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Like other writers with a rabid following, there have been attempts to take Robbins novels to the screen. In 1993, the New York Times said the road to Hollywood is littered with failed screenplay attempts of Robbins novels. The only one to have been made into a movie so far is "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" in 1994, starring Uma Thurman and her prosthetic thumbs. The joy of the novel didn't quite translate to celluloid, and the movie was a critical and commercial failure. Other screenplays are floating around, notably a treatment for "Another Roadside Attraction" with the characters all grown up and living in the '90s. At one time, there was also talk of a treatment for "Skinny Legs and All," probably Robbins' most tightly plotted book. Apparently, the movie was to be narrated by one of the inanimate objects, a painted stick that had resided in Solomon's first temple. Another Roadside Attraction By Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues By Tom Robbins Bantam Books, 384 pages
If you think about that for a moment, it becomes clear why the movie has yet to be made. Robbins' greatest accomplishment is probably that he has successfully force-fed the '60s ethos to countless complacent children of hippies. I am a complacent child of a hippie, and feel that the '60s were, in part, an exercise in demographics. Baby boomers were coming of age en masse in the last half of the decade and were doing what comes naturally to 20-year-olds: getting laid, getting stoned and trying to rattle society's chain. Robbins disagrees, though, and he gets the last word (from "Jitterbug Perfume"): Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies, etc. they were superior to them. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness. salon.com | March 9, 2000
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