Adapting Cormac McCarthy: Tracking Blood from Page to Screen

Stacey Peebles' new book, Cormac McCarthy and Performance, is the first comprehensive overview of the renowned author's writings for film, theater, and the film adaptations of his novels. Uncovering these oft-overlooked works by drawing on primary sources from McCarthy's recently opened archive and interviews with several collaborators, this book examines titles such as the 1977 televised film The Gardener's Son, McCarthy's unpublished screenplays from the 1980s that became the foundation for his Border Trilogy novels and No Country for Old Men; various productions of two of his plays; and seven film adaptations.

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The vice president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, an associate professor of English and the director of film studies at Centre College, Peebles focuses on the emergent theme of tragedy within McCarthy's work, relaying the difficulties of translating his vivid depictions of violence and suffering into the medium of film by giving us a brief look into the unending and often upended saga of adapting 1985's Blood Meridian to the silver screen.

Tracking Blood from Page to Screen

Stacey Peebles

American cinema—and cinema generally—is no stranger to violence. In 1903, one of the first one-reelers, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, showcased a group of outlaws who didn’t hesitate to shoot innocent bystanders or beat a man’s face in with a rock before tossing the body off the moving train. Later years would pass milestone after violent milestone: Bonnie and Clyde meeting their gruesome and excessively brutal end in Arthur Penn’s 1967 film (a level of graphic realism that audiences were already seeing every night on the evening news about the Vietnam War, Penn implied); Michael Corleone ordering hits on all his rivals to take place simultaneously with his niece’s baptism in Coppola’s The Godfather (1977); Quentin Tarantino blasting his way into the national consciousness with an unsettling mix of violence and comedy in Pulp Fiction (1994); and the development of the 1970s slasher film into the post-9/11 “torture porn” of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). Even now, when a glut of superhero films present violence as fantastical or metaphoric, audiences seem ever willing to consider, even test themselves against, spectacular violence in cinema.

From The Great Train Robbery

The Western, the genre which The Great Train Robbery inaugurated into film, may not be as ubiquitous as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, but it remains alive, resurrected from claims of its obsolescence by films like True Grit (2012), The Revenant (2016), and Hell or High Water (2017). Violence is arguably the genre’s fundamental element, and some films take that bloodiness to an extreme, like The Wild Bunch (1969) or The Hateful Eight (2015). And so an acclaimed Western novel from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author like Cormac McCarthy, whose No Country for Old Men was masterfully (and very lucratively) adapted for the screen by the Coen brothers, would seem like a sure bet, brimming with cinematic potential. (And who remembered the fiasco that was All the Pretty Horses, anyway? 2000 was ancient Hollywood history, and blame it all on Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein if you need to point the finger somewhere.)

McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian is epic in scope, style, and import. It has a narrative focus and sweep that is, as Steven Frye and others have argued, likely influenced by Western films from directors like Peckinpah. The novel’s language is ineffably literary and, at the same time, richly imagistic. After all, this is no Remembrance of Things Past, a deeply internal exploration of memory and the streams of consciousness. Blood Meridian is a story in which action and landscape speak loudest, and though it may be philosophical, political, historical, and theological, it is perhaps most primarily a vivid, disturbing, haunting spectacle. And spectacle is the very language of film. Despite those attractions and advantages, however, the novel has thus far eluded attempts to bring it to the screen—perhaps indicating that, at least as far as violence is concerned, there are still some places that lie off the cinematic map.

The 10 Most Significant Sci-Fi Films

Advance tickets for a small indie film called Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (wink, wink) went on sale this week, smashing box office records for pre-sales and crashing movie theatre websites. The Walt Disney Company release, which doesn't hit theaters until December 18th, is expected to take in $2 billion globally making it the biggest mainstream science fiction film of the decade, potentially the biggest genre film of the century. But let's not forget how the film industry got here.

Douglas Brode is a screenwriter, playwright, novelist, graphic novelist, film historian, and multi-award-winning journalist who has written nearly forty books on movies and the mass media. His latest book Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents
The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films is a comprehensive list ranging from today’s blockbusters to forgotten gems, with surprises for even the most informed fans and scholars. We asked Brode to list the ten most significant science fiction films that established the genre as a global industrial powerhouse. The force is strong with this one.

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'The 10 Most Significant Sci-Fi Films'
By Doug Brode

The idea of doing a book on the 100 greatest science fiction films of all time had been dancing around in my mind for decades. Thank goodness I didn’t have the opportunity write it until very recently. While growing up in the 1950s, most of the sci-fi films that I stood in line to see were low-budget affairs, sometimes high-quality (The Incredible Shrinking Man), others less so (Cat-Women of the Moon) – though even the least ambitious films were appealing to the first true generation of American teenagers who became addicted to rock ‘n’ roll music, the then-new medium of television, and anything at all to do with outer space – in large part because that's when the US-Soviet space race began in earnest. So many films of that era played strictly at local drive-In movie theatres or downtown grindhouse bijous that many people forget a simple fact: when feature-length science-fiction premiered with Metropolis in 1927, the genre represented the biggest budget films of the time.

Today, the most important films being produced internationally as well as in Hollywood are almost exclusively science-fiction related. The mainstream has fallen in love with the sort of stories that way back when, in the Dick Clark era, were thought to be marginal. But how did the transition occur? One element of my book Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents is the manner in which step-by-step, high budgets (often accompanied by high quality) gradually returned to this genre.

Here, in their order of their production, are ten of the most significant:

1
Forbidden Planet (1956)

If there was one Hollywood studio that seemed unlikely ever to make a sci-fi film, it was MGM. Here was the home of the greatest musicals, the biggest epics, and more stars than there were in the heavens. Leave sci-fi to the likes of Universal-International, where such B items could be knocked out for about $500,000 per production, invariably in black and white. Then, the seemingly impossible occurred – MGM turned out a $2 million sci-fi color feature with a top star (Walter Pigeon), gorgeous color photography, a sexy female star who appeared in the near-nude (to make clear this was for adults as well as kids), and an irresistible robot named Robby. Here was an early indication of the shape of things to come.

2

The Time Machine (1960)

George Pal, the second greatest fantasy-filmmaker in L.A. (only Walt Disney surpassed him as to quality and quantity), wanted to move away from what remained the run of the mill stuff by mounting a full-scale interpretation of H.G. Welles’ The Time Machine. With young rising stars Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux, a smart script that updated the classic novel for a new generation, some superb state of the art special effects for the monstrous Morlocks, and the creation of a ruined future world brought to life in vivid color, he succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dream.