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Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty: New Book, TV Show

Friday, February 6th, 2015 -- by Bacchus

It’s old news from last September, but new to me: a television production company has acquired the rights to produce a television show based on Anne Rice’s Beauty books.

Televisa USA has acquired TV and digital rights to Anne Rice’s best-selling book series The Sleeping Beauty, with plans to produce the erotic BDSM trilogy as a TV series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

First published in 1983-85 as The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment and Beauty’s Release, the series is set in a medieval fantasy world. The books center on a young princess who, like Sleeping Beauty, is awakened from her long sleep – only in a more provocative fashion than in the fairytale.

By fucking her. What the writer would have said if equipped with a spine is that Beauty’s prince woke her up by fucking her. And then, basically, he kept her as a pet — one of many! — as was his habit.

Obviously the intention is to cash in on the pop-BDSM craze currently under way thanks to the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon. The article doesn’t say where this series would be broadcast, but unless it’s filmed in the same wall-to-wall soft-core 85%-porn style in which the books were written, it’s going to be a huge disappointment. Which pretty much means it will have to be on one of the premium cable channels, or it will suck. (Most likely, it will suck.) Visually it needs to be “Orgy Scenes From Caligula” meets “Game Of Thrones brothel”, and content-wise it needs to be wall-to-wall naked slaves of both genders, or it won’t capture the essential charm of the books. This would be expensive to produce and I have little faith that it will actually happen.

As a throwaway detail, the story also confirms the rumor from a year ago that Rice is writing a fourth Beauty book:

“I wrote this to be fun, in the belief that dominance and submission can be romantic and delightful as well as erotic,” said Rice, who noted in February that she’s prepping a fourth book in the series.

I guess she’s finally over the whole “I’m a Christian now and ashamed of my devil-friendly writings” deal, and is now ready to get back to the work she’s good at.

Update: I went a little nuts on Twitter trying to explain what a Beauty TV show ought to, but will not, look like.

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The Return Of Anne Rice’s “Beauty”

Sunday, January 12th, 2014 -- by Bacchus

Word has been kicking around the internet that Anne Rice is working on a fourth “A.N. Roquelaure” novel, although as far as I can tell she hasn’t actually said (despite my post headline) that it will necessarily be a Beauty novel. News of the new erotic novel is great for fans who feared that Rice’s kinky side was gone for good when she found religion; and even though she renounced her Christianity back in 2010, she was sufficiently equivocal about doing so that nobody (I think) ever expected another kinky erotica novel out of her.

It turns out that she’s been talking about the new book on her FaceBook page since at least December 30, and she says she’s working on the book now. (I’d provide links, but of course FaceBook is broken-by-design where the rest of the internet is concerned.)

Here’s something interesting she said in a 2012 interview about her motives in writing the original Beauty trilogy:

I wrote it because I thought most pornography was 1) Victorian classics revived and repackaged or 2) hack work by people who didn’t share the fantasy. So I decided to write the pornography I wanted to read, to prove that good S&M porn could be done without murder, burning, cutting or any kind of real physical harm; that a delicious pornography of detailed S&M games — dominance and submission, humiliation and love — could be made, all of it with elegance, refinement, and some romance. I created a fairytale kingdom of luxurious chambers, gorgeous costumes, and handsome and beautiful royal slaves, a world filled with romance, some intrigue and a lot of detail as to sexuality. I wanted it to be fun.

My interest in pornography started early. I came of age in the sixties when there was more interest. At that time Grove Press re-issued many Victorian porno works, including Victorian S&M materials, and they also took the world by storm by publishing The Story of O, a new work from France.

When The Story of O came out in the sixties that was an underground event. I loved it. But I found it grim. I wanted with my pornography to write something that was not grim, some playful fantasy in which the “slaves” were presumably enhanced by their “service” and admitted they enjoyed it, where the relationships between the dominated and the dominating were fluid. I think I achieved it with the Trilogy. I don’t think anyone sees it as grim. That was one very strong impulse. I was dissatisfied with all I read; I was striving for a more comfortable, flexible, durable fantasy.

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The Ecstasy Of Saint Beauty

Sunday, March 29th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus

A few months ago I had the pleasure of an edifying correspondence with an old friend who had recommended to me a trilogy written by Anne Rice (she of the vampire books fame) in which Rice re-imagines the old fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as an extended BDSM scenario. A very extended, quarter-million words-long scenario, as it happens. Many ErosBlog readers are doubtless familiar with this trilogy already, but for those that aren’t and who like that sort of thing, I’m happy to report that all three books appear to be still in print.

In the course of our discussion, my learned friend grumbled a bit about the fact that, as of late, Ms. Rice appears to have turned her back on such agreeably lurid and salacious content. Once a self-described atheist, she has returned to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and sworn off writing about vampires, flagellation, etc.

Tish-tosh, I responded. It’s a free country, isn’t it?

Indeed it is, or at least ought to be, my liberty-loving comrade hastened to reply. But isn’t Rice dissing her fans a bit, when she disparages the themes those fans embraced so loyally and profitably?

I turned this thought over in my mind for a while.

What came up was something rather odd. A memory (or possibly confabulation) from childhood, of being a ten year-old faculty brat tagging along with a group of American college students on a tour of a church in Rome called Santa Maria della Vittoria. As you art lovers should be aware, this church contains a famous sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) called The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

ecstasy of st theresa

Ten year-old me didn’t really understand why the big kids were elbowing each other and trying not to snicker. Later in life I discovered that Teresa of Avila left us a rather vivid account of her ecstasy, which makes what’s going on here a little clearer.

Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it — even a considerable share.

But it’s spiritual pain, so that’s okay, I guess.

Still I couldn’t help thinking more along these lines. I also remembered seeing a lot of renderings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) is perhaps typical in his generous rendering of Sebastian’s arrow-violated flesh:

saint sebastion

And one cannot help but notice what pretty flesh it is, too.

No one is safe from suffering in this grand artistic tradition, not even — especially not even — its central figure:

the flagellation of christ

That’s by Caravaggio (1571-1610), a painter of genius who, for my money, would have extracted homoerotic interest from a still-life of a bed of gravel, had he chosen to paint one.

I’m not sure whether Albert von Keller (1844-1920) is mocking this tradition or part of it, but it’s pretty clear he was willing to take it a logical step forward in Mondschein (1894):

female crucified

These are only four works, presented here only because they happened to catch my eye on a certain day. Other works of a similar inspiration and part of the same grand religio-visual narrative could easily be found by the truckload. I have no doubt that many ErosBlog readers can add their own favorites to the list. If you’re of a certain cast of mind, you will be led to the suspicion that an anthropologist from Alpha Centauri, given the record of humanity’s visual culture and tasked with identifying its largest and longest-lived fraternity of BDSM enthusiasts, might point to a certain institution headquartered in Rome.

For my part I shall confine myself to a more modest conjecture, in response to my friend, and addressed to any fan of Anne Rice who might be feeling dismayed by the current turn in her life. Without this particular grand narrative, in which Ms. Rice was reared, and back into which she has now written herself, there might never have been her own distinctive body of work at all.

Or to put it more simply: no Holy Mother Church, no Naughty Beauty Tales.

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