The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True 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.

Buy now!

Source

John Hillcoat’s Lawless Bumped to August 31st

John Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era drama The Wettest County has been pushed back from April 20th to August 31st.  Nick Cave (The Proposition) wrote the script based Matt Bondourant‘s novel about two brothers (played by Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy) who become bootleggers in the South during Prohibition.  In addition to LaBeouf and Hardy, the outstanding cast also includes Mia Wasikowska, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Dane DeHaan, and Jessica Chastain.

With this cast and this premise, it seemed odd that the Weinstein Company would schedule it to April 20th, but the August 31st date doesn’t make much sense either.  Hit the jump for positives and negatives of the new date.

April 20th seemed an odd time to schedule the flick but we simply assumed that while the film may be good, it wasn’t a movie that would appeal to Academy voters.  However, the August 31st date is troublesome because Labor Day weekend is one of the slowest box office weekends of the year.  Audiences are worn out on summer fare and they’re not yet willing to leap into fall film-going.  The Help was an exception, and you have to keep in mind that it was based off a ridiculously popular book.

However, there could be an upside to the new release date.  The Venice Film Festival is also on August 29th so it’s possible The Weinstein Company want to set the release alongside a major festival (a la Contagion).  There’s also the benefit of putting it after The Dark Knight Rises, so journalists can potentially ask Oldman and Hardy about Hillcoat’s movie.

Or TWC could just be burying it like they did with Hillcoat’s previous movie, The Road (although I’m not sure the best time to release a movie that redefined the word “bleak”).

Right now The Wettest County‘s only competition is the thriller 7500 starring Leslie Bibb and Ryan Kwanten, and the horror flick The Possession starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick.  Based on star power alone, The Wettest County has the edge to win the weekend, but how much will it make?

Source

Shia LaBeouf officially signs on to the project, joining "Inception" star Tom Hardy in the "Lawless"

Jessica Chastain will star opposite Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy in The Wettest County, a Prohibition Era-set drama from Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher’s Red Wagon production.

 The casting puts the project, being directed by John Hillcoat (The Road) on the runway to production, with the producers eyeing a February 2011 start.

 The movie has been a longtime coming together, and has remained highly coveted amongst the younger set for its meaty roles and colorful setting. The project has experimented with various acting configurations on its road to production but LaBeouf has remained the throughline.

 LaBeouf had stamped Wettest as a passion project and stuck with it even as names such as Ryan Gosling, Paul Dano and Scarlett Johansson came and went as Wettest segued from being set up at a studio to fledgling indie to finally finding financing; in this case, via Michael Benaroya of Benaroya Pictures, the company behind the Sundance-bound Kevin Spacey finance drama Margin Call, and Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Productions (True Grit).

 The pieces came together just as LaBeouf wrapped up a long shoot for Transformers: Dark of the Moon and was looking for something more scaled down in scope yet weighty in range.

 Based on the novel The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, and on his grandfather and two great-uncles, the true gangsters story tells of the Bondurants boys, bootlegging siblings taking the law into their own hands in Prohibition-era Virginia while making a run for the American Dream.

 Chastain will play Hardy’s love interest, a big city woman now living in a small town who at one time was mixed up with gangsters.

Nick Cave, who fronts the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as well side band Grinderman, adapted the novel and will compose the music. Cave worked with Hillcoat on The Proposition.

Paranormal Activity producer Jason Blum is exec producing with Scott Hanson via their duo’s Blum/Hanson/Allen shingle. Also executive producing along with Rob Barnum and Laura Rister of Benaroya Pictures as well as Red Wagon’s Rachel Shane. CAA reps the package.

 Chastain, repped by Paradigm and Mosaic, is one of Hollywood’s rising starlets, with a slew of high-profile projects coming out in the new year. She plays Brad Pitt’s wife in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and appears with Sam Worthington and Chloe Moretz in The Fields, a thriller directed by Ami Mann. She recently wrapped The Help, DreamWorks’ adaptation of the Kathryn Stockett novel.

 LaBeouf is repped by CAA, John Crosby Management and attorney Matthew Saver.

Source

Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy in Lawless

The hot young acting pair will team up to make "The Wettest County in the World," a Prohibtion-era dramatic thriller from director John Hillcoat ("The Road"), according to two people familiar with the film.

LaBeouf, who had previously been mentioned in conjunction with the project, and Hardy, who hadn't, will both be taking a turn to period pieces. LaBeouf did star in the golf movie "The Greatest Game Ever Played" but is of course best known for action movies and thrillers.

Hardy, meanwhile, was in adaptations such as "Wuthering Heights" and "Black Hawk Down" but is best known for his role as the agent Eames in "Inception" this summer, and he has an as yet unrevealed part in "The Dark Knight Rises." (He's also currently shooting the Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy "This Means War.")

Nick Cave wrote the screenplay for "County" (speaking of teen pinups, albeit from another era). The film is based on a novel from Matt Bondurant about a family of Prohibition-era bootleggers, and crimes committed by and against them. The movie, an independently financed project that's being produced by the producers of "Jarhead" and "Girl, Interrupted" and executive produced by the man behind "Paranormal Activity," aims to begin shooting in the spring.

The firming up of LaBeouf and Hardy for "County" does put a pin, at least for the moment, in "College Republicans," in which LaBeouf was to play a young Lee Atwater and, sources say, Paul Dano a young Karl Rove, in the "Social Network"-esque story about the two conservative kingmakers in college.

That would have been juicy. But to see LaBeouf and Hardy as bootleggers may be worth the wait.

-- Steven Zeitchik

Zeitchik