Bad Blood, Good Taste
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Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Tommy Lee Jones’s lost project, Tina Fey's dynamic duo, Ron Howard’s beautiful mind, Baby Reindeer signs, and psilocybin.
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BAD BLOOD, GOOD TASTE
Moving through the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian feels like wading through a swamp.
The overwhelming, poetic, primordial violence of this masterwork cannot be overstated.
Tommy Lee Jones, one of many who tried to adapt the book into a film, stated:
“I was going to make it just like the book, but studios get a little scared when a black guy cuts off a white guy’s head, and the shooting jets of blood douse the fire. I wasn’t going to cut it back.”
Others like Ridley Scott, James Franco, and Todd Field (Dir: Tar) have also tried their hand and failed.
The language is nearly impossible to adapt on screen.
Indulge in a quote:
“The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.”
The latest attempt at adaptation is by New Regency, who has just hired John Logan to write the script.
Logan’s credits include:
Gladiator (20o0)
The Last Samurai (2003)
Skyfall (2012)
Logan stated:
“Blood Meridian has been one of my favorite novels since first reading it in 1985… It’s a majestic, beautiful and uncompromising book and I’m thrilled to be able to help bring Cormac McCarthy’s dark masterpiece to the screen.”
The crowing achievement of McCarthy adaptations is the Coen Brother's best picture winner, No Country For Old Men (2008).
The runner-up is The Road (2009), directed by John Hillcoat, who will serve as the director for this new adaptation of Blood Meridian.
It’s a hell of a task and as Logan moves into the clutches of the darkest corners of the human soul, we leave with a quote:
“They paused without the cantina and pooled their coins and Toadvine pushed aside the dried cowhide that hung for a door and they entered a place where all was darkness and without definition.”
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