Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country For Old Men, sells his first spec script

Cormac McCarthy is a man you may well know of without knowing that you know of him – ever seen ALL THE PRETTY HORSES? Or what about that film which won four Oscars including Best Supporting Actor and Best Picture, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN? Oh, and then there was THE ROAD, that one movie that was bleaker than bleak yet still stunningly beautiful. So if you don’t know, and it’s quite okay that you don’t, those films were all originally books by Cormac McCarthy. And he’s got another book that seems to be perpetually in production hell which could be brutally brilliant if done well called “Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness In the West.”

To be produced by the same folks behind the adaptation of THE ROAD, his spec script THE COUNSELOR deals with “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 script is contemporary, and set in the Southwest.  While McCarthy’s ICM agents Binky Urban and Ron Bernstein were expecting McCarthy to deliver his next novel, he instead surprised them with the spec script before returning to the book.”

I’m sure McCarthy could have sold a spec script before now if he’d so desired, but from what I understand he’s the sort of writer who writes in a particular medium because he feels that it’s the best way to tell that particular story.  Just like the lead character of Blood Meridian, he’s content to mosey out into the world and respond to adventure as it finds him whlie letting whatever mood he’s in take him where it wilt. 

“’The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac’s novels,’ [producer] Wechsler said. [One of the other producers] Steve Schwartz told me: ‘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.’

I believe the technical term for this is “hell yes, please and thank you, and I’ll be there opening day.”

*It’s a bit hard to see, but the paper heading reads “No Country for Old Men.” Yeah.