KC-area filmmaker sees Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future hiding In Plain Sight

With the current fascist-leaning state of life in the U.S., it feels like only a matter of time before someone attempts (again) to adapt Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Versions of Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel were made in 1980, 1998 and, most recently 2020 as a notably ill-received streaming series. But for as many times as it’s been attempted, a definitive version—one that sticks in our collective consciousness—has yet to emerge.

Thomas Rex would like to be the guy who helps make that happen.

Rex, a filmmaker and 2023 graduate of KU’s film and media production program, is in the process of developing an adaptation of Huxley’s novel, which made an impression on him as a freshman at KU, then again when he re-read the book as a senior.

“I was in a screenwriting class and our final project was a feature film script,” Rex says. “It struck me as perfect source material. It’s not untapped; there have been other projects. But I fell in love with the book again and decided to take it page by page. That’s how it got started.”

In case it wasn’t part of your high school or college reading list, Brave New World tells the story of a futuristic society in which artificially-grown humans are groomed for life in specific class identities. Everyone stays happy thanks to propaganda and rampant state-sanctioned drugs, particularly a happiness-inducer called soma. The discovery of a man named John, who was raised a naturally-conceived, non-government medicated “savage” outside of modern society, upends the characters’ satisfaction with what they’d believed to be a utopia.

To say this is an ambitious undertaking for someone fresh out of film school is an understatement. Fortunately, Rex was aware of that.

“There’d be no way in hell I could make that as a newly graduated student,” Rex says. “I didn’t have the experience, the resources. The next best thing would be to write a proof of concept.”

That proof of concept is a trailer for a prequel to Brave New World called In Plain Sight, which covers the events leading to the creation of the society we encounter in Huxley’s novel. The gist is that an employee at a pharmaceutical lab unintentionally discovers the nefarious origins of a drug that’s being tested on patients, and the government conspiracy behind it.

Rex is using his trailer to pitch his dream project to studios.

“It reflects some real anxieties right now, like corporate overreach, monopolies, things mirroring the systemic conditioning of the population you see in Brave New World,” Rex says. “There are some eerie, not-so-subtle parallels (from the book) to life in the west and the U.S. in particular with the coordinating of industry and the federal government, and how they collaborate against its citizens in some ways, and the way that social media is shaping young minds on a daily basis.”

Filming on In Plain Sight concluded April 28, and Rex plans to have the trailer and pitch deck finished and ready to share by the end of May. If any studios bite, Rex knows he likely won’t be behind the camera for the resulting film, but he’s hopeful he’ll still be involved.