Watching paint dry, grass grow, dictionaries compile
Can one make a popular film about a dictionary? An impossible task, on the face of it, we would assume. Very useful things are dictionaries but they're not exciting in the sense that thrillers are. You can visualize Philip K. Dick and John Grisham on the screen as you turn the pages, but it's hard to see how a dictionary script would get the Hollywood executives exchanging high fives and ponying up the funds.
Mysterious (misteries), a. [f. L. mysterium Mysteryi + ous. Cf. F. mystérieux.] 1. Full of or fraught with mystery; wrapt in mystery; hidden from human knowledge or understanding; impossible or difficult to explain, solve, or discover; of obscure origin, nature, or purpose. Oxford English Dictionary
But what if one could get John Boorman to write the script? After all, he did the business with Deliverance (1972) and turned out a lot of good stuff between that date and The Tailor of Panama (2001). According to a story doing the rounds at the Venice Film Festival recently, where Boorman was jury chairman, a script about the compiling of the Oxford English Dictionary lies on his desk in his home in Annamoe, a village in County Wicklow, on Ireland's east coast. It is based on Simon Winchester's best-seller The Professor and the Madman, which describes the extraordinary friendship between Professor James Murray, who edited the dictionary, and William Chester Minor, a mad, murdering American surgeon who helped Murray with his etymology while an inmate at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Says Boorman, Mel Gibson's production company, Icon, bought the film rights five years ago and production is set to begin "next year".
Asked by the Wall Street Journal which of the characters — Murray or Minor — Mad Max would be better suited to play, Boorman replied, "Gibson favors the madman, but I would prefer him to play the professor because the professor is a Scot and a tremendous enthusiast, and Mel Gibson has that marvellous enthusiasm and boyish vitality. I see him in a different way than he sees himself." So, might Mel do for dictionaries what he did for divinity? After all, "The Passion of the Christ" took $200 million at the box office and DVD sales are expected to reach 20 million copies. Mel's got the power, you know. In the beginning was the Word, and all that.
