Conan Notes
A few days ago, the comics site Bleeding Cool put up a link to some press notes for the new Conan the Barbarian film, which had appeared on the web site for Lionsgate Entertainment. I read through them; they seemed pretty standard. Like most press notes, they’re relentlessly upbeat, and give strong lip service to the importance of fidelity to the source material for the production. Who knows? Maybe it’s honestly meant. But the more closely I looked at the notes, the less convinced I was by the approach they suggested the movie was taking, or by the reading they presented of Howard and Conan.
I understand the need to change elements in the process of adapting a work from one medium into another, but there comes a point where you wonder what the point of an adaptation is; what is it about the original work that the adaptation is seeking to convey? Or, conversely, would the work have been better served without the framework of the pre-existing story? Personally, I don’t see the character of Conan as I recognise it in these notes. I’m not a Howard scholar, but I’ve read the stories, and to me they were fairly consistent in the depiction of Conan across several decades of his life. That character isn’t in these notes. The film may still be good, of course, but if so I doubt it’ll be because of any fidelity to the themes of the source material.
It couldn’t have been easy for Novalyne Price Ellis to write One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard the Final Years (Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc., 1986). Price Ellis’ memoir of her relationship with Howard (roughly 1934-36) is illuminating in its raw honesty. It’s also painful, at turns disappointing and downright frustrating. We might find escape in Howard’s sword and sorcery tales but there is none to be found here.
Moving on from the