Ever since I read the book THE ROAD, I promised myself to be a new loyal fan of author Cormac McCarthy but I can’t say I’m devout disciple just yet because I still haven’t read most of the books he’s written all these years, including OUTER DARK and CHILD OF GOD but there is one McCarthy’s book that people have said is Unfilmable because they think the film version would be hardcore graphic beyond anything you’ve ever seen on the big screen, but McCarthy disagreed…
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, the great author was asked what he thinks about people saying BLOOD MERIDIAN is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence,.. I love McCarthy’s response…
That’s all crap. The fact that’s it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.
The story is about a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Scalps huh? Inglourious Basterds got scalps and that was filmable, wait, we might hit the jackpot here.. McCarthy says it would take a filmmaker with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls,… paging Quentin Tarantino!
By the way, I remember back when Lord Of The Rings books were called unfilmable and bam! Peter Jackson proved everybody wrong. BLOOD MERIDIAN the movie can be done, folks!
Published in 1985, Here’s the official synopsis of the book…
“The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner,” writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition. “I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable.”
Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.
“A classic American novel of regeneration through violence,” declares Michael Herr. “McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers.”
