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The success of the late Cormac McCarthy reached new heights in the spring of 2007, when mainstream audiences became familiar with his work through the Coen Brothers’ film adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which would go on to win Best Picture, followed by the surprising choice of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic book The Road as the next selection in Oprah Winfrey’s vaunted Book Club. The reclusive McCarthy did his first television interview ever with her that summer, to the shock of long-standing fans of his work.
McCarthy’s writing has long been thought of as impossible to adapt to the screen, and there’s certainly some truth to that — though John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road was well-received, fans have had doubts about the long-rumored possibility that he would tackle McCarthy’s Blood Meridian — at last confirmed by Deadline just a few months ago, with the author’s blessing.
Yet there’s an earlier adaptation of a McCarthy classic that deserves reconsideration with his passing, in part because of what an impact it had on the directing career of one Billy Bob Thornton. Just a few years removed from his astounding success with Sling Blade, Thornton’s adaptation of All The Pretty Horses was a Miramax production starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, and it was infamously ruined by meddling from one Harvey Weinstein.
To summarize how author and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz related the story back in 2017, Weinstein demanded to see an “assembly cut” — essentially, all the footage you have for the film, pre-editing — and hated it. He lobbied against it by arguing that it was nearly four hours long (Thornton insists that he intended to cut it down to around 2:40, about the length of Miramax’s own English Patient). But Weinstein wanted it under two, and he wanted to lean into the idea of marketing it as a romantic piece for the two young stars, despite the fact that’s not what the story’s about at all.
So Miramax slashed the film apart, ditched the Daniel Lanois score, and cut it to under two hours, resulting in a mess of a movie that seems unevenly paced and was widely panned (though Roger Ebert loved it). At the box office, like so many westerns released in that decade, it failed.
Thornton felt so drained by the experience that he never directed again. Damon has expressed his frustrations at multiple times over the years — in a 2012 interview, he said:
“Everybody who worked on All the Pretty Horses took so much time and cared so much. As you know, the Cormac McCarthy book is set in 1949 and is about a guy trying to hold on to his old way of life. The electric guitar became popular in 1949, and the composer Daniel Lanois got an old 1949 guitar and wrote this spare, haunting score. We did the movie listening to his score. It informed everything we did. We made this very dark, spare movie, but the studio wanted an epic with big emotions and violins. They saw the cast, the director, Billy Bob Thornton, and the fact that we spent $50 million, and they never released our movie — though the cut still exists. Billy had a heart problem at that time, and it was because his heart fucking broke from fighting for that film. It really fucked him up. It still bothers me to this day.”
Note that key sentence: the Thornton Cut still exists. According to Seitz, he’ll even show it to you if you ask — it’s on VHS, apparently.
So now it’s 2023. Cormac McCarthy is a much bigger mainstream name than he was in 2000. His books are bestsellers again with his passing. Harvey Weinstein is disgraced and in prison. And westerns, thanks to cultural phenomenons like Yellowstone, are bigger business in Hollywood than they’ve been in a generation. Daniel Lanois’s score is out there floating. And Billy Bob Thornton still has his cut of All The Pretty Horses.
The internet has proven its power. If it worked for Zack Snyder, surely we can ask for something more important than Justice League. It’s time to release the Thornton Cut.
