Joanne Dobson & Beverle Graves Myers's "Face of the Enemy"

Joanne Dobson is a former English professor, having taught for many years at Fordham University, also at Amherst College and at Tufts University. Beverle Graves Myers made a mid-life career switch from psychiatry to full-time writing. A graduate of the University of Louisville with a BA in History and an MD, she worked at a public mental health clinic before her first Tito Amato novel was published in 2004.

Here they dreamcast an adaptation of Face of the Enemy, their first novel in the New York in Wartime mystery series:

Face of the Enemy opens just days before the attack on Pearl Harbor that changed America forever. In New York City, neighborhood boys lined up for blocks at recruitment centers, Times Square and the famous skyline were dimmed out, U-boats skulked just off Long Island, cabbages grew in Victory gardens outside Rockefeller Center. As World War II dragged on, black-and-white images from the movies kept New Yorkers spirits up. Since our characters walk Manhattan’s mean 1940’s streets, it only seems right to cast our film with stars from the period.

For those who don’t relish old movies the way we do, we surveyed the actors working today and added a Modern Clone (MC).

Louise Hunter: a nurse who vows to help her patient’s Japanese wife fight charges of espionage and murder. Louise has sworn off men for the war’s duration, but that doesn’t keep them from trying. She’s tall and slender with an elegant pompadour of honey-colored hair. Only one actress fits the bill: Lauren Bacall. MC: Charlize Theron.

Cabby Ward: Louise’s roommate, an ambitious, Bronx-born reporter who defines the word moxie. Cabby can be annoying, but she always comes through for her friends. Physically, she’s shorter than Louise, gamine—a word she hates—with a cap of untamable dark curls. Our choice: Judy Garland. MC: Mila Kunis.

Lt. Michael McKenna: a middle-aged homicide detective. Until the world went mad, he was looking forward to retirement and spending his days fishing on Shinnecock Bay. He’s not happy to see the younger guys joining up. He’s furious that he has to fight the Feds who are muscling into his cases. But “Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.” This one’s easy. Bev had this actor in mind when she wrote his first scene: Spencer Tracy. MC, going out on a limb here: Edward Norton.

Masako Fumi Oakley: a brilliant Japanese artist raised in Paris and married to a Columbia University professor. Unfortunately, the cultural atmosphere of the early 1940s prevented many Asian actresses from working in Hollywood. The stereotypes of “the dragon lady” and “the china doll” were still in force, usually played by a Caucasian actress wearing Oriental make-up. Fast forwarding to today’s crop of talented Asians actresses, we like: Jamie Chung.

Robert Oakley: Masako’s husband, a middle-aged professor of Asian History who spends most of the book seriously ill with pneumonia. The grumbling professor is not an easy patient for Louise and tries to direct Masako’s defense from his bed. Only one choice for him, too: Monty Woolley. MC: Christopher Walken.

Arthur Shelton: a 57th Street art dealer and the murder victim. He’s discovered in his gallery with his head bashed in, posed beneath Masako’s signature canvas, “Lion After the Kill.” Arthur is very much a part of New York’s artsy, underground gay scene—underground because 1940s New York amounted to one big closet. We had to think about this one. Leslie Howard looks the part, but by 1941 was too old to play the young tyro Arthur. Our final choice, if he could tone down the boy next door vibe: Van Johnson. MC: Tom Felton.

Learn more about Face of the Enemy at Joanne Dobson and Beverle Graves Myers's websites.

The Page 69 Test: Face of the Enemy.

--Marshal Zeringue

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J.A. London's "Darkness Before Dawn"

J. A. London is the mother-son writing team of Rachel Hawthorne and her son, Alex London. Rachel has written many novels for teens, including the popular Dark Guardian series. Alex, a recent graduate with a degree in Historical Studies, enjoys combining history and fiction to create unique worlds. The Darkness Before Dawn series is their first joint project.

