A Blood Meridian Screenplay

Finally finished this book.

The history of me slogging through Blood Meridian is almost as long and pointless as the trails of violence winding their way through this panorama of death and destruction. The cover is torn and bent, its pages curled, the binding rent by a sad, soft crack.

Rest well, BM, Or the Evening Redness in the West.

I’m not sorry I bothered. The writing in places achieves peak expression. Other places, the author loses his way, absorbed perhaps by some fallacy that every word and sentence and paragraph bring the reader closer to the author’s vision and intent.

What to do having completed such a read? Much has been made of failed attempts to bring it to cinema. How does one go about this, other than with hamburger and ketchup? Lots and lots of hamburger and ketchup.

My screenplay begins three decades after the plot opens on a fourteen-year-old Tennessean, now forty-five. He’s joined in a remote camp by five youth. Their conversation sours over the man’s scapula of human ears. A rifle is fired but its an unheard pistol that kills.

The child is father to the man who kills the child.

My screenplay, as yet unwritten, carries long passages of voice-over. My screenplay depicts the endlessness and stillness of sunrises, sunsets, and desolate landscape panorama.

It’s not violence that prevents this movie from being filmed. For that we have hamburger and ketchup. It’s the majesty of the tale’s voice, much of it vivid, much of it inscrutable, wandering passages like our protagonists through horrors unimaginable. These last, these inscrutables, the screenplay does not harbor.

My screenplay is direct, a pistol report, a gunshot echoing across the naked landscape of America’s mythic past and shattered future, rebuilt and enduring.

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