Robert Redford Takes ‘A Walk in the Woods’ to the Big Screen

Posted by Mike Richard on February 4, 2008
Filed under: Books, Film, News

Like what you see? Subscribe to the full RSS feed.

Bill Bryson’s ‘A Walk in the Woods’

Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods is perhaps my favorite hiking/camping book of all time. Few books actually make me laugh out loud, but Bryson’s hilarious prose leaps off the page and begs to be read.

A Walk “chronicles — in typically droll fashion — Bryson’s attempts to hike the Appalachian Trail with a friend. (We don’t want to spoil the ending for you, but the trail is 2,100 miles long, and neither Bryson nor his hiking companion were young men at the time of their trip.)”

According to Rotten Tomatoes, after a ten year debate of whether or not to actually produce the film, Robert Redford is finally ready to move forward with his adaptation of the bestselling book. Barry Levinson is set to direct, with Redford himself playing the role of Bryson.

Like any book-to-film adaptation, it’s always a hit-or-miss proposition:

“Settling on a script now becomes the issue for Redford, who is no stranger to the pitfalls of literary adaptations; he spent years in an ultimately ill-fated attempt to bring Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to the screen.”

Not to mention the whole writer’s strike has Hollywood production in limbo. But for Bryson fans, it’s great news nevertheless.

If you liked this post, subscribe to our full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by email and have new posts delivered directly to your inbox daily.



Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



Like This Post? You Might Also Like:

Our Sponsors

Comments

Amanda
February 4th, 2008
6:12 pm

Wow, I really hope this gets made. I adore Bryson’s books, and I do wonder how well that would translate to the screen … I’d love to have Bryson himself narrate it or something, he has such a relaxing, enjoyable voice to listen to, I still hear it every time I read any of his books.


Mike
February 5th, 2008
9:03 am

Definitely! In the interviews that I’ve seen with Bryson, he has a charming, avuncular quality that makes you feel like your grandfather or favorite uncle is just sitting you down and spinning tales from his youth.

It sounds like it’s a done deal too. If you look up Barry Levinson’s name on IMDB.com, you can see that A Walk in the Woods is listed as being in “pre-production”.


Sean
February 5th, 2008
9:21 am

I really hope they can pull this off. A Walk In the Woods is one of my favorite books. I’ve give about 6 copies of it to people as gifts and have read it a bunch of times. If they do a good job translating this to the screen it will be a great movie.


Tina Anderson
February 14th, 2008
1:04 pm

His books are fantastic and I would like to see this materialize into a movie. He seems like such a good guy from the interviews I’ve read.