Starting June 1, PBS stations will regain the legal right to broadcast the program, an adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's 1971 novel of the same name.

Novel and film alike revolve around the character of George Orr, a young man whose dreams sometimes come true. Orr (played with exquisite passivity by Bruce Davison) hates and fears this ability, eventually attempting suicide before coming to the attention of dream specialist Dr. William Haber (Kevin Conway).

Dreams like the world, only better

As in fairy tales, the price of Haber's interference is that he gets what he says he wants -- fulfillment is both the reward and cost of wishing, even when the wish is as seemingly altruistic as Haber's "greatest good for the greatest number."

"What attracted me to it was there were no bad people in the show," co-director Fred Barzyk told SPACE.com. "Everyone was trying to do good, but it just kept getting out of hand. Ursula's point was sometimes people -- sometimes driven by appropriate values -- cause more problems than if they had sat back and relaxed a bit."

Relaxation is the key. In an interview taped with Bill Moyers that will run alongside the remastered film, Le Guin explains The Lathe of Heaven as "a Taoist book," a cautionary story of ambition, the limitless power of creation and the abuse of that power.

Kevin Conway -- Dr. Haber himself -- agrees.

"There's a kind of laid back acceptance in George that I think reflects the way Ursula tends to look at the world," he told SPACE.com. "There's a case to be made that there's so much striving going on, everybody's striving to make more money, to fix this and fix that, people's lives get away from them."

"People don't concentrate enough on what it means to be alive, and we know it. Lower forms of animals -- and I say this guardedly -- aren't really aware. We [on the other hand] live, and we're able to think about it. And yet we tend to distance ourselves from it."

Shadows and smoke

The film's obliquely dreamlike texture and storyline have contributed in large part to its mystique.

"I didn't want it to be 'dreamlike' in the usual sense," Barzyk said. "From a directorial standpoint, the thing I did -- a conscious effort -- was I tried to play it like grand opera. Not an action documentary, more in the sense of tableaux . . . it was an attempt to say, 'it's real, but not real.' "

Part of the decision to rely on abstraction and innuendo was the fact that Barzyk and longtime collaborator David Loxton, pioneers in the early video art movement, were bringing Le Guin's occasionally cosmic novel to life on a budget of about $250,000.

"The first draft was filled with all kinds of special effects," Barzyk said. "It became clear we would have to infer all the metaphorical, allegorical concepts."

"We had become a little iconoclastic, we really thought this was the way we could get to the content, the emotional heart of it."

The author's handmaidens

Although Barzyk remains pleasantly surprised at the high regard in which his film is held -- Lathe of Heaven counts Tom Hanks and Jason Alexander, among others, as high-profile fans -- he attributes its success to Ursula Le Guin's text.

"We really saw ourselves as handmaidens," he said. "Our job was that we really wanted to pay attention to what she said."

Le Guin herself was perplexed to hear that Barzyk and Loxton wanted to adapt such a subterranean, internal book, where most of the action takes place in dialogue or offscreen.

"That one, of all things?" Barzyk remembers her saying. "It's so difficult."

Turtles from the id

More than 20 years after its creation, the film holds up quite well -- probably thanks to the fact that it hints at so much and shows so little.

"The least successful thing was the arrival of the spaceships," Barzyk said, referring to a development in which Orr dreams of an alien invasion in order to satisfy Haber's request for world peace. "We just couldn't afford it"

Likewise, the turtle-like aliens were "costly, but not highly successful."

"It was difficult to construct, then shipped in pieces from New York State to Dallas," where much of the film was shot. "Since it didn't have much flexibility or movement, I reduced the amount of time it was on camera-- at one time I used just the shadow. Better to leave it to the imagination."

Conway agrees that the aliens are now one of the film's weaker images, and yet even that cartoon quality can be seen as a strength.

"The alien, we always kid about because it looks a lot like the Michelin tire man," he said. "It's so 'George' to come up with an alien like that." "In fact, the aliens end up running a hot dog stand, they don't want to rule the world. They come down, they just say 'hey.' "

Barzyk is also on the side of those who point out that the aliens are much like those George Orr would create.

"That was Ursula's vision, the sea creature," he said. "She liked the fact that it moved slowly, it was another version of Orr."

The fullness of time

The Lathe of Heaven was produced in 1979 as part of New York PBS affiliate WNET's Experimental TV Lab project, and was occasionally shown over the next eight years. The public television network's rights to rebroadcast the program expired in 1988.

Unfortunately, nobody else had the right to exhibit the film or distribute it in videocassette form, leaving it in limbo for the next 12 years.

The adaptation became "by far the most requested program" in PBS history, according to WNET, sparking an organized campaign to bring it back to television -- a campaign that succeeded only recently.

Since then, co-director David Loxton has passed away, while Fred Barzyk remained an active creator of educational, entertaining and experimental television. The next of his "television children," a high-definition performance of Arthur Miller's play "The Ryan Interview", will air August 25.

"If I did it today," he says of Lathe, "I would have done it in high definition so the dream world would be super real -- the shadows and smoke."

However, he notes that the film likely couldn't have "existed anywhere else, and it couldn't have gotten funded except at that period in time [when] PBS was still experimenting with what its final form would be."

Kevin Conway (Dr. Haber), meanwhile, continued his rich acting career. Beyond Lathe, he is probably best known to science fiction fans for his 1993 appearance playing Klingon consensus builder Kahless the Unforgettable on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

He is a science fiction fan himself, and describes the film as "profound."

"I've often thought about it," he said. "There was just something about that. Maybe because it was a very minimal budget, very minimal time, very strange story that you have to throw yourself into, you can't think about it too much."

"I think of it as a profound piece, but profound in a kind of reverse way that forces the audience to provide their own rationale for the whole thing." "It's open to interpretation. A lot of people have different ideas about what it really meant, what was really happening, how it ends. I think it touches a chord in people who are into that kind of thinking, non-linear thinking."

Check your local listings for details, or contact your local PBS station. A DVD release is planned for later in 2000.

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