Wild Palms

The year is 2007 and we find ourselves in a Los Angeles of the future. The city has developed into a brutal police state beneath the scorching sun. Dream and reality become blurred in this tale where murder, power struggles och dark passions take place between cyberpunks and those in power. The plot revolves round Harry Wyckoff, a lawyer and legal adviser working for a TVcompany. His existence becomes more and more nightmarish as he becomes increasingly entangled in senator Anton Kreuzer's power-crazed plots. The series Wild Palms is Oliver Stone's debut as a TV-producer.

COMMENTARY
Gil Scott-Heron was wrong. The revolution will be televised. Wild Palms is a nearly six hours long TV-series, set in Los Angeles in the year 2007. The script writer Bruce Wagner based the script on his cartoon with the same name, which has also been serialized in Details magazine for two and a half years.
After the first screening of Wild Palms in American TV in May and June 1993 a lot of comparisons to Twin Pea/(s have been made. Unlike Lynch/Frost, who were never capable of pulling the loose ends of the manuscript together below the kitschy surface, Bruce Wagner and the producer Oliver Stone manage to present a tightly knit story where the manuscript is without any gaps.
Both concentration and patience is required to keep up with this science-fiction story. The combination of hallucinations, high-technology, advanced drug-culture and common pop-trivia resembles nothing we have seen before on TV or on the big screen.
In the future of Wild Palms the TV-medium is no longer limited to the TV-set. In the year 2007 a new channel revolutionizes the medium and the world through the transmission of holograms. Everyone who buys a cheap decoder is able to watch newscasters and soap opera actresses enter their living-room in 3D.
A senator, who is also the leader of a totalitarian unorthodox religious group, exploits the hologram channel to take control of people's dreams. He who controls ''the techno-shamanic I(ey to eternity'' rules the dream world as well as the real world and is able to wipe out the boundary in between. An underground movement consisting of sophisticated cyberpunks who hide out beneath swimming-pools tries to stop him.
Bruce Wagner injects further life into his story with references to everything from W B Yeats and Buddhism to the Beach Boys and computer games. The cyperpunk writer William Gibson plays himself in one scene, as does Oliver Stone in a TV-program where he is asked: ''How does it feel today, when the opened FBI-files prove you were right back in 1991?''.
Imagine The Prisoner made for a generation of ravers and maybe you get the picture of what this six hour long virtual reality story is like. James Belushi in the lead is a good choice. A book has been published, The Wild Palms Reader (Little Brown & Co), for those who want to know more. The script writer Bruce Wagner has also published a novel, Force Majeure (St. Martins Press), about the absurd existence of a script writer in Hollywood. ':'
Jan Gradvall