Last week, I stuffed you catamites to the thrapple with the news that Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist and infamously lapstrake curmudgeon Cormac McCarthy had written a script. Today, Toldja.com reports that Ridley Scott is in talks to direct, which is either a huge deal or nothing at all, considering Scott has been attached to roughly eleventy quintillion projects in the last few years.

Scott has several films he’s considering, but there is a strong possibility this could be his next film and his followup to Prometheus, the 3D space film which Fox releases this summer.
Scott had been mulling several options, including an historical epic about Gertrude Bell that The Constant Gardener scribe Jeffrey Caine is currently rewriting, and Child 44 at Summit Entertainment. But Scott has been talking directly to McCarthy and it’s looking likely that he and his Scott Free Entertainment banner will come aboard the film and join Wechsler and the Schwartz’s as producers.

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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.

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A while back, I brought you the news that gay prostitute observer and dicknose enthusiast James Franco was looking to direct an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in between curating invisible art museums and working towards his Masters of Belles Letres in 16th century French pastry from the Sorbonne (probably). Professor Dicknose recently attended the Toronto Film Festival, where he was asked about Blood Meridian. He revealed that Scott Rudin was on to produce, and that they’d shot 20 minutes of test footage with Scott Glenn and Luke Perry (of course), but the project was “on hold” for “various reasons.” Then he added, “but we are going to make a movie based on [Cormac McCarthy]‘s third novel, Child of God.”

What’s that about, you ask? Why, it’s a book about a man falsely accused of rape who moves to a cave and dabbles in necrophilia, of course. “James Franco Dicknoses Necrophilia.” Book it.

“Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog.”

Child of God must be the most sympathetic portrayal of necrophilia in all of literature. The hero, Lester Ballard, is expelled from his human family and ends up living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his victims. Cormac McCarthy’s much-admired prose is suspenseful, rich with detail, and yet restrained, even delicate, in its images of Lester’s activities.

“You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you…. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it.” [Amazon]

“Gives suck to the maimed,” you say? Why, that describes all my favorite porn. Anyway, I hope it still stars Luke Perry. “James Franco Dicknoses Necrophilia with Luke Perry: A Choreopoem,” they could call it.

[story via Empire, pic via WooMagazine courtesy of Buzzfeed]

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.

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Well this is a fun story.  Joe Penhall adapted Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for the film. He recently published an essay in the Guardian about what it was like attending a private screening in Albuquerque, for which McCarthy himself had driven his silver Cadillac up from Santa Fe (sounds like a Bugs Bunny premise, doesn’t it?).

Finally the three of us sank into the leather armchairs, a discreet distance from one another, and the film began. Immediately, McCarthy began scribbling notes on a reporter’s notepad. [Director John] Hillcoat and I eyed each other nervously. By the end, he had pages of the damned things. He stood up and stretched, yawned and said absolutely nothing as the credits rolled. Finally Hillcoat asked: “Well?” “I have to go to the restroom,” was the impassive response, and he was gone.

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