So many people are killed -- so graphically -- in some of his books that it's almost unimaginable. In his latest novel, it's after the end of the world, and besides wandering and waiting, almost nothing happens. He's renowned for his dialogue, but tends to ignore plot and doesn't use quotation marks.
The author was so poor he couldn't afford toothpaste, but refused to do anything to promote his work. It's the biography of a starving artist, not a Hollywood player. But with this week's release of "The Road," Cormac McCarthy -- the reclusive author who told Oprah Winfrey that he didn't care if people read his books -- will be officially enshrined as one of Hollywood's hottest properties.
It's not just "The Road," a grim but sometimes stirring post-apocalyptic tale directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee. Andrew Dominik, the adventurous Australian director who adapted "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" from Ron Hansen's novel, has expressed interest in McCarthy's "The Crossing."
Three of McCarthy's key cinematic admirers -- Dominik, Hillcoat and "Road" screenwriter Joe Penhall -- all grew up in Australia. The sense of the landscape as a harsh, unforgiving place, says Penhall, "is part of both nations' mythologies." But it's not just Aussies.
Todd Field, director of "In the Bedroom" and "Little Children," is in the process of adapting "Blood Meridian," which Ridley Scott was originally drawn to. (Scott Rudin, known for the best literary taste in Hollywood, owns the rights.)
It's been a long slog to respectability, though. "His writing was horrific at the beginning, then he wrote about the West," says Kenneth Lincoln, a UCLA professor whose critical study, "Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles," appears in paperback in December. "The frontier narrative has never been taken seriously in New York. For over two decades, he was seen as a regionalist, an eccentric, certainly not highbrow."
The Oscars for " No Country for Old Men," the 2007 Coen Brothers film adapted from his '05 novel, changed things, and not just in the film world, Lincoln says. "Now he's become the cause célèbre of every English department. Academia follows the marketplace, including the movies. Suddenly, he's being taught everywhere."
