The LATHE OF HEAVEN

   Made-for-tv film (1980). TV Laboratory WNET/13, New York, for PBS. Prod and dir David R. Loxton and Fred Baryzk, starring Bruce Davison, Kevin Conway, Margaret Avery. Teleplay Roger E. Swaybill, Diane English, basedon The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K. LE GUIN. 120 mins. Colour.

   Made outside the commercial system for Public Television, this may be the best sf tv-movie ever made, with innovative use of existing reality (futuristic high-rises in Dallas, for example) substituting for expensive sets. The visual consultant was Ed EMSHWILLER. The story of George Orr (Davison), who can dream permanent changes to reality, is both here and in Le Guin's chilling original a moral fable rather like the fairy-tales about three wishes. Orr's talent is exploited by an ambitious psychiatrist (Conway), but every time he tries to dream a better world something frightful goes wrong, OVERPOPULATION being cured by plague or, later, racism cured by everybody turning grey. The deliquescence of reality, whose binding glue is ultimately in danger of dissolving (the ending is ambiguous), is subtly caught, and the viewer has to be observant to register every change.

   PN

   See also: VIRTUAL REALITY.