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FILMMAKER ALUMNI WRITES FILM-WORTHY BOOK
I was reading GreenCine Daily and I noticed this link to a column at Kirkus reviews entitled “Adapt This,” which highlights hot film potential material from the month’s releases. Clicking to the column, I was happy to see that among this month’s four selections is Under the Bridge, the second book from former Filmmaker alumni Rebecca Godfrey. Here’s what Kirkus’s Chris Barsanti had to say about the book:
“Although it initially has the feel of a story normally captured on film for, at best, a 15-minute piece in one of the weekly newsmagazine shows, Rebecca Godfrey’s haunting, true-life murder story Under the Bridge (Simon & Schuster, $24) is phenomenal cinematic raw material. The setting couldn’t be more idyllic — the quiet British Columbia suburb of View Royal — and the crime hardly more horrific, a teenage girl murdered by a group of her peers after a series of inexorably escalating misunderstandings culminates in a shocking confrontation and stranger-than–iction cover-up. The rainy, lo-fi setting could work as a corrective to the standard high-octane views of transgressing adolescents, and there’s an organic, fly-on-the-wall quality to the material that recