Robert Rodriguez, god of classy B-flicks and campy kid movies, has decided to make a movie out of one of the best crime comics in the business – Frank Miller’s Sin City. Rodriguez being Rodriguez, even rediff.com has carried the story, with A-list star names being dropped around, names like Elijah Wood, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bruce Willis – even Brittany Murphy. Of course, rediff being rediff, it says that ” it is an adaptation of Frank Miller’s novel series”. How convenient.

The film has been making news because it seems Rodriguez resigned from the Director’s Guild recently. Why? Because he wants to bring in Frank Miller as co-director, and the Director’s Guild wouldn’t allow him. Some say that Tarantino has been solicitated to direct one of the three arcs that make up the story. Fingers crossed.

Aintitcoolnews has this interesting story about how Rodriguez got Miller’s permission to make the movie. Seems he did some clandestine preparations, developed a script using three different Sin City stories – and then shot a 9-minute long opening sequence. He invited Miller over for a private screening, saying that even if the creator didn’t like what he saw, he would have something to show people later. Miller agreed, and in aintitcool’s own words, “Frank fell in love”.

“This is the first time a graphic novel will be treated with absolute respect in how it is brought to the life. My pitch to Frank was that I didn’t want to adapt ‘Sin City,’ but rather translate it to the screen. I also wanted him involved in every aspect of the production, including sharing in the directing. If you look at his books, you see that in a way they are already the best written, shot, and directed ‘movies’ never seen in a theater,” said Robert Rodriguez.

Very encouraging.

If you’ve ever read a Sin City comic in your life ( I’ll be very snobbish here – but if you’re from India, you most likely haven’t. ), you would know that even thinking of a film version of this comic book series is tough. It’s not just the artwork – stark black-over-white and white-over-black renderings of characters and scenarios, with very innovative use of colour ( I mean “innovative” in the truest sense of the word ), it’s not even the storylines – the distillation of the best crime fiction stories you have ever read, each story in the series written as 5-6 issue arc, and each story intersecting with the other at memorable moments. The prose is hard-hitting, a first-person perspective of the central character, written in the hard-boiled tradition of Chandler, Ellroy, Vachss and the rest of the gang that makes up the genre. It’s dark storytelling, my friends. Sin City is…dark. It’s the kind of place where there are more shadows than light, the inherent badness of the place and its people superseding anything bright and shiny.

What makes Sin City unfilmable, in my opinion, is the very nature of storytelling Frank Miller has perfected throughout the series, and the timeless nature of Basin city. There is also the issue of morality as portrayed in the comics, but that can be ignored for now.

The way you would read a copy of Sin City can differ radically – you can choose to rush through the story, soaking in the prose, gritting your teeth all the while, frantically rushing to the next issue to find out how the cliffhanger is resolved. If you do that, you’ll see that the story ends very quickly. Or you might choose to examine every bit of the artwork, observe the detail Miller manages to bring out with minimal use of black on a white page( or white on a black page ), marvel at the kinetic energy of the panels, and drool over the drop-dead-gorgeous women that Sin City has in spades. I do both, reading the story first, very fast and with that funny feeling deep down in my intestinal area. And then I spend the next three hours looking at the art. Can Rodriguez bring that feeling to the screen? Ok, so Kill Bill had it, but that was QT, and RR ain’t no QT.

Sin City: That Yellow Bastard, the very first issue has a page – one whole page – that’s black. That’s right, nothing but a black page. Except, in the lower right corner, in a tiny white panel, there’s the word “No!”. If you’ve been reading it from the beginning, which you must have, you will realise the emotional importance of this page, and the Sheer Perfection of the way Miller has depicted it. How can you transfer something like that to the screen?

Most of all, if they shoot the film in colour, all is lost. There is no redemption for anyone who transgresses this vision of countless readers and cheats the hell out of our collective perspective of the Town Without Pity. I promise I’ll boycott the movie if it’s shot in colour, I promise.

The comic introduces colour in very oddball ways – mostly to identify a particular character, or to highlight a subtle nuance. A recurring character named Delia has her eyes, and her jacket painted blue. That Yellow Bastard has a yellow bastard in it, that’s right, he’s coloured yellow. To Hell and Back has one of the sexiest uses of colour I have seen employed in a black and white scenario. The protagonist is doped and left to die, and his hallucinations are in colour – that’s right, a whole issue of Sin City painted by Lynn Varley ( Frank Miller’s wife and longtime collaborator ) with visuals that will pop a minor mortal’s eyeballs out. I was unlucky to have read To Hell And Back before I read the other Sin City books, and I advise you not to do so.

I can see it when I close my eyes, grainy shades of gray and black with filters added to highlight some character in a particular grainy colour. Can you see it? Black. The sound of rain. A flash of lightning, and in that brief flash. you see that it’s a deserted road, and there’s something lying on the road. A light, two headlights coming closer. Another flash of lightning. The headlights of the car, and the lightning together illuminate the figure lying on the road. It’s a girl. The car stops, headlights still on the girl. The wipers are on, because it’s raining very hard, and this guy gets out. It’s a mousy-looking guy wearing spectacles, and he is very worried about seeing a girl lying in the middle of the road on a dark and stormy night. He hesitantly calls out to her. No response. Comes closer, tentatively. The rain splashes hard, he’s drenched. He shivers. Kneels down at her side, and turns her around gently. She’s still alive. She groans, he tries to wake her up. And then she opens her eyes. Picture the feeling you, the unsuspecting viewer, will have when you see her blue eyes in a black and white world. Picture the anticipation a fanboy like me will have, when he has recognised Delia onscreen.

Please don’t screw up, Mr Rodriguez.