WETTEST COUNTY Is Now Called THE PROMISED LAND With Amy Adams Attached

After watching The Road, I felt like going to director John Hillcoat‘s house and shake his hand and thank him in person. I know it sounds stalkish and creepy but that’s how much I’m grateful for such a haunting and faithful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy book I truly admire. I vow to follow whatever Hillcoat has up his sleeves and as we know, he’s been developing an adaptation of THE WETTEST COUNTY IN THE WORLD based on a true story novel by Matt Bondurant, a project which has been housed at Columbia for a while and has attracted some A-list names like Shia LaBeouf, Scarlett Johansson, Ryan Gosling, Paul Dano and Michael Shannon. But Collider noticed a promo poster for the movie at the recent AFM and turns out the title has been changed into THE PROMISED LAND. No sign of Scar-Jo, Dano and Shannon but listed are LaBeouf and Gosling plus Amy Adams apparently is attached as the female lead. View the whole poster that looks like one of those tests at the eye Doctors, after this jump…

Here’s the official synopsis of the book…

“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.”