By Cormac McCarthy is one of America’s best living writers, taking up the torch of Melville and Faulkner with works like Blood Meridian, The Border Trilogy, and Suttree. Well, the author of The Road and No Country for Old Men has just sold his first screenplay. It’s called The Counselor, and here’s a synopsis from Deadline:
The protagonist in The Counselor is a respected lawyer who thinks he can dip a toe in to the drug business without getting sucked down. It is a bad decision and he tries his best to survive it and get out of a desperate situation.
Okay, so it sounds like a riff on Breaking Bad — that’s a bit underwhelming. There’s probably (hopefully) a lot more to it than the synopsis lets on. If only he’d been watching Adventure Time while conjuring up an idea for a script…
I wonder if The Counselor might attract interest from the Coen Brothers or John Hillcoat. This is definitely a screenplay I’d like to read just to see if McCarthy’s prose style has seeped into it somehow.
[Via Deadline]