It was produced in 1979 as part of New York City public television station WNET's Experimental TV Lab project, and directed by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk.
[2] The film stars Bruce Davison as protagonist George Orr, Kevin Conway as Dr. William Haber, and Margaret Avery as lawyer Heather LeLache.
In Portland, Oregon, in the near future, George Orr is charged with abuse of multiple prescription medications, which he was taking to keep himself from dreaming.
Haber initially considers Orr's fear as a delusional symptom of neurosis or psychosis, referring to him as "possibly an intelligent schizophrenic".
The doctor puts Orr into a hypnotic trance while attached to the "Augmentor," a device he has invented for monitoring and enhancing, or augmenting, brainwaves during dreaming, to help with patient therapy.
Haber begins to use Orr's effective dreams, first to create a prestigious, well-funded institute run by himself, then to attempt to solve various social problems.
The first science fiction drama they created together was a 1972 film called Between Time and Timbuktu, based on the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.[3] With a two-week shooting schedule,[4] and a lean budget of about $250,000, Loxton and Barzyk had to get creative to effectively convey The Lathe of Heaven's deeper meanings and sometimes grand science fiction scenarios.
The reason that was important, especially on Lathe, is that we had a very limited budget, and we were moving into science fiction ... and let's face it, some of Ursula's ideas were pretty big.
We didn't have enough money to be able to do these things, so we were constantly trying to figure out ways in which we could shoot something in half a day and imply vast amounts of impressions to the audience.
We grabbed from the art director the dust and the smoke and the cobwebs, and in effect we wound up using some of David's English heritage with the candelabras and the rest, which kind of went back to Great Expectations.
[7] According to a 1978 article in The New York Times, during the process of funding a prospective series focused on "speculative fiction, a category of fairly recent vintage applied to ... the most thoughtful and provocative works of science fiction ... [such as] Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Anthony Burgess and Robert Heinlein," Le Guin was one of several authors whose novels were considered for adaptation: "The [$750,000] financing was awarded as the result of an earlier grant by [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] to research and develop such a series.
[8] Loxton and Barzyk hoped that Lathe would be the first production in a public television series exploring science fiction literature.
[12] Moore commented that "One hopes some producers who plan yet more clones of Star Wars will have watched Lathe and learned that science fiction does not consist solely of dogfights in space and cardboard heroes facing 'gee-whiz' challenges.
[15] Of the 2000 re-release (see below), TV Guide wrote, "Unlike much current science fiction, it's driven by ideas rather than special effects, and Davison's subtle performance as George, who turns out to be a far tougher character than he at first appears, is a highlight.
[17]Time magazine wrote: Nineteen years before The Blair Witch Project, this classic sci-fi film showed that you can make an arresting fantasy with hardly more than the change under your couch cushions ... [S]ome of the no-budget effects haven't aged well--at one point the earth is visited by alien ships that look like electric hamburgers.
It is the best quality transfer possible of this important work using the only surviving materials.” WNET has not said how much it cost to re-release Lathe, stating simply that it "wasn't cheap," and that hopefully royalties would help recoup the expense.
(An image from this sequence is featured on the cover of both the mass market paperback edition of the novel that was issued with the film's premiere, and the 2000 video/DVD release).