Contents
Also by Cormac McCarthy
Foreword
Cast of Characters
Notes
The Gardener's Son
Also by Cormac McCarthy
The Orchard Keeper
Outer Dark
Child of God
Suttree
Blood Meridian
The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts
All the Pretty Horses
The Crossing
Copyright © 1996 by M-71, Ltd.
All rights reserved
THE ECCO PRESS 100 West Broad Street Hopewell, New Jersey 08525
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Ltd., Ontario Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, Cormac, 1933—
The gardener’s son : a screenplay / Cormac McCarthy. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-88001-481-4 (case)
I. Gardeners son (Motion picture) II. Title.
Pn1997.G3194 1996 79I-43'72-Dc20 96-13611
Designed by Barbara Aronica
The text of this book is set in Caslon
987654321
FIRST EDITION
Foreword
In the spring of 1975 I sent Cormac McCarthy a letter in care of a post office box in El Paso, Texas. His wife in Maryville, Tennessee and his editor at Random House were protective of his whereabouts, but they both assured me that, wherever he was, he picked up his mail every six weeks or so. At the time I was a documentary filmmaker on sabbatical (thanks to a fellowship from a journalism foundation) with money to spend (thanks to a Public Television series entitled “Visions”) looking for a screenwriter. Not just any screenwriter. A great screenwriter. I had already spoken to Eudora Welty (I was young and shameless).
McCarthy’s first three novels ( The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God) had been published to the requisite number of glowing reviews describing the author as “Faulknerian” (the southern novelists proverbial kiss of death). Sales had been fitful at best. Certainly Hollywood had not been beating a path to this particular P.O. Box in El Paso before me. Child of God, the oddest of a wonderfully odd lot, had been the one that struck me. It was easily the most cinematic, but not in the conventional sense of the term. It had a rigor about it, a way of not taking the easy, ‘novelistic’ route. By never presuming an author’s license to enter the mind of his protagonist, McCarthy had been able to insure the almost complete inscrutability of his subject and subject matter, while at the same time thoroughly investigating it. Here was “Negative Capability” of a very high order. I was hooked.
And so when a few weeks later I received a reply from this most inscrutable of writers suggesting we meet and talk about my ideas for the film, I became convinced that it was meant to be, and so it was. We were, at least in one sense, perfectly matched: he had never even seen, much less written a screenplay before, and I had never directed a fiction film, only documentaries. The treatment or story of the film, insofar as one existed, was based on nothing more than a few paragraphs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous industrialist of the pre-Civil War South. Our first meeting ended with an agreement to reconvene in Tennessee, then drive southeast through North and South Carolina, making our way to Graniteville, where the actual events of the story took place. It would be a kind of research trip, or at least an excuse for a research trip. It would last a few weeks, and then with a few more weeks of work back in Maryville at the typewriter, we would have our screenplay. It would be that simple.
In fact it took almost exactly a year. For me a wonderful itinerant year on the road, with the deafening roar of the textile mills of South Carolina giving way to the tiny plop of a perfectly ripened tomato outside Cormac's living room window in Tennessee. For Cormac McCarthy, at least from my vantage point, it was a year of pure alchemy, much of it spent translating what could have been a dry academic expose into a strange and haunting tale of impotence, rage, and ultimately violence among two generations of owners and workers, fathers and sons,
Also by Cormac McCarthy
Foreword
Cast of Characters
Notes
The Gardener's Son
Also by Cormac McCarthy
The Orchard Keeper
Outer Dark
Child of God
Suttree
Blood Meridian
The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts
All the Pretty Horses
The Crossing
Copyright © 1996 by M-71, Ltd.
All rights reserved
THE ECCO PRESS 100 West Broad Street Hopewell, New Jersey 08525
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Ltd., Ontario Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, Cormac, 1933—
The gardener’s son : a screenplay / Cormac McCarthy. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-88001-481-4 (case)
I. Gardeners son (Motion picture) II. Title.
Pn1997.G3194 1996 79I-43'72-Dc20 96-13611
Designed by Barbara Aronica
The text of this book is set in Caslon
987654321
FIRST EDITION
Foreword
In the spring of 1975 I sent Cormac McCarthy a letter in care of a post office box in El Paso, Texas. His wife in Maryville, Tennessee and his editor at Random House were protective of his whereabouts, but they both assured me that, wherever he was, he picked up his mail every six weeks or so. At the time I was a documentary filmmaker on sabbatical (thanks to a fellowship from a journalism foundation) with money to spend (thanks to a Public Television series entitled “Visions”) looking for a screenwriter. Not just any screenwriter. A great screenwriter. I had already spoken to Eudora Welty (I was young and shameless).
McCarthy’s first three novels ( The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God) had been published to the requisite number of glowing reviews describing the author as “Faulknerian” (the southern novelists proverbial kiss of death). Sales had been fitful at best. Certainly Hollywood had not been beating a path to this particular P.O. Box in El Paso before me. Child of God, the oddest of a wonderfully odd lot, had been the one that struck me. It was easily the most cinematic, but not in the conventional sense of the term. It had a rigor about it, a way of not taking the easy, ‘novelistic’ route. By never presuming an author’s license to enter the mind of his protagonist, McCarthy had been able to insure the almost complete inscrutability of his subject and subject matter, while at the same time thoroughly investigating it. Here was “Negative Capability” of a very high order. I was hooked.
And so when a few weeks later I received a reply from this most inscrutable of writers suggesting we meet and talk about my ideas for the film, I became convinced that it was meant to be, and so it was. We were, at least in one sense, perfectly matched: he had never even seen, much less written a screenplay before, and I had never directed a fiction film, only documentaries. The treatment or story of the film, insofar as one existed, was based on nothing more than a few paragraphs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous industrialist of the pre-Civil War South. Our first meeting ended with an agreement to reconvene in Tennessee, then drive southeast through North and South Carolina, making our way to Graniteville, where the actual events of the story took place. It would be a kind of research trip, or at least an excuse for a research trip. It would last a few weeks, and then with a few more weeks of work back in Maryville at the typewriter, we would have our screenplay. It would be that simple.
In fact it took almost exactly a year. For me a wonderful itinerant year on the road, with the deafening roar of the textile mills of South Carolina giving way to the tiny plop of a perfectly ripened tomato outside Cormac's living room window in Tennessee. For Cormac McCarthy, at least from my vantage point, it was a year of pure alchemy, much of it spent translating what could have been a dry academic expose into a strange and haunting tale of impotence, rage, and ultimately violence among two generations of owners and workers, fathers and sons,
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