Deal revives The Hawkline Monster, Gothic Western that stumped Ashby, Burton

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

I have a memory from my youth of reading a horror magazine, maybe it was an issue of Fangoria, in which there was a reference to Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood starring in a Gothic Western about gunslingers being hired to kill a monster that lurks beneath a woman's house. I was fascinated by the idea, and have always been disappointed that the movie never happened. Now that project is back in the works, although it's not likely to star Nicholson and Eastwood at this point.

As it turns out, the project that has been in the back of my mind since childhood is an adaptation of Richard Brautigan's 1974 novel THE HAWKLINE MONSTER, which tells the story of 

two unlikely hero gunslingers hired by a 15-year-old girl named Magic Child to kill the monster that lives in ice caves under the basement of a house inhabited by a young woman named Miss Hawkline. What follows is a unique adventure where there is more to Magic Child, Miss Hawkline and the house than meets the eye.

THE HAWKLINE MONSTER has spent a lot of time in development hell over the years. Hal Ashby, director of such classics as HAROLD AND MAUDE and THE LAST DETAIL, picked up the film rights in '75 and spent a decade trying to figure out how to bring Brautigan's story to the screen. He considered pairing Nicholson with Dustin Hoffman or Harry Dean Stanton to play the lead gunslinger characters. At another stage of development he considered casting Jeff and Beau Bridges. Brautigan wrote a draft of the script himself, but Ashby wasn't satisfied with it, and by the end of the '80s both men had passed away.

In the '90s it was Tim Burton who decided to give THE HAWKLINE MONSTER a shot, and this is when I saw that report about Nicholson and Eastwood starring in it. But Burton couldn't crack the adaptation, either.

The adaptive rights have been stuck in what's described as "a complex stalemate" between the Brautigan and Ashby estates for the last twenty years, but now New Regency has acquired those rights and intend to finally make a movie happen.

Roy Lee, Andrew Trapani, and Steven Schneider will be producing THE HAWKLINE MONSTER, with Paul Swensen and Ianthe Brautigan executive producing and Natalie Lehmann overseeing the project for New Regency.

I hope the movie will be made this time. It will be interesting to see what director might follow in the footsteps of Ashby and Burton, and how the lead actors could possibly come anywhere close to being as amazing as a Nicholson and Eastwood pairing could have been.

In the meantime, a copy of Brautigan's novel can be purchased HERE.