Here they share some suggestions for adapting the series for the big screen:

As we wrote Darkness Before Dawn, we didn’t have a specific actor in mind for any of the characters. However, we did have a specific look for each character: haggard, tired, worn-down. Dawn takes place in a dystopian future, where humanity has been ravaged by a war against vampires, and now must live their lives in quarantined cities. Food isn’t abundant or nutritious, and neither is makeup or shampoo. Everyone gets by, but only just.

Dawn would be hard to cast, but we’d want an “unknown” to play her. We wouldn’t want any pre-conceived notions of the actress to filter into Dawn’s personality. But most importantly, we’d want the actress to read the entire series of books, to know where Dawn is heading, and to play the part of a girl torn between two worlds.

For Michael, we’d like to see an unknown actor as well. He’s a bodyguard-in-training, but we don’t want a fashion model playing him. We want someone who’s intimidating and serious, until he flashes that smile just for Dawn. We also want him to have that “every-man” look, we want him to look like your friend at school, that guy who waits tables, your next door neighbor.

And Victor … ah, yes, Victor. Talk about a challenge to cast. He needs to have an Old School style, with the etiquette of the 19th century, but a modern cutting edge hidden just underneath the surface. We almost need two actors! So much of his dialogue depends on the delivery; it’s all about confidence. Everything he says and does should feel intentional. For Victor, we’d look toward the stage. We think actors who have experience in plays could carry themselves well in this role, and give them a chance to get their feet wet in Hollywood.

As for the director, we’ve got only one choice: Alfonso Cuarón. He directed the third Harry Potter film (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), and brought a dark edge to the series that really matured it. We’ve also been impressed with his work in Children of Men; some of the shots and long sequences are so beautiful they could be played in an art gallery.

Overall, if Darkness Before Dawn were greenlit and made into a movie, we’d have one final piece of advice for everyone involved: Make it your own. We’d completely trust the actors, actresses, and director. We’d hand them the keys to the kingdom, and then step back. We live in the world of novels, and they live in the world of film. The only way to have a good adaptation is to have faith in your team’s ability to deliver. In Darkness Before Dawn we may have set the stage, but everyone else has to make it come alive.

Visit J.A. London's website, Twitter perch, and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

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Mischa Hiller's "Shake Off"

Mischa Hiller is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the Best First Book Category for South Asia & Europe. Raised in London, Beirut, and Dar El Salaam, Hiller lives in Cambridge, England.

Hiller's acclaimed, first thriller Shake Off has been called "deadly, poignant, and powerful" (The Economist),"Smart and tense and real enough to be scary" (David Morrell), and "A spy thriller of the highest class" (Charles Cumming).

Here he dreamcasts an adaptation of the novel:

When I was writing the book I had an actor from The Battle of Algiers in my head as the protagonist Michel but since that was made in 1966 he seems an unlikely candidate. However, I did come across a Lebanese-American actor called Haaz Sleiman, who was in a UK TV series about Israel-Palestine called The Promise and who I've also seen in the US series Nurse Jackie. My wife is insistent that she meet him should he be cast.

For Helen, Michel's love interest, I had Helena Bonham Carter in mind when writing, in terms of the characters she plays, but she is too old to play Helen, and doesn't look like her. However, after reading Shake Off someone pointed out that Rebecca Hall (The Awakening, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) would make an ideal Helen. Having watched her a few times I have to agree, she has that certain English quality that I envisaged when writing.

Abu Leila, Michel's mentor, could quite easily be played by Israeli-Iraqi actor Yigal Naor, who excelled as Saddam Hussein in House of Saddam and was also in Rendition and Green Zone. He has enough gravitas and sensitivity to play him, but could steal the show.

Learn more about the book and author at Mischa Hiller's website.

The Page 69 Test: Shake Off.

--Marshal Zeringue

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Steve Hockensmith’s "Cadaver in Chief"

In 2010, Steve Hockensmith clawed his way onto the New York Times bestseller list with a prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dawn of the Dreadfuls. He completed the PPZ trilogy the following year with Dreadfully Ever After while also continuing his Edgar-nominated “Holmes on the Range” mystery series.

