So what is it that’s keeping Blood Meridian from getting turned into the next No Country for Old Men ?įor answers, I turned to a trio of Blood Meridian and/or McCarthy experts: Stacey Peebles, Director of Film Studies at Centre College and editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal Noah Gallagher Shannon, writer of Oxford American ’s “Old Woods and Deep,” a survey of McCarthy, his fans and followers and character actor Mark Pellegrino, who played the infamous Judge Holden in a test reel Franco shot for Rudin in 2016. Meanwhile, producer Scott Rudin has owned the rights to the novel since at least 2004, but thus far hasn’t found the right collaborator - or right take - to move forward with any of them.Īgain, McCarthy’s novel is as prestigious a text as a filmmaker is likely to receive: a brutal, unvarnished, amoral portrait of the American West, to be sure, but one also seeded with the author’s extraordinary text, and if not a particularly rousing “hero” (The Kid) then at least a potential all-time great villain (Judge Holden). (It’s about a teenager referred to only as “The Kid,” who joins a gang of scalp-hunters in the Southwest and becomes embroiled in a battle of wills with the bald, erudite, imposing Judge Holden.) Steve Tesich ( Breaking Away and The World According to Garp ) first attempted to translate it to the big screen in 1995, followed in subsequent decades by efforts that stalled at various stages from Tommy Lee Jones the Kingdom of Heaven pairing of William Monahan and Ridley Scott James Franco Andrew Dominik ( The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ) John Hillcoat ( The Road ) Michael Haneke ( The White Ribbon ) and Lynne Ramsay ( We Need to Talk About Kevin ). It’s gone on, of course, to become recognized as McCarthy’s masterpiece and among the greatest American novels of all-time.Īll the while, it’s been the source of one troubled, incomplete or unsuccessful Hollywood adaptation after another.
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy ’s fifth book, was first published in 1985 to lukewarm critical and commercial reception.
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