In a surprising announcement, especially given his agents were expecting a novel, Deadline reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy has sold his first script on spec to Nick Wechsler, Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz, the producing trio behind the adaptation of his novel The Road.
Deadline report that the script, named The Counsellor, follows “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”.
“The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac’s novels,” Wechsler said. Steve Schwartz adds: “Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.”
To date, all of McCarthy’s works that have been turned into films have been by other screenwriters, including All the Pretty Horses, the award-winning No Country for Old Men and, of course, The Road.
The script will be a contemporary Southwest setting, giving it very much a No Country for Old Men vibe. Now, where is that adaptation of Blood Meridian?
