In it, a blade runner administers a Voight-Kampff test to a replicant. His former colleagues tell him about the fugitives, and ask him to watch a disturbing video. As a so-called “blade runner,” his job was to track down replicants and “retire” them. The reason Deckard is tasked with tracking down the fugitive replicants is because of his police work. As in the rest of the film, the director deftly employs appropriated materials to deliver a satisfying character arc for Fancher, who - in his screenwriting (which would continue with the 1989 film The Mighty Quinn, his 1999 directorial debut The Minus Man, and this year’s sequel, Blade Runner 2049 ) - did eventually find a stability he wasn’t driven to escape.When viewers first meet the former police officer, Deckard is being detained by Officer Gaff, who's busy folding origami, and his former supervisor. In a clever set-up, the actor had mentioned his identification with Humphrey Bogart earlier in the film at the end, Almereyda cuts footage of Harrison Ford as the replicant-hunting cop Deckard with images of Bogart’s noir detectives, positioning Blade Runner as the apotheosis of Fancher’s childhood dreams. Vangelis’s iconic theme for the film heralds Fancher’s discussion about pursuing the rights for Dick’s novel and eventually adapting it. These asides mirror the discursive course of Fancher’s overall life, full of fits and starts that saw him constantly escaping any path - whether professional or personal - that might create stability.Įscapes ends with the work that would cement Fancher’s legacy as a Hollywood icon: his screenplay for Blade Runner. Fancher often stops himself in the middle of a story to change direction at one point, he discusses cruising for women with Flipper actor Brian Kelly but halts his reminiscence by saying, “Actually, this story is so terrible, I’m not going to tell it.” Our narrator also gets the film back on track when his attention wanders, commenting, “Oh, that’s another story,” as he finds himself straying. His storytelling is laced with meta-commentary that allows the film to delve deeper into his biography than a straightforward telling would allow. The audio of his narration suffices at first, but visual takes of the protagonist as raconteur lengthen as the film progresses. Hampton Fancher as seen in Michael Almereyda’s Escapesįancher’s own words tie together the majority of this pop-culture ephemera. The fact that Almereyda could find so much material appropriate for illustrating Fancher’s experiences might make one question the authenticity of the footage, if the vast expanse of the actor’s pursuits wasn’t so well-documented. While some of Fancher’s famous friends (Teri Garr, Barbara Hershey, David Carradine) are represented with footage from their own roles, others are represented by avatars, like the old man with glasses conversing with our hero represents a boss at his job as a ditch digger. Sometimes they are merely thematic, as when a shot of Fancher mopping accompanies a discussion of his job as a ditch digger, uniting the image and narration only in their common focus on manual labor. These pairings are not always perfect matches. The footage often matches the points the actor makes in narration for example, an anecdote about confronting a girlfriend’s ex-lover is paired with a shot from a Western of the actor walking out of a building, getting a shotgun, and pumping it. Whether dressed as a cowboy or a common criminal, the various characters Fancher played are paired with his stories about work and romantic dalliances. While Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein’s 2002 Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture similarly paired archival footage with narration, Escapes is a stand-out due to the fact that Fancher - who boasts 51 actor credits on IMDB - appeared in front of the camera significantly more than Evans, who has 14 Almereyda simply has more source material to use. Although the story of Fancher’s life is a fairly straightforward example of Hollywood hustling eventually yielding success, Almereyda’s use of images from Fancher’s decades of work makes Escapes unique among film industry documentaries.
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