Backdrop fallback

The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven

Share

The Lathe of Heaven

"Ursula K. Le Guin's Science Fiction Masterpiece"

1980

1h 44m

6.5(45 votes)

Science Fiction

Fantasy

Drama

Thriller

TV Movie

Overview

George Orr, a man whose dreams can change waking reality, tries to suppress this unpredictable gift with drugs. Dr. Haber, an assigned psychiatrist, discovers the gift to be real and hypnotically induces Mr. Orr to change reality for the benefit of mankind --- with bizarre and frightening results.

Links & Resources

Social & External

Production Companies

Thirteen

Taurus Film

PBS

The people behind it

Cast & crew

10 featured cast members

Starring

Bruce Davison

Bruce Davison

George Orr

Peyton E. Park

Mannie Ahrens

Niki Flacks

Penny Crouch

Kevin Conway

Kevin Conway

Dr. William Haber

Vandi Clark

Aunt Ethel

Bernedette Whitehead

George's Mother

Jo Livingston

George's Father

Jane Roberts

Grandmother

Tom Matts

Grandfather

Frank Miller

Parole Officer

Creative team

Directed by: Fred Barzyk
David R. Loxton
Written by: Roger Swaybill
Diane English
Produced by: Fred Barzyk
David R. Loxton

Similar Movies

Vikalpa

Vikalpa

Arjun is presented with an opportunity to live the life he has always wished for. As he embraces a world filled with comfort and endless possibilities, he slowly drifts away from the people and moments that once meant everything to him. When the line between what he wants and what he truly needs begins to blur, he is forced to confront the consequences of his choice.

The Time of the Beginning

The Time of the Beginning

A "symbolic" character traces the path of man in search of salvation in this world within his own ghosts and deformations.

Strange Attractor

Strange Attractor

A strange attractor is created when lovers synchronize their minds, bodies, and computers using botanical substances. An enchanted and skewed digital dream world, Strange Attractor inverts the Adam and Eve story and re-visions the Persian/Arabian tale of Layla and Majnun. Sufi love madness meets media prophecy.

Lucia

Lucia

A man suffering from insomnia is tricked into buying a drug, Lucia, that makes his desires come true in his dreams, blurring the line between fantasy and reality.

Coherence

Coherence

Four couples gather for dinner the night a mysterious and powerful comet passes overhead.

Phenomenon

Phenomenon

An ordinary man sees a bright light descend from the sky, and discovers he now has super-intelligence and telekinesis.

Scanners

Scanners

A scientist trains a man with an advanced telepathic ability called 'scanning' to stop a dangerous Scanner with extraordinary psychic powers from waging war against non-Scanners.

Howard the Duck

Howard the Duck

A scientific experiment unknowingly brings extraterrestrial life forms to the Earth through a laser beam. First is the cigar-smoking drake, Howard, from the duck's planet. A few kids try to keep him from the greedy scientists and help him back to his planet, but then a much less friendly being arrives through the beam...

Glimpses of the Outskirts

Glimpses of the Outskirts

In an alternate reality where the decline of nations has given rise to corporatist regimes, any trace of culture or tradition is suppressed by these new leaders to prevent the masses from reclaiming a national identity. However, rebel cells have emerged to counteract this agenda.

Matilda

Matilda

Matilda Wormwood is an brilliant and intelligent little girl. Unfortunately, her parents, Harry and Zinnia, fail to see that fact. As time passes, she finally starts school and has a kind teacher, loyal friends, and a terrifying, sadistic headmistress. As she becomes fed up with the constant cruelty, she discovers she has a special gift that she just might be able to use to outwit the unruly adults around her.

Everywhen

Everywhen

A boy must fight his way from an alternate reality, back to his own, to save his suicidal 5-year old brother; when 3 billion people are reported missing.

Zathura: A Space Adventure

Zathura: A Space Adventure

After their father is called into work, two young boys, Walter and Danny, are left in the care of their teenage sister, Lisa, and told they must stay inside. Walter and Danny, who anticipate a boring day, are shocked when they begin playing Zathura, a space-themed board game, which they realize has mystical powers when their house is shot into space. With the help of an astronaut, the boys attempt to return home.

