Recently cheered by the prospect of elected officials and prostitution rings, I decided to see what the industries actually designed to provide entertainment had in store, seeing as how state government was doing such a bang-up job all its own. And that's when I found this gem over at Aint' It Cool News (be sure to note the writer's gift for understatement with "tweaks and bends"):
An indie production entity called The Film Department has acquired the rights to GALAHAD, Ryan Condal's spec script which tweaks and bends the King Arthur legend. "Galahad" retells the classic story by portraying King Arthur as an aging coward whose young, ambitious Queen Guinevere murders him, then blames the crime on Sir Galahad. Galahad must escape near-certain death, vanquish the forces of evil and return Camelot to its rightful glory.
Oh dear God no. You can't see me right now, but I assure you that my head is in my hands. What is it with revisionist takes on Arthurian legend? Why do people insist on brutalizing this one mythos so egregiously while leaving everything else relatively intact? Well, come to think of it, Troy was about as much like The Illiad and The Odyssey as a kick to the teeth is like a ham sandwich. Maybe there's some sort of implicit cutoff where if your subject matter is set before, say, 1500, historical or literary accuracy becomes utterly unnecessary. It's not like you'll see Hollywood producing a film about Hitler during the height of Nazi Germany, except that Hitler is a gay florist with a live-in partner, and together the two plan to free the Jews using an army of Persian kittens.
So now King Arthur is an aging coward murdered by his treacherous wife Guinevere. And who gets blamed for it? Galahad, the knight renowned for his purity who ultimately realizes the Grail quest. Yeah, good choice. I've actually got a script about Mother Theresa murdering orphans in Calcutta, so it's good to see there's a studio that'll pick my work up, too. Honestly, who the fuck is this Ryan Condal son of a bitch and why hasn't someone shoved a rusted butter knife up his urethra yet to keep this kind of shit from happening?
Have you ever heard that meditation on probability that says an infinite number of chimps at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually crank out the complete works of William Shakespeare? Well I give "Galahad" three chimps (that's including Mr. Condal), a bottle of Jack, and fifty two minutes. And I'm willing to bet you the other two chimps, drunk on whiskey though they might be, would at least have the common fucking decency to feel dirty after writing that script.
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