A-List Names Are Getting WET

I’m about to head out to Whittier for business but before I go, I figure we’d take the time to quickly familiarize ourselves with the following development. The adaptation THE WETTEST COUNTY IN THE WORLD based on a true story novel by Matt Bondurant has been housed at Columbia for a while with John Hillcoat (The Road) set as the director but the project was put in a turnaround. According to Hollywood Reporter, producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher of Red Wagon (Jarhead, Girl Interrupted) want to reconfigure the process and finance it as an Indie gig and this has attracted A-list names.

Talented names like Shia LaBeouf, Scarlett Johansson, Ryan Gosling, Paul Dano and Michael Shannon have expressed their interest. The production hasn’t started yet, the cast hasn’t been confirmed yet, this is just to tell you where this project is right now at this very moment but if this does move forward, I think it will be the next big thing that we need to keep an eye on.

Here’s the official synopsis of the story…

“Based on the true story of Matt Bondurant’s grandfather and two granduncles, The Wettest County in the World is a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder. The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition and in the years after. Forrest, the eldest brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; Howard, the middle brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; and Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted, these men forge a business, fall in love, and struggle to stay afloat as they watch their family die, their father’s business fail, and the world they know crumble beneath the Depression and drought.

White mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut — whatever you called it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. When Sherwood Anderson, the journalist and author of Winesburg, Ohio, was covering a story there, he christened it the “wettest county in the world.” In the twilight of his career, Anderson finds himself driving along dusty red roads trying to find the Bondurant brothers, piece together the clues linking them to “The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy,” and break open the silence that shrouds Franklin County.

In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men — their dark deeds, their long silences, their deep desires — to life. His understanding of the passion, violence, and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.”