The holy road

I’ve always said, “Hollywood will rue the day they chose to ignore me.”

While it’s often a butt of my jokes, Dances With Wolves is still one of my favorite movies. I will go to my grave saying that Kevin Costner deserved his Oscar and I will continue to beat that drum. Unfortunately he will never return to that material and honestly he doesn’t need to. Costner told his story in the best way he could.

Still though, I think there’s potential in a sequel. It’s just unfortunate that Michael Blake, the original author of Dances With Wolves, didn’t agree. Maybe I’m wrong, but reading his own sequel, The Holy Road, Blake seemed to have purposely written his story so that it couldn’t have been adapted for the screen. In truth, it’s not a very well-written book. Plus, I don’t think Hollywood has the appetite to make another white savior story, which is why the powers that be (I won’t say their names because my treatment still has the “possibility” of getting produced (because I have never received an official ‘no’)) have been having trouble getting this project off the ground.

However I was undeterred. My thought process was, “if the Holy Road could be successfully adapted considering the current political climate, what would that look like?”. So I wrote my own treatment as a miniseries. And my take was a much more cynical and less naive approach to the Old West. However that naïveté was what partially made Dances With Wolves so compelling, so those images had to be sprinkled throughout the story. The result was a violent and pessimistic portrait, where Dances With Wolves/John Dunbar’s role is somewhat diminished, but the sentimentalism remained.

I rearranged some of the events of the book and completely changed the ending (which, if you read The Holy Road, is a necessity if you want to make a direct sequel to Costner’s movie). This might not have appealed to the producers, but they know that I’m right.

So come on Hollywood, call me back goddamnit!