Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy has had four of his novels adapted into films (All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, Outer Dark, and The Road), and claims he actually started No Country for Old Men as a screenplay and turned it into a novel when no one wanted it. But no one has ever hired him to write specifically for a film or bought one of his screenplays… (*dramatic music*) …UNTIL NOW. From TOLDJA.com:
The terrain of the script is reminiscent of the rough and tumble world depicted in No Country For Old Men. The protagonist in The Counselor is a respected lawyer who thinks he can dip a toe in to the drug business without getting sucked down. It is a bad decision and he tries his best to survive it and get out of a desperate situation. While McCarthy’s ICM agents Binky Urban and Ron Bernstein were expecting McCarthy to deliver his next novel, he instead surprised them with the spec script before returning to the book.
“The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac’s novels,” [producer Nick] Wechsler said. Steve Schwartz told me: “Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.” The script is contemporary, and set in the Southwest.
As much as I want to see the eventual film, I’d love to be a fly on the wall during the notes process even more. “Hey, Cormac? Yeah, hey, it’s Binky again. About your script, everyone LOVES it. I mean they are just going bonkers for it over here, everyone says you’re a genius. But… well, some of the folks at the studio were just wondering… here on page 34 when you say ‘the kerchiefed joplin split the catamite’s thrapple down to the sidemeat, scuttling the lapstrake quenchbucket,’ we were just thinking that sounded a little… harsh, you know? They were really hoping the hero could have more… I dunno, heart.”
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Binky Urban is Raffi’s hip-hop alter-ego.
You could combine any two words from Vince’s McCarthy impression and would have a perfect hipster band name.
“Blood Meridian” or GTFO.
I don’t know what a quenchbucket is, but I know I can’t bring one into McDonalds anymore.
Grown men named Binky are the personification of what people think about when they think negatively about Jews.
I vividly remember having to look up thrapple while reading Blood Meridian. And then giggling.
For eight and forty hours they bore knowledge of the corpse between them like some grim puppet stitched and stringed from the fabric of the damned amongst the revelers who shrieked about the house by the sand like gaudy crows hopping to and fro, as the dark figure watched over them, the avatar of the slippery power of a shadowy cabal’s tendrils. In fraud they found a false gem of honesty with which they had first been brought to spread but then this gem revealed itself as coal and the pair wailed and gnashed at the dead meat which they had found and in doing so they perpetuated new frauds, ones not built of numbers and deceptions upon the printed page, but ones of bodily reality, a hangman’s ruse. Though conceived in a pounding panic delirious and unlikely, as the fantastic bloody charade persisted on the island under the sallow moon and with the sound of deep water eroding hard land grain by rock by grain in a battle of attrition older than hate itself Larry and Richard began to enjoy this, their weekend at Bernie’s.
THIS!
IS!
SPARTA!
I’ll see myself out.
The internet has ruined my patience for long-form, and I don’t want to encourage such comments, but this was very well done.
I learned “pipeclayed” while reading The Road. Actually, as it turns out, he made the word up. It’s the verb version of a color… like saying “oranged.”
For once McCarthy’s refusal to put quotation marks around dialogue actually fits the format.
Yes, but in a parallel gesture of conceit he refused to identify which lines were spoken by which character.
Does Binky also manage Booboo Stewart?
“Set in the Southwest”. Nice of McCarthy to anticipate his budget.
Somebody nom jabask for me. It’s far too much of a pain to do on my phone.
[From memory] “When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto, and the lank swamp hair struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried. It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of it’s nativity wail on wail while he lay there with palsied jaw hasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.”
In a Coen Brothers/Cormac McCarthy movie: everyone’s a yokel, the good guys die, the villains win, and no one gives a shit. “Fin”