9. Blood Meridian
Mark Pellegrino as the Judge, in James Francos 30-minute show-reel for his abandoned version of BLOOD MERIDIAN. When Cormac McCarthys epic novel BLOOD MERIDIAN (or, THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST) saw publication in 1985, it epitomised the generic hybrid gothic western. So well-drawn was its gruesome yet mystical Wild West panorama that it drew comparison with darkly obsessive American writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Flannery OConnor, as well as to Melvilles Moby Dick. The story of the kid, a drifter in the mid-19th century whose every step from outlaw gang to army renegades to Native American massacres is shadowed by the sinister Judge Holden, who may possibly be an earthly demon. It was also inherently cinematic, inviting allusions to the violent outlaw West of Sam Peckinpah in THE WILD BUNCH (1969) and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974), his contemporary tale of revenge and obsession. At the same time, BLOOD MERIDIAN was seen as impossible to film, its poetically described violence eclipsing the slow-mo squibs of action movies with acts of cruelty, the Comanche tribe outdoing even the white man by murdering a wedding train and sodomising the corpses too extreme to maintain sympathy with the amoral characters. Of course, this was before some of McCarthys more extreme novels (ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, 2000, aside) had been brought successfully to the cinema screen: John Hillcoat focused on Viggo Mortensen as the anguished father in the apocalyptic THE ROAD (2006); the Coens eschewed their quirky humour (as they had in their screenplay for TO THE WHITE SEA) to depict the murderous avarice of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007). It was Tommy Lee Jones, lead actor in the latter and a personal friend of Cormac McCarthy, who first obtained an option on BLOOD MERIDIAN; it expired after a draft screenplay which maintained the poetic savagery but only contained about a third of the book. Screenwriter William Monahan, Oscar winner for THE DEPARTED (2006), had a crack at it too, before the option rights came around to indie actor/director James Franco. Francos 30-minute screen test for his mooted cast, based on a crucial section of the book, can now be found online at Vice Magazine. In some ways BLOOD seems un-filmable, hes admitted self-defeatingly. His terse prose utilises vocabulary only found in the crannies of annals of the Old West and the specialised spheres of working men. Francos footage is faithful in that sense, as reverential of his literary source as his adaptation of Faulkners AS I LAY DYING (2013). But it contains only a little of McCarthys sense of overhanging violence: the Glanton gang, holed up in the hills, barely resemble men bloodied and diminished by Apache attack though theres a tense moment when they find the skinned corpse of one of their number. Maybe this was why the producer pulled the rope, and a film of BLOOD MERIDIAN remains only a fond hope though its hard to imagine any director besides Hillcoat or Paul Thomas Anderson who could pull it off. Franco compensated by filming an earlier (1973) McCarthy novel, CHILD OF GOD, also once considered unfilmable. With Scott Haze in the title role of feral backwoodsman Lester Ballard, the brooding indie film explores the lower depths of necrophilia and sex murder as Ballard becomes ever more estranged from society.
In 2014, it was a subject that lent itself well to a grungy, low-budget rendition; but the epic scale of BLOOD MERIDIAN is going to require producers with balls and money.