When androids dream, Syd Mead gets paid
Syd Mead (Tron, Alien, Blade Runner) is a professional artist. This explains why he doesn’t work more in the movies.
That’s professional artist. He does a lot of work for major corporations who are happy to meet his fee for his services without any phony penny pinching. When it’s the movies calling, he says, the price “starts at zero” and the artist has to “work his way up.”
There are many needy artists. Producers always can find someone to work on spec.
But they won’t get Syd Mead.
He also insists on a “one to one relationship with the director,” which means no intermediaries or departments of intermediation. And if they do agree to his fee, and his working conditions, he then makes sure that the exact amount of work is specified and the fees due for anything more. That means anything.
The last picture he worked on was Mission Impossible III, on the Mask Maker sequence.
I’m one of Syd Mead’s newest fans. Before I signed up to cover his panel at Comic-Con I didn’t know his name, though I’d enjoyed his work.
Though “artist” is a big enough term to hold him, he is sometimes called a “visual futurist.” But that’s a little silly. No one can predict the future. But an artist who is good enough can make images that speak to our sense of how we would like to improve the way things look and our need to make things that are better and more useful than the things that went before. Henry Ford wasn’t being a futurist when he made a Model A to replace his Model T automobile, but today we would call him one.
Most designers are making good livings doing renderings that gently recycle the images of the past, the better to please the client. This is why there are several hundred fake Tudor houses on Shady Bend for every saucer shape clinging to a hillside.
He is best known for his work on Blade Runner, though his career began in industrial design. Like many successful designers, his career has made many twists and turns. Designers work alone when they’re putting pencil marks and paint on illustration board, but they turn their work over to dozens, even hundreds of people who will then make a car or a building or a movie along the lines the designer suggests. Good designers like this process. They like working with directors and architects and other confident, creative people. People who are in charge of insane amounts of money, risked by other people to create things people will buy and take to their hearts.
Back in the halcyon Sixties, when respectability was but a distant glimmer on science fiction’s horizon (and comics were still mired in disrepute), the editor of an SF magazine asked me to review a novel by Philip K. Dick. It wasn’t my first encounter with Mr. Dick; back in St. Louis, before I’d migrated east and gotten into the funny book racket, I’d read a roommate’s copy of Man in the High Castle and found it interesting. I told the editor, sure, be happy to. The book was Galactic Pot Healer. I didn’t like it and wrote the review accordingly.
, have further anointed Mr. Dick by bringing out an edition of four of his novels to be offered alongside productions from Twain, Hawthorne, Melville…you know, the gents whose yarns get assigned in Lit. classes. The Dick collection is edited by the increasingly ubiquitous Jonathan Lethem, which, as far as I’m concerned, is icing on the cake.
