Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is so awesome and obtuse and violent that it makes Nicholas Sparks cry like a hippie at a Slayer concert. There’s been talk of a film adaptation for years, last by Ridley Scott. What I’d really like to see is a Coen Brothers version of it, but the latest is that James Franco wants to write and direct it. In typical Franco fashion, this news was tucked into a story about Franco acquiring the rights to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
Unlike at least a half dozen other films that have been “announced” for Franco in the last few weeks, the actor tells me [As I Lay Dying] is the one he’s most attached to. He’s hopeful of getting it off the ground next spring.
“As I Lay Dying” isn’t the only writer-director project Franco’s involved in. He tells me he’s also in the process of making a deal with Scott Rudin to write and direct Cormac McCarthy‘s “Blood Meridian” in 2012. Franco and Rudin are also partnered in next fall’s Broadway production of “Sweet Bird of Youth” with Nicole Kidman. [via Showbiz411]
Hopefully Franco will be able to get to Blood Meridian between work on As I Lay Dying, six graduate programs, three performance art projects, a choreopoem, and tricking people into having fake gay sex as a practical joke.
This is neither here nor there nor a joke, but my theory is that Eli Cash, Owen Wilson’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums, was inspired by Blood Meridian. Here’s an excerpt from Blood Meridian:
They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tired grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now.
Now, here’s Eli Cash:
Am I crazy?
(*wildcat*)