Happy days may be here again for John Hillcoat, whose projects just couldn’t seem to stay together this year. The LA Times’ 24 Frames is reporting that The Wettest County in the World is back on track, and will shoot in the spring.
That’s good news all on its own. Wettest County boasts
a script by Nick Cave, and is based on Matt Bondurant’s novel.
Bondurant based the story on his own family’s history of violence and
bootlegging. It’s right up Hillcoat’s bleak and violent alley. The
summary alone mentions a man surviving a throat-slitting(!), another
having his legs shattered, and another being castrated. Oh, and the
perpetrators preserve his bits in a jar of moonshine for him. Ouch. Boardwalk Empire, eat your heart out.
The
two men to bring those glory and bloody bootlegging days to life? 24
Frames says that Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf are attached to star.
Both are supposed to be booked for the spring — Hardy on The Dark Knight Rises, LaBeouf on College Republicans
— so we’ll have to see how this shakes out. It’s being independently
financed, so the shooting date could change drastically. It could
(no!) fall apart altogether.
But join with me, CHUD readers, and
hope that it doesn’t. 24 Frames isn’t clear on who Hardy and LaBeouf
will play, but I’m going to guess (or hope?) that Hardy will be Forrest
Bondurant, he who miraculously survived a throat slitting. And I need
to see Hardy survive a throat-slitting before I die. Don’t you?