Page 45 Review by Jonathan
Interestingly, glancing around the internet, I note I am not the only person to make an immediate connection and comparison between this work and the 1968 Monkees’ “psychedelic comedy-adventure” film Head. That film, written and produced in part by Jack Nicholson (who also produced the soundtrack) and heavily, heavily influenced by LSD, is primarily meant to be a stream of consciousness burble about the nature of free will, and most definitely has much in common, concept and content-wise, with Henson’s screenplay for Tale Of Sand.
Which makes it all the more surprising, given that Henson was pitching his screenplay to studios around the same time that films like Head were being made, that it didn’t get picked up. This is undoubtedly a far tighter single concept story than Head; in fact on the face of it, it’s just one long extended dream / nightmare chase sequence, with a psychological undercurrent that gets resolved right at the conclusion. I would have thought it would have been ideal for an experimental film. Evidently so did Henson.
Happily for us (the altogether more low-budget, though no less beautiful medium of comics), the masterful penstrokes of Ramon K. Perez finally allows Henson’s dream to see the light of day. There’s little I can add to my comments about the plot. Instead, I’ve posted some artwork on the product page to give you a glimpse of the bizarre world Henson envisaged and Perez magically transports us to. There’s no doubt in my mind that Henson, undoubtedly a master craftsman himself, would have been absolutely delighted by, and enchanted with, Perez’s adaptation. This is a beautiful constructed work, and who knows, may start a whole new trend for adapting screenplays which have never been made. I like to think Henson would have got a real kick out of that if so.
