In apparently confirmed casting news, Cameron Diaz has snagged a part in The Counselor. Twitch breaks the news:
The role will certainly be a darker part than we’re used to seeing from Diaz but, surely, after years of playing eye candy with only the occasional foray into more substantial material Diaz must be ready for the change.
Diaz will play the role previously contemplated by Penelope Cruz and Angelina Jolie.
More at Indie Wire.
A long profile of Samuel L. Jackson in the April 26 New York Times Magazine contains this tidbit about Jackson’s work on The Sunset Limited:
When Jackson was making a filmed version of the play “The Sunset Limited,” with Tommy Lee Jones, the play’s author, Cormac McCarthy, complained about his line readings. Jackson said: “It sounds better my way. I’m not trying to make this [expletive] worse!”
via How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre – NYTimes.com.
The Sunset Limited, starring Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones, is available on DVD and Blu-Ray via the links below.
And yes, I’ve also included a link to the book.
In case you missed it, we’ve added a Conferences section to the Web site. The new page details our preliminary plans for celebrating the 20th Anniversary of All the Pretty Horses, which was published in 1992. As the Society will be celebrating its own 20th Anniversary in 2013, we’re combining the two occasions into one not-to-be-missed event.
Also, if you know of McCarthy Sessions at any of the other national or regional conferences, please email me and I’ll add it to the site.
Penélope Cruz may take the Counselor role previously rumored to have been offered to Angelina Jolie, reports The Hollywood Reporter.
Cruz would play Fassbender’s love interest. The actress doesn’t have an offer, but talks have taken place and one is expected.
There also is chatter about Angelina Jolie playing the enigmatic love interest, but it is unclear how the actress would balance Counselor with Disney’s Maleficent, which she is supposed to begin shooting in June in England.
We’re not especially interested in becoming a film gossip site, though we should note than none of the articles we’ve read have mentioned that The Counselor would not be Cruz’s first encounter with McCarthy-penned material. She played Alejandra in Billy Bob Thornton’s ill-fated adaptation of All the Pretty Horses (2000).
The Keystone, journal of the Witliff Collections, published a short piece in their Spring 2012 issue about researching in the Cormac McCarthy Papers. “McCarthy Scholar Illuminates the Research Process” discloses the following:
Since opening to research in the summer of 2009, the Cormac McCarthy Papers remain the Wittliff’s most heavily accessed archive—and certainly the one that has generated the most interest among the international community. Scholars from Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Israel, and Portugal, as well as several from the United Kingdom, have made the trek to San Marcos, Texas, to study the McCarthy collection. As [Rob] McInroy [profiled in the piece] points out “for a McCarthy researcher, access to the archive is essential.”
McInroy also offers some tips for researchers contemplating spending time with the Cormac McCarthy Papers. The entire issue is available as a free download here [PDF]. The article appears on page 11.
For more information about the Witliff Collections, visit their Web site.
A recent article in The Guardian reveals Cormac McCarthy’s “parallel career” as a scientific copy editor. After detailing McCarthy’s involvement with several books and authors and revealing McCarthy’s disdain for exclamation points and semicolons, there’s this:
“Cormac is scary,” said physicist Luis Bettencourt. “He just asks really good questions.” Neuroscientist Chris Wood said the author’s knowledge of physics and maths exceeds that of many professionals in the field.
The article makes mention of McCarthy’s edits for the new paperback edition of Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man, due out next month.
News from all over the Web today is that Angelina Jolie is in talks to take a small part in The Counselor, Ridley Scott’s upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay. The source for all this speculation appears to have been Vulture:
Insiders tell us that Ridley Scott’s planned Cormac McCarthy narco-thriller, The Counselor, is rapidly heating up, so much so that Twentieth Century Fox is now in active discussions to distribute and possibly co-finance the movie — provided Scott gets the white-hot cast he’s seeking.
For instance, on top of Michael Fassbender, who has previously been confirmed to star (which would mark his second collaboration with Scott following this summer’s Prometheus), a Fox insider tells us that Angelina Jolie is in talks with Scott to take a small part.
More relevant at this point, of course, may be the fact that Twentieth Century Fox might be involved.
Apologies for the muckraking headline, but I received a Google Alert this morning. It contained a link to a site that purported to offer me a free PDF of Peter Josyph’s Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy. The link was apparently to a non-US site, and the site downloaded an executable file to my computer without prompting from me.
These kinds of sites are common and malicious. I’ve notified Google, but I wanted to take a moment to warn people away from a potentially harmful site. And I wanted to mention that Peter Josyph’s book is available in the Bookshop from www.cormacmccarthy.com.
It’s not free and it’s not an ebook, but it doesn’t require a wireless network. It needs no batteries to operate. It looks and feels like a book, smells like a book, and will not infect your computer with viruses.
Jack Neely, writing in The Daily Pulse, mentions Paulo Faria’s upcoming Portugese translation of Child of God and Faria’s recent research trip to Knoxville, where he was given a tour of sorts by Wes Morgan. The blog entry is called Cormac Abroad.
For those of you interested in the ongoing production of the new film adaptation of Child of God, James Franco’s RABBIT TV has been regularly posting behind the scenes videos from the shoot. Some of these are probably not safe for work, and minors are hereby warned.
