend to agree with that assessment of Blade Runner. The picture continues to inspire clones in 1999. (Without Blade Runner, is there a Matrix?) Sammon's thick tome makes a perfect companion piece to its subject; I'm not sure I've ever read something juicier on the filmmaking process. Sometimes, the best DVD supplements come in paperback.-Bill Chambers

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