If you like Stephen King and Peter Straub's THE TALISMAN, you should check out what this guy's doing...

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Being the resident Stephen King nut around these parts, I was sent a link by Moriarty to a website called The Wordslinger which is championing a young Canadian filmmaker who has taken a giant leap of faith. I remember as a kid consuming every Stephen King book I could get my hands on and when I read The Talisman I was floored. Then I heard that noneother than Steven Spielberg optioned the book and I've been dying to see him tackle it for damn near 2/3rds of my life. But he hasn't done it. There have been attempts, the most recent by Ehren Kruger. I got my hands on his script back in 2003 and... I wasn't happy. Thank God that script didn't happen (where there were only a couple of scenes in the territories, Morgan Sloat was Jack's daddy and Jack started out with the Talisman), even when Kruger retooled it for a 6-hour mini-series he was to produce. Now we are here today and a young filmmaker named Mathieu Ratthe has taken the initiative to try to convince the powers that be that he's the man for this material. He created a sequence from the book and with little money and a lot of called-in favors he made it the best he could. And it is impressive. What he was able to get done with little money is a damn fine little piece. Is it my perfect imagining of the story? Not really. It's nice he got Cameron Bright to play Jack, but in my mind Jack has to be younger, not a teenager, someone who really is on a grand adventure. And the mom has to be more regal, elegant. But that's all casting stuff... I'll say some more below, but check out what Mr. Ratthe put together:

It looks sharp, I love the imagery outside the window and when it cracks. I doubt Mr. Ratthe will get to make this flick, but his heart's in the right place and he's really taken a leap of faith putting his effort into this piece, so I wish him luck. For us Talisman fans, we at the very least get to see a nifty curiosity, a little bit of the story realized. I hope someday we'll see The Talisman made (with the Sunlight Gardener sequence intact) and I doubly hope that whoever is behind the camera is as passionate about it as Mr. Ratthe seems to be.