Making Contact

Making Contact

A nine year old boy named Joey, who after the tragic death of his father, begins to experience psychic powers such as allowing him to move inanimate objects with his mind, set things on fire, and even communicate with his dead father. However, not everything is good for Joey as his newly gained powers accidentally awake an evil supernatural force that is contained inside the body of an old ventriloquist's dummy that Joey found in an abandoned house. The supernatural Dummy shows similar powers to Joey's, and soon he puts the lives of everyone near Joey in danger as the evil Dummy has dark plans for Joey's special powers.

Carrie

Carrie

An awkward, telekinetic teenage girl's lonely life is dominated by relentless bullying at school and an oppressive religious fanatic mother at home. When her tormentors pull a humiliating prank at the senior prom, she unleashes a horrifying chaos on everyone, leaving nothing but destruction in her wake.

Carrie

Carrie

Withdrawn and sensitive teenager Carrie White faces bullying from her classmates and abuse from her fanatically pious mother. When she begins to suspect that she has supernatural powers, things take a dark and violent turn.

The Rage: Carrie 2

The Rage: Carrie 2

A horrible massacre strikes up after an outcast teenage girl is taunted by a group of high school jocks, all of them unaware of her cutthroat telekinetic powers.

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

A henpecked housewife ekes out a meager existence, surrounded by a host of colorful characters: her ungrateful husband, her delinquent sons, her headstrong mother-in-law, and her sex worker neighbor, among others.

The Spiderwick Chronicles

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Upon moving into the run-down Spiderwick Estate with their mother, twin brothers Jared and Simon Grace, along with their sister Mallory, find themselves pulled into an alternate world full of faeries and other creatures.

The Sun Vanished: Proof of Concept

The Sun Vanished: Proof of Concept

Follows Skylar and Quinn as they survive the first day of the sun's disappearance. But as they dig up their past, they come face to face with the unearthly threat invading the planet while struggling to come to terms with their own mistakes and choices to carve a path forward.

Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice

The villainous Nekron and his mother, Queen Juliana, plot against the human race from their frigid fortress. Creating mass destruction with huge glaciers, mother and son incur the wrath of Larn, a warrior whose entire village was destroyed by ice. When Nekron's underlings kidnap the beautiful Princess Teegra, Larn sets out to rescue her, assisted by the fierce and enigmatic Darkwolf.

Recommended Movies

Battlestar Galactica: Razor

Battlestar Galactica: Razor

The history and adventures of the Battlestar Pegasus, from shortly before the Cylon invasion to shortly after Lee Adama is made commander. The story is told through the eyes of and largely focuses on one particular member of Pegasus's crew, Kendra Shaw.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien who has come to Earth in search of water to save his home planet. Aided by lawyer Oliver Farnsworth, Thomas uses his knowledge of advanced technology to create profitable inventions. While developing a method to transport water, Thomas meets Mary-Lou, a quiet hotel clerk, and begins to fall in love with her. Just as he is ready to leave Earth, Thomas is intercepted by the U.S. government, and his entire plan is threatened.

Ben 10: Race Against Time

Ben 10: Race Against Time

Ben, Gwen, and Max must stop an extraterrestrial who plans to open a gateway that leads to an alien invasion.

2073

2073

Inspired by Chris Marker's iconic 1962 featurette La Jetée; the year is 2073—a not-so-distant dystopian future—and the setting is New San Francisco, the scorched-earth tech-dominant police state where democracy and personal freedom have been well and truly obliterated.

Ben 10: Alien Swarm

Ben 10: Alien Swarm

Ben and a mysterious girl from his past must prevent an alien threat from destroying the world.

