The future keepers

Now Hackett is the most visible face for the family as the children carry on with their father's considerable library. "The three of us," she said proudly, "have not had a single significant disagreement on a project, ever." She counts one of their great successes to be "A Scanner Darkly," the 2006 Richard Linklater adaptation that starred Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder working for scale. The film used an animation process that made it possible to capture the fantastic elements of the story on a small budget.

On the set, Reeves came up to Hackett and humbly thanked her for the honor of allowing the movie to be made, a moment that stuck with Hackett. Now, she said, the family's emphasis is working "with true fans of the material" on projects that capture the creative edginess of the source material. In other words, more like "A Scanner Darkly" and less like the action-heavy, high concept of, say, "Total Recall."

When was the last time Hackett saw her father? Well, in a way it was 2005. That's when a team of scientists -- all of them among Dick's many devotees in the wired world -- put his face on an eerie android with lifelike skin, camera eyeballs and an artificial intelligence that allowed it to recognize old friends. When Hackett saw the face she almost fainted.

"It looked very much like my dad," she said. "When my name was mentioned it launched into a long rant about my mother and this one time that she took me and left him. It was not pleasant."

Hackett, knowing that her heritage and life pursuits require a certain affinity for the bizarre, said she "understands" where the robot's creators were coming from and that it was flattering that they selected her dad to be the face of their high-tech curiosity. That android, by the way, was supposedly "misplaced" by an unnamed airline, its handlers said, a shady story to say the least, but Hackett doesn't miss the contraption.

"That flight it was on, the one where it was lost, it was headed to Santa Ana. That's where my dad died. That's fitting, I guess. It's still out there somewhere."

--

geoff.boucher@latimes.com