Ron 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.

The present lot—“Mars City”—is an archival concept painting by Ron Miller ca. 1984/5, the period of Total Recall’s production when the project was set to be directed by David Cronenberg, the Canadian ‘king of body horror.’ A far cry from the industrialized, factory-like architecture of Verhoeven’s Martian world, “Mars City” depicts Cronenberg’s vision as an almost Brutalist, highly developed urban landscape—complete with motorized elevator-like cars that climb the city walls. 

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. In 1982, Shusett sold the project to Italian American mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis after his development deal at Walt Disney Studios rejected the Total Recall script he had written with Dan O’Bannon. Over the next year, Cronenberg created twelve drafts of a new script and began collaborating with technicians and artisans to start bringing his vision to life. Two of those artists on Cronenberg’s Total Recall team were the husband-and-wife duo, Judith and Ron Miller—who joined the production as model maker and illustrator respectively.

Working out of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group’s studios outside of Rome, the Miller’s spent a year producing scores of set models, prototypes for spacecrafts made from paper and balsa wood, drawings, and paintings like the one on offer here. Cronenberg’s Total Recall was 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.

The present lot is an opportunity to own a piece of production history from one of the classics of nineties sci-fi cyberpunk filmmaking that came to define the genre for years to come.