Next

Next

Las Vegas showroom magician Cris Johnson has a secret which torments him: he can see a few minutes into the future. Sick of the examinations he underwent as a child and the interest of the government and medical establishment in his power, he lies low under an assumed name in Vegas, performing cheap tricks and living off small-time gambling "winnings." But when a terrorist group threatens to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, government agent Callie Ferris must use all her wiles to capture Cris and convince him to help her stop the cataclysm.

Omni Loop

Omni Loop

Diagnosed with a black hole growing inside her chest and stuck in a loop reliving the last five days of her life, a 55-year-old wife and mother from Miami, Florida decides to solve time travel in order to go back and be the person she always intended to be.

The Terminator

The Terminator

In the post-apocalyptic future, reigning tyrannical supercomputers teleport a cyborg assassin known as the "Terminator" back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose unborn son is destined to lead insurgents against 21st century mechanical hegemony. Meanwhile, the human-resistance movement dispatches a lone warrior to safeguard Sarah. Can he stop the virtually indestructible killing machine?

The Giver

The Giver

In a seemingly perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man about the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world.

Gemini Man

Gemini Man

Henry Brogan is an elite 51-year-old assassin who's ready to call it quits after completing his 72nd job. His plans get turned upside down when he becomes the target of a mysterious operative who can seemingly predict his every move. To his horror, Brogan soon learns that the man who's trying to kill him is a younger, faster, cloned version of himself.

Coherence

Coherence

Four couples gather for dinner the night a mysterious and powerful comet passes overhead.

Paycheck

Paycheck

Michael Jennings is a genius who's hired – and paid handsomely – by high-tech firms to work on highly sensitive projects, after which his short-term memory is erased so he's incapable of breaching security. But at the end of a three-year job, he's told he isn't getting a paycheck and instead receives a mysterious envelope. In it are clues he must piece together to find out why he wasn't paid – and why he's now in hot water.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Mulder and Scully are called back to duty by the FBI when a former priest claims to be receiving psychic visions pertaining to a kidnapped agent.

The 6th Day

The 6th Day

A world of the very near future in which cattle, fish, and even the family pet can be cloned. But cloning humans is illegal - that is until family man Adam Gibson comes home from work one day to find a clone has replaced him. Taken from his family and plunged into a sinister world he doesn't understand, Gibson must not only save himself from the assassins who must destroy him to protect their secret, but uncover who and what is behind the horrible things happening to him.

Space/Time

Space/Time

After a fatal test shuts down their project, a disgraced team of scientists enters the criminal underworld to rebuild a forbidden space-bending engine that could rescue humanity or annihilate it entirely.

The Running Man

The Running Man

By 2017, the global economy has collapsed and U.S. society has become a totalitarian police state, censoring all cultural activity. The government pacifies the populace by broadcasting a number of game shows in which convicted criminals fight for their lives, including the gladiator-style The Running Man, hosted by the ruthless Damon Killian, where “runners” attempt to evade “stalkers” and certain death for a chance to be pardoned and set free.

Infidelity in Suburbia

Infidelity in Suburbia

With her husband away at work, and her son at school, Laura dreams of a home-renovation project to supplant her restless days. Elliott, her irresistibly hot private contractor, soon fulfills her more forbidden dreams.

The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower

A boy haunted by visions of a parallel world aids its disillusioned guardian in preventing the destruction of the nexus of universes known as the Dark Tower.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

Amy Pond and Rory Williams are trapped on a crashing space liner, and the only way the Eleventh Doctor can rescue them is to save the soul of a lonely old miser. But is Kazran Sardick, the richest man in Sardicktown, beyond redemption? And what is lurking in the fogs of Christmas Eve?

Doctor Who: The Snowmen

Doctor Who: The Snowmen

The Doctor has retired to 1892 London. Despite the protests of his allies, he is determined to keep out of mankind's affairs. However, a governess named Clara has stumbled upon a plot which only the Doctor can unravel, involving the death of her predecessor in ice and the sinister Dr. Simeon, who controls monsters made of sentient snow. And there is another mystery afoot: Clara is the spitting image of Oswin Oswald, whom the Doctor saw die in the Dalek asylum...