"I still read his work and think, 'Dad, how did you know?'" "I sometimes feel like I'm living in one of his novels," Hackett says. With that, it's back to reality, our reality, the one hewing ever closer to her dad's disturbing visions. "I'm really impressed with Jen Salke and the direction they're going in." Apart from that, she says, "Amazon's been a terrific partner," and she's happy to have seen things set right. That point can't help but resonate: last year, Amazon Studios chief Roy Price was forced out after making unwanted sexual advances toward Hackett in 2015. "It's important to me that I work with not just good partners but good people." "I really try to stick to my no-assholes policy," she says. With her increasing success, Hackett has accrued the clout to surround herself with simpatico partners. Though she has some feature-film adaptations in the works, Hackett says she prefers the expansiveness of television: "Having that core group and that continuity and those relationships is much more enjoyable." She adds, "I like seeing these characters grow and creating these arcs." She's currently working on "about a half dozen" more projects, among them a series based on Dick's story "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." Meanwhile, Hackett is also executive-producing Electric Dreams, an Amazon anthology series that mines her father's short-story catalog for hour-long episodes. The odyssey took 10 years, but High Castle's fourth and final season will stream this fall on Amazon Prime. The goal was to take a firmer hand in future adaptations.ĮSP's first realized project was the 2011 feature The Adjustment Bureau, but its hardest-won accomplishment was bringing Dick's 1961 dystopian novel The Man in the High Castle to a streaming service. In 2007, Hackett left the world of nonprofits and low-income housing development to establish Electric Shepherd Productions. When she and her half-sister, Laura Coelho, and half-brother, Christopher Dick, first inherited the rights to Dick's work (120-plus short stories and 44 novels), they green-lit adaptations without taking a creative role. It took a trio of prestige feature films - Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990) and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) - to establish her father as a literary lion. "He died in relative obscurity," Hackett confirms. Incredibly, Dick's work was out of print when he passed away. "It seemed wild and sort of preposterous, very paranoid, and now, of course, it just seems prescient." "His work was really ahead of its time," Hackett says with a sigh. On the other hand, that celebration underscores the fact that his bleak visions of a future marked by mind control, authoritarianism and the melding of man and machine have edged ever closer to reality. On the one hand, Dick, who died at age 53 in 1982, has been celebrated with screen adaptations of a staggering number of his novels and short stories. Dick business, which for his daughter Isa Dick Hackett is a mixed blessing.
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