Hockensmith’s latest effort, the horror/mystery/satire Cadaver in Chief, combines the genres he’s known for: Hockensmith describes it as “State of Play with zombies.” He says he knows exactly who should turn it into a film.

Memo
To: Bobcat Goldthwait
From: Steve Hockensmith
Re: Call me

You don’t know it, but we have a checkered past, you and I. For a time in the mid-’80s, I was under the impression that you were Tony Rosato. (“Wow,” I remember thinking as I watched Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment with my high school buddies, “that guy wasn’t nearly this animated on Saturday Night Live.”) This misapprehension came to an end in 1988 as a result, alas, of an assignment for my college newspaper: I was sent to review Hot to Trot. (Obviously, I was low man on the film critic totem pole. They sent me to see all the Ernest movies, too, which is why I can definitively state that Ernest Saves Christmas is bad but Ernest Goes to Jail is waterboarding for the soul.)

During the ’90s, we were ships passing in the night. I caught Nirvana’s final concert appearance in Chicago but showed up too late to be antagonized by your opening act. I let Shakes the Clown and Radioland Murders slip in and out of theaters without my ass in one of the many available seats. Capitol Critters and Herman’s Head were cancelled before I (or the rest of the nation) realized they were on. I managed to miss each and every one of your one-man late-night TV riots.

The decade that followed was a blur. (I’d like to blame booze and coke, but the truth is I started having kids. So I got to spend years of my life feeling sleep deprived and jangled without even experiencing the dizzying highs afforded by life-threatening substance abuse. Hi ho. Maybe I’ll get around to that in my fifties.)

And now here we are in 2012, and a surprising thing has happened. A black guy is President! I’ll bet even Michael Winslow didn’t see that one coming!

Oh, and another surprising thing, more to the point: I’ve discovered that there are few people in the business of show whom I respect more than you. You’ve gone from being a known associate of Steve Guttenberg to writing and directing some of the bleakest black comedies being made today. You’ve remained true to your own vision and voice -- recently going from the ultra-grim (but funny) World’s Greatest Dad to the ultra-ultra-ultra-grim (but funny) God Bless America -- when you could have cashed a big, fat studio check and signed on for Wild Hogs 2: Hogs in Hawaii. And coolest and perhaps most surprising of all, you seem to really have your head screwed on right.

Which is why you’re the man to bring my new satirical horror novella Cadaver in Chief to the screen. It’s about a journalist who’s trying to prove that the President of the United States is a zombie. That’s a win-win-win for someone like you. You’d get to make fun of the media and politicians plus...zombies!

You write the script. You do the casting. You direct it however the hell you want. I promise to keep my mouth shut until it’s time for the gala premiere, at which point I’m sure all I’ll have to say is, “Hell’s yeah!”

And that’ll be true even if that “gala premiere” is at an Olive Garden in Pasadena because the movie went straight to video. I don’t need Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I don’t need one of those big, fat studio checks. (Well, actually, I do. But I’ve resigned myself to living without any.) I need the Bobcat!

Oh, and if you’re not interested, could you forward this to Eli Craig?

Learn more about the book and author at Steve Hockensmith’s blog and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

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Maryanne O'Hara's "Cascade"

A graduate of Emerson College's MFA program, Maryanne O'Hara was a longtime associate editor at Ploughshares magazine. Her short stories have been published in Five Points, The North American Review, The Crescent Review, and Redbook, as well as the literary anthologies MicroFiction, Brevity & Echo, The Art of Friction, and Flash Fiction: Youth.

Here she shares some suggestions for the above-the-line talent for an adaptation of her debut novel, Cascade:

I don't usually imagine actors when I’m creating characters but at one point, watching Jake Gyllenhaal during Brokeback Mountain, I thought, “Oh, Jacob, there you are.” At around the same time, my daughter mentioned that she saw Maggie Gyllenhaal as Dez, funny enough.

