Friday, June 02, 2017

Alan Drew's "Shadow Man," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Shadow Man by Alan Drew.

The entry begins:
My wife and I sometimes sit around and talk about the fancy things we’ll buy when the movie rights sell. For example, “When the movie rights sell, we’ll buy a beach house on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.” So this is a nice little fantasy (delusion?).

The novel is told from three different points of view: Detective Benjamin Wade, medical examiner Natasha Betencourt, and serial killer Ricardo Martinez.

For Ben, I’d need an actor who can play the classic American male stoic tough-guy, but one who can also express real vulnerability. The book is set in Southern California in 1986, and Ben is the son of the last cowboy of a small south Orange County town, Rancho Santa Elena (the fictionalized Irvine, CA), that is now being devoured by development. Detectives are the new cowboys in American pop culture, and the male archetypes in these fictions often celebrate, to my mind, problematic constructed ideas of masculinity. With Ben, I wanted to play on that archetype and then undermine it a bit too. My neighbor says Aaron Eckhart is perfect, but I think he’s a little too clean cut preppy. My wife thinks Viggo Mortensen, but I think that’s because she’s had a crush on him since the Lord of the Rings films. For me, a younger Chris Cooper would be ideal or Ed Harris in his prime. But since we cannot turn back time, I think someone like...[read on]
Visit Alan Drew's website.

My Book, The Movie: Shadow Man.

--Marshal Zeringue