KUBRICK, JAMES FRANCO, AND CORMAC McCARTHY'S "BLOOD MERIDIAN"

For certain fans of Cormac McCarthy’s Satanic western "Blood Meridian" - a cohort among which your humble blogger enthusiastically counts himself - it has frequently been remarked that the only man for the job of translating that evil epic for the big screen would have been Stanley Fucking Kubrick. Hell, the novel even has its own Strangelove-style either/or secondary title: "The Evening Redness in the West". And so it was with great trepidation that most of us approached this Borgesian bit of blarney about Kubrick's (obviously fictional) 1998 film version of the novel, penned for the website TropMag by actor-slash-director-slash-"renaissance bro" James Franco, who called his imagined version "the perfect western for these times". Trepidation, obviously, because of what this presumptuous bit of fannish fluffery potentially foretold...

And lo, it has come to pass. With such talents as Ridley Scott and (actual Kubrick protege) Todd Field hopping on and off the Blood Meridian train over the past few years, Franco has taken it upon himself to film an extended test reel of HIS version of Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. The fact that he's released it publicly through VICE kind of tells you something right off the bat. So does the poster he created for his little thought experiment (see below).

Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on this. And I've enjoyed Franco's work as an actor, so I don't want to be too cruel. I did, however, feel that it at least merited a mention here at Kubrick U, where we hope to cover any and all ephemera that pops up in the Kubrick Universe from hereon out.