I'm semi-ashamed of my museum shaming.

"[Ronald Shusett] originally conceived [Total Recall], which is based on Philip K. Dick's short story, 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,' a year before writing Alien with Dan O'Bannon. It was a script so powerful that it became legendary, so ambitious it was for years considered unfilmable. Yet it was nearly shot several times, with Patrick Swayze, Christopher Reeve, even with Arnold Schwarzenegger under Dino De Laurentiis. Powerhouse directors like David Cronenbrerg and Bruce Beresford have come and gone, each leaving their imprint on the script's development."

—Will Murray, "Postcards from Mars," Starlog magazine, May 1990

It turns out that the Art Institute of Chicago placard that stated that Gretchen Bender's 1987 work is "named after the Paul Verhoeven film" isn't inaccurate, but it's still confusing, because Verhoeven wasn't hired to direct Total Recall until the year after Bender's work premiered ("named before the Paul Verhoeven film" would probably have only made things more confusing). According to Art in America magazine, "Bender's work was completed and made public before the director's 1990 Hollywood blockbuster, which the artist read production notices about in movie industry trade papers and from which she cribbed the title."

However, from what I found online, Bruce Beresford was attached to direct Total Recall throughout 1987, but producer Dino De Laurentiis's financing kept falling through. (Beresford then directed Her Alibi and Driving Miss Daisy, both released in '89, in quick succession.) David Cronenberg took the job after Beresford quit, but he soon bowed out as well, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger, who first read the film's script while making Commando (1985), convinced Verhoeven to do it.

Want to be more confused? Allow Red Bull Arts to pour you its version of the story: 

"Although her work debuted three years ahead of the movie’s release, Bender's title comes from the Paul Verhoeven film Total Recall (1984), which is based on the Philip K. Dick short story 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.'"

So, if you want to forget how time and math work and subtract three years instead of adding three, drink Red Bull.

Remembering things, wholesale or otherwise, can be a tricky business.

To be morally deep, or not to be?

In Last Action Hero, which debuted to disappointing box-office numbers 22 years ago this week, Arnold Schwarzenegger's teenage sidekick, Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien), points a gun at the movie-within-a-movie's bad guys in at least two scenes.

Because school shootings were rare in 1993, that wasn't as big a deal as it would've been just a few years later, even after the ultraviolent preteen villainy on display in RoboCop 2 (1990)—Danny was at least taking up arms against villainy—but as Anthony Linehan points out on his blog Movie Tie-In Toys, the hand accessory for Mattel's Danny Madigan action figure was a grappling hook, which "hasn't any basis in the movie itself!"

Hook Launchin' Danny was presumably created to placate parents who wouldn't have been thrilled with Heat Packin' Danny, but it was also a form of wishful thinking: audiences never got hooked on Last Action Hero, especially when compared to Jurassic Park, considered its main competition for the summer movie season before anyone had seen either movie. By the end of the year, Jurassic's $357 million gross in North American theaters had cast a T. Rex-sized shadow over Hero's $50 million gross.

(Even two decades removed from its overhyped debut, Last Action Hero doesn't work as an action movie, a fantasy, or a comedy, but it did have potential. Its best line, in my opinion, is spoken by Schwarzenegger's character when he meets the "real" Arnold at the premiere of "Jack Slater IV," their franchise's latest sequel: "You've brought me nothing but pain." Now, there's a starting point for a great meta-movie.)

Incidentally, in an essay on morality in fiction in the winter 2015 edition of Pleiades, Phong Nguyen, the literary journal's editor, states:

I ask my writing students, "What's the difference between Hamlet the Prince of Denmark and an action hero?" Like any good revenge story, the hero gets his man in the last act, at the cost of his own life. But in the meantime, rather than battling the king's goons (though he does accidentally kill poor Polonius), the Great Dane is waging an internal struggle with his conscience. What does it mean to kill a man? What does it mean to die? When the ghost of your dead father comes to you in the night and says, "avenge me," your mission should be obvious. No further thought is required. Vin Diesel or Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson would simply ride in on a motorcycle armed with two pistols or a medieval axe and stylishly polish off Claudius with a cinematic flourish. They may even be right to do so. But they are not afflicted with doubt, or thought, so what we've witnessed is actually mere moral catharsis, the opposite of moral depth.

True, but could moral depth ever produce as memorable a twist on Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy as the one that's followed by a huge, Elsinore-demolishing explosion in Last Action Hero? Doubtful.

Dwayne Johnson's solid sequel choices

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, starring Dwayne Johnson, opens in theaters today. In case you're wondering why you don't remember a previous Johnson movie called Journey, this one's a sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), which starred Brendan Fraser, not Johnson (both films are loosely based on Jules Verne novels). And it's not the first time this athletic actor has grabbed the baton after the initial lap.

Johnson, a former WWE wrestler who went by the name of "the Rock"—and who's taken the John Cougar Mellencamp route on the big screen, beginning his film career with his wrestling moniker, transitioning to Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, and now using just his first and last name—once costarred in a movie with Fraser, though they didn't share any screen time. But Johnson's supporting role in The Mummy Returns (2001) was so well received, at least by the studio heads that took calls from his agent, that he was given his own spin-off, The Scorpion King, in 2002.

Since then Johnson has made a smart habit of taking supporting parts in sequels or already successful franchises, including Be Cool (2005), the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's follow-up to Get Shorty, and Fast Five (2011), the fifth iteration of The Fast and the Furious. (Inexplicably, 2010's Faster wasn't a sequel to anything.) He also showed up at the end of Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010), and this summer he'll play a live-action action figure in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, a retooling of the series that began three years ago with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Because Johnson himself was already an established brand when he began making movies a decade ago—with a nickname like "the Rock," how could he not inspire confidence in studio executives eager to extend the life of their "tentpole" action franchises?—it makes sense that he would want to hitch his fortunes to movies with built-in name recognition. Johnson also appeared in the remakes of Walking Tall and Escape to Witch Mountain, which was renamed Race to Witch Mountain; the 2005 adaptation of the popular video game Doom; and the Steve Carell-Anne Hathaway update of the TV series Get Smart (2008). A cameo in Reno 911! Miami continued the trend.

In The Rundown (2003), one Johnson movie that isn't a sequel or a remake, Arnold Schwarzenegger makes an uncredited appearance walking past the muscular star in a crowded club. It's a symbolic passing of the torch from one action hero to another ("Have fun," the Terminator says). Johnson still hasn't reached the same box office heights as Schwarzenegger in his prime, but by signing up for ensemble parts in Fast and/or Furious and G.I. Joe sequels and picking up where Brendan Fraser left off on his Journey, Johnson is showing Hollywood that he does have the same business acumen as Schwarzenegger.

Besides, if this acting thing doesn't work out, he can always run for office.