Spec Script Sale: “The Counselor”
Producers Nick Wechsler, and Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz with a preemptive acquisition of the drama spec script “The Counselor” from writer Cormac McCarthy. Per Deadline:
The terrain of the script is reminiscent of the rough and tumble world depicted in No Country For Old Men. The protagonist in The Counselor is a respected lawyer who thinks he can dip a toe in to the drug business without getting sucked down. It is a bad decision and he tries his best to survive it and get out of a desperate situation. While McCarthy’s ICM agents Binky Urban and Ron Bernstein were expecting McCarthy to deliver his next novel, he instead surprised them with the spec script before returning to the book.
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“The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac’s novels,” Wechsler said. Steve Schwartz told me: “Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.” The script is contemporary, and set in the Southwest.
Not every day you see a Pulitzer Prize-winning author bust out his first spec script and sell it. And as if the competition wasn’t stiff enough!
McCarthy is repped by ICM.
By my count, this is the 6th spec script sale of 2012.
Last year, the 6th spec script didn’t sell until February 16th, so the market continues to be about a month ahead of the pace set in 2011.