I didn’t personally picture anyone as Dez until I saw the latest production of Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska inhabiting the role of Jane. Later, I stumbled upon a lovely photo of Mia in period makeup, with her hair set in 1920s waves, and I thought, yes, she could be Dez: placid-looking on the outside, but so much going on within.

Anthony Minghella would have been my idea of an ideal director. I loved his subtle, gorgeous artistry. Although, maybe a movie version of Cascade would be better off not being strictly period; maybe it would benefit from the inventiveness of someone like Sofia Coppola. I did a playlist for Cascade for David Gutowski’s music and literature blog, Largehearted Boy. His Book Notes feature asks authors to list a series of songs that relate, in any way the author likes, to their recent book. The Cascade playlist runs the gamut from Billy Strayhorn to Pink Floyd. Fun stuff.

Visit Maryanne O'Hara's website and Facebook page, and view the Cascade trailer.

The Page 69 Test: Cascade.

Writers Read: Maryanne O'Hara.

--Marshal Zeringue

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Moira Crone's "The Not Yet"

Moira Crone is the author of several novels and story collections including What Gets Into Us and A Period of Confinement; her works have appeared in Oxford American, The New Yorker, Image, Mademoiselle, and over forty other journals and twelve anthologies. She has won prizes for her stories and novellas, and in 2009 she was given the Robert Penn Warren Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers for the entire body of her work.

Here Crone dreamcasts an adaptation of her latest novel, The Not Yet:

The year is 2121, the place, just outside the United Authority, on the American Continent--- the Islands of New Orleans.

Throughout the former U.S., the rich, called the Heirs, have found a way to purchase extended life. The rest of the population, still on the old life cycle, called the “Naturals” or “Nats,” are either poor---or destitute.

New Orleans is a great place to make a movie---and the watery world of the The Not Yet is a visual reference to the city’s recent history, its vulnerability—and our nation’s failings. Our great architecture, with Venetian landscape and navigation. The richness of this drowning environment is explored in the recent hit, Beasts of the Southern Wild.

I’ve described a playground for rich, bored ancients: the French Quarter is full of humans transformed by plastic surgery to appear like pet animals---birds, or borzoi dogs. These companions, called “Altereds” are essentially slaves for the amusement of the Heirs. The system of castes, enclaves, and strata keep most from rising, or earning a decent living.

Artists were inspired by the novel, and the descriptions of the Altereds, the Heirs, and the setting. They helped to set the scene---see an online gallery commissioned by my publisher.

James Franco might be the best actor for the part of Malcolm, the young hero. A former child star, one of the lucky ones, Malcolm has saved the wherewithal get on life extension. As the novel begins, however, funds have disappeared. He is on a quest to discover why. During the course of the novel, Malcolm is shot, given drugs that leave him helpless, captured by a band of rebels who think he’s a demi-god. He begins as a repressed, careful, and vain young man, but becomes outraged, disillusioned, and dangerous. Franco is fully capable of playing someone in physical extremes. He is equally expert at making a psychological transformation convincing.

In his youth, Malcolm is the assistant of Heir Dr. Lydia Greenmore, an experimental psychologist whose patients are near age two hundred. She has begun to conclude that Heirs’ extended lives are destroying natural, previously invisible limits of the psyche and the soul. She embarks upon a devolution in order to explore the mysticism of other times---so that she can map a “way out” for her charges --- to grant them the peace of mind they desperately seek.

Julianne Moore could be the ideal actress for this role. She can look old, and she can look very young---there is a point in the novel when Lydia “unmasks” and we see her true visage and physique under the manufactured dermis layers that swaddle her. She can play a queen, imperious and complex---and the part of the seer. She can also be very cold, and withholding. But perhaps her best quality is her seductive vulnerability that attracts Malcolm, makes it hard for him to separate from her---something he must do, if he is going to live the life he eventually yearns for.

