The Cinematheque

By the mid-1970s, David Bowie had, for all intents and purposes, transformed into his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. Skeletal, pale, carrot topped, and coke fueled, he was extraterrestrial even before being cast in Roeg’s slippery, psychoactive take on Walter Tevis’s sci-fi novel. In it, the Thin White Duke is Thomas Jerome Newton, a starman living in New Mexico who builds a billion-dollar space program in an effort to save his draught-plagued home planet, seen in frenetic, fractured flashbacks. His earthly tour guide (Candy Clark) acquaints him with sex, gin, and television, precipitating his fall. (Rip Torn is in the mix too, as a lecherous science professor.) Roeg, given the keys to England’s first-ever US-based production, brings with him a suitably alien outlook on America. Paramount, upon seeing the final cut, dropped the film and demanded their money back. It’s now a cult classic and canonized SF staple.