Harvest Home

Heading out to Conjure Cinema in central Mass. to watch the mini-series adaptation of Thomas Tryon's excellent novel Harvest Home which was retitled, for the purposes of sounding spooky, "The Dark Secret of Harvest Home."

It's a great series, starring Bette Davis (post stroke), David Ackroyd and a young nubile Rosanna Arquette. I have been wanting to do a new script adaptation of this for a while now (looking into getting the rights) but this one was really pretty well done. But it could definitely be updated for a contemporary audience.

Ya know, it strikes me that one difference between life in the 1970s and life now is, everyone is attached to some sort of electronic device on a nearly constant basis. So a writer has to include things like cell phones and iPods and Blackberries and make sure their characters interact with them. But with this story, where a couple who lives and works in Manhattan decide to move with their teenage daughter to a tiny village in New England that still keeps the "old ways" it is not implausible to think that cell phone coverage might be, well, spotty at best...the better to make sure the hero is not able to call for help from the dark, scythe-shadowed cornfield, ha ha...

I am not sure where Walter got the DVD copy of this, maybe it is a bootleg. It is shown on TV once in a while but I am sure it gets cut a lot by commercials...the original version is 300 minutes long, and we are seeing it in two parts (part 2 next month), so hoping he has the whole thing!

Of course this book is also the basis of my coven's Provider Cycle rituals, along with a few other key texts including Robert Duncan's poems from The Opening of the Field and Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha."

Trying to figure out something appropriate to make for the potluck. If the idea of cooking and eating tongue were not so repulsive...hmm, maybe fruit salad.