Someone Get Mel Gibson On The Phone
"Aztec" Miniseries /
Steven Lloyd Wilson
Trade News | August 25, 2009 | Comments (10)
Here’s the short version, which only is very interesting if you know exactly who all these blokes and the book are without some combination of IMDB and Wikipedia: Gary Jennings’ historical novel Aztec is being made into a miniseries, with John Milius and Alfonso Arau attached.
OK, so here’s the look up table of proper nouns from that sentence that when taken in the context, make for a potentially very interesting project:
Gary Jennings wrote the five (three of which were posthumous and finished by his editor) novels of the Aztec series.
John Milius wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and co-created and executive produced “Rome.”
Alfonso Arau directed Like Water for Chocolate and A Walk in the Clouds, amongst other films.
The original novel (published in 1980) was based on a decade of historical research by Jennings and revolves around an elderly surviving Aztec man recounting the story of his life to a Spanish bishop after the destruction of the Aztec empire. Sex! Violence! Human sacrifice! History is only boring when you learn it from a text book compiled by committee not to offend anyone. Novels like this are what you get when you dig under the facade we erect of the past and see past people for what they were: people. Dirty, perverse, violent, angry, adventurous, heroic, idiotic, brilliant, and most of all, flawed individuals.
So it sounds sort of like Apocalypto, except good.
Comments
Posted by: alphawhiskey at August 25, 2009 7:36 PM
I hope it's an HBO or Showtime Miniseries. I've read three of these, and they are, by far some of the most sex and violence filled novels. I mean...It's pretty damn explicit in some places. I swear some chapters should have started with "Dear Penthouse...".
This mini-series has the potential to reach Deadwood levels of violence, sex, and awesomeness.