Joe Penhall To Adapt BUTCHER’S CROSSING. Sam Mendes Might Direct

The other man that I need to thank besides director John Hillcoat, for how faithful The Road was to Cormac McCarthy‘s book is scribe Joe Penhall. Nothing about that film was disappointing. I’ve been hearing harsh reviews regarding Peter Jackson‘s upcoming adaptation The Lovely Bones, maybe he should’ve let Penhall take a shot at it. For his next gig, Penhall might be working with American Beauty director…

According to Hollywood Reporter, Penhall has been hired to pen the adaptation of BUTCHER’S CROSSING based on the 1960 Western Novel by John Williams (not the maestro original score composer). The project is housed at Focus Features and it’s part of a two year first look deal that the studio made with Sam Mendes this past summer, which means Mendes is expected to direct BUTCHER’S CROSSING

Here’s the official synopsis of the book…
“It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.”