Another main role in this novel is Malcolm’s guardian, Lazarus, a man who has been on life extension himself for over a hundred and fifty years, but has spent his last several decades trying to save those children who are “tossed out,” by parents who have no legal rights to procreate. Lazarus runs an orphanage for these foundlings. His own children consider him a mad liberal.

Ed Harris would be a good fit. He has a way of being “in control,” and yet about ready to lose it. Lazarus begins to question, as do all the main characters, the world of haves and have-nots, of Heirs and Nats, of those that die and those who avoid dying. Malcolm’s voyage reveals to him the very darkest side of Heir’s privilege. Eventually, he must decide if he will join their ranks---if eternal life is worth the cost the soul surely pays.

Learn more about the book and author at Moira Crone's website and the Facebook page for The Not Yet.

Writers Read: Moira Crone.

--Marshal Zeringue

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James R. Benn's "Death's Door"

James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II series, historical mysteries set within the Allied High Command during the Second World War. The series began with Billy Boyle, which takes place in England and Norway in 1942. The second, The First Wave, carries on a few months later during the Allied invasion of French Northwest Africa. The third, Blood Alone, continues the story through the Allied invasion of Sicily; and Evil for Evil, the fourth volume, follows Billy Boyle to Northern Ireland where he is sent at the request of the British government to investigate links between the Irish Republican Army and the Germans.

The fifth book in the series, Rag and Bone (2010), deals with the infamous Katyn Massacre of Polish Officers by the Soviets, and how the uncovering of that crime affected the war, especially Polish-Americans and the Poles in exile in England. Book number six, A Mortal Terror (2011), is set in southern Italy and within the Anzio beach head, where Billy tracks down the Red Heart Killer, who is targeting officers of increasingly senior rank.

In Death's Door, the seventh installment of the series, Billy goes undercover in the Vatican.

Here Benn shares some suggestions for casting an adaptation of the series:

When I was writing the first book in the Billy Boyle series—titled Billy Boyle, appropriately enough—the film Good Will Hunting had recently come out. Matt Damon then was not yet a superstar, but I was struck by the intensity of his character and the energy with which he infused the role. The working class Boston accent was perfect as well.

The “How do ya like them apples?” scene sealed the deal for me. From that point on, Matt Damon, circa 1997, became Billy Boyle. Smart, loyal to his friends, and a bit out of step with the rest of the world.

Billy Boyle’s sidekick is Lieutenant Piotr Augustus Kazimierz of the Polish Army in Exile, otherwise known as Kaz. Kaz is an intellectual with an affinity for his Webley service revolver. From the first, I imagined the English actor Leslie Howard in glasses. Slight, lean-faced, with an easy aristocratic air, nonchalance is his middle name. David Niven’s description of Howard fits Kaz perfectly: Howard was "...not what he seemed. He had the kind of distraught air that would make people want to mother him. Actually, he was about as naïve as General Motors. Busy little brain, always going."

The American actor Scott Glenn, known for his role in The Hunt for Red October, is a reliable stand-in for Colonel Sam Harding, Billy’s West Point-educated, non-nonsense boss. Glenn’s voice is deep and rumbly, and he can set his square jaw in a determined line that shows he means business. Some days I imagine George Clooney, day-dreaming that he wanted to produce the movie and support it with a secondary role. The man does look good in a uniform.

Billy’s British lover, Diana Seaton, is an operative for the Special Operations Executive, and is often sent on dangerous assignments. She’s quite beautiful, and I have always seen her as Veronica Lake, the actress who is well-known for her blond tresses. But she looks best for the role of Diana in this still [photo left] from the wartime flick So Proudly We Hail.

Everybody I mentioned has either died or aged out of the role (but not you George, in case you’re interested!). It’s a fun exercise to watch young actors and pick out possibilities for the role. Casting call, anyone?

Learn more about the Billy Boyle WWII Mystery Series at James R. Benn's website.

The Page 99 Test: The First Wave.

The Page 69 Test: Evil for Evil.

The Page 69 Test: Rag and Bone.

--Marshal Zeringue

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