Screenwriter Aaron Stockard is two for two so far. Back in 2007, he co-wrote Ben Affleck’s Oscar-nominated directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which was an exceptional debut for both Affleck in the director’s chair and Stockard in the writer’s.
Three years later, the pair re-teamed for Affleck’s second film, The Town, which went straight to #1 at the US box office, earned Jeremy Renner an Academy Award nomination, and was by far one of favourite films last year. It was immense.
Deadline are now reporting that Stockard will be adapting Thomas Perry’s crime novel, Strip, which came out just last year. The original novel, courtesy of Amazon, focuses on an innocent man, Joe Carver, accused of robbing a strip club:
“Claudiu ‘Manco’ Kapak is a strip club owner. When placing his cash receipts in a bank’s night-deposit box, he is robbed by a masked gunman. Kapak is determined to find the culprit and make him pay. After a month of investigation Kapak’s goons settle on Joe Carver, an innocent but hardly defenceless newcomer who evades capture, furious at being wrongly accused. Meanwhile the real culprit and his new girlfriend believe they’ve found a whole new profession, robbing Kapak of his strip club’s cash. As the case explodes into a triple killing, Carver finds himself in the middle of an escalating gang war over Kapak’s little empire, ploughing into territory more strange and violent than he could ever have imagined.”
This definitely sounds like a project to look forward to. Stockard has already proven his worth as a writer, and clearly he’s got experience with the heist aspect of Strip given his work on The Town, so I think it’s safe to predict this is going to be awesome. No news yet on casting or a director, but I’m hoping that that news is only a few months away, because I’m already really excited about this.
I’ve not read Perry’s original novel, but I think it’s going to be on my Christmas list this year. Perry won the Edgar Award (named after Edgar Allen Poe) back in 1983 for his first novel, The Butcher’s Boy, and has been putting out a wealth of books at a solid rate of once every year or two since then.
It’s good to see that a writer like Stockard is getting the attention he deserves, and I can’t wait to see how Strip turns out. If it’s anything like Gone Baby Gone or The Town, it’s going to be immense.
