trixel

In the ten years before Steve McQueen died in 1980, he tried to get a personal project called Yucatan produced. Now Lance Sloane, a friend of the family who Steve McQueen treated like a son, has pulled two trunks out of the McQueen basement. The trunks are full of meticulously detailed notebooks with characters studies and storyboards for the project which was never to be made during Mr. McQueen's lifetime. The NY Times describes it as a "a screenplay without dialogue written in a kind of hyper-stylized poetry."

What I read of the Times' article suggests an adventure epic centred around a retired navy diver and motorcyclist (the role McQueen wanted to play) who is hired by an archeologist from a British museum to explore underground lakes in the Yucatan jungle where vast stores of Mayan treasure lie.

Sounds mildly exploitative, no? According to the Times' article the project shows a respect for nature and environment and reflects the Zapatista class struggle. McQueen's vision of Yucatan includes several science and technology references which were years ahead of their time. Yucatan sounds like adventure with a bit of scifi thrown in.

I am excited at the prospect that this might actually get made.

McQueen ends the notebooks with:

He was parting the curtains on tomorrow
A commando on the liquid frontier...
The inheritors of that emerald planet
That jewel on the finger of the firmament
Ringed by its creator with sapphire seas
For the exaltation and the ultimate salvation of the Dominion of Man.

In other unrelated news, I'm completely hooked on Oblivion.