Judith Miller | [David Cronenberg]

The private collection of Ron Miller

With a budget that ballooned to almost $90 million by the end of filming, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) was one of the most expensive productions of its time and one of the last sci-fi blockbusters to rely on the use of practical effects. Verhoeven’s monumental budget paid off—Total Recall was the fifth highest grossing film of the year and winner of the Special Achievement Award in Visual Effects at the 63^rd Academy Awards in 1991. While Verhoeven is the director that finally brought this adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” to the screen, Total Recall is the product of a film project that actually began over a decade earlier in 1974.

“Mars Flitter,” the present lot, is an archival pre-production model by Judith Miller dating from the period of Total Recall’s production when the project was set to be directed by David Cronenberg, the Canadian ‘king of body horror.’ The “Mars Flitter” is a model of a spacecraft that would serve as a sort of ferry providing regular transport for humans between Earth and Mars.

Cronenberg was attached to the project in 1984, ten years after producer Ronald Shusett first purchased the rights to Dick’s short story for screen adaptation and two years Shusett sold the project to Italian American mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis. From 1984 to 1985, Cronenberg created twelve drafts of a new script for Total Recall and began collaborating with technicians and artisans to start bringing his vision for the film’s Martian reality to life.

Working out of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group’s studios outside of Rome, the Miller’s spent a year producing scores of illustrations, paintings, set models, and prototypes for spacecrafts made from paper and balsa wood like the one on offer here. Cronenberg’s Total Recall was a much more faithful adaptation of Dick’s short story, with little of Verhoeven’s campy irony that transformed the tale from a dark exploration of isolation and memory into something like an action adventure.

“Mars Flitter” is an opportunity to own an artifact from an unproduced project of one of science fiction’s greatest directors—an unprecedented look into a film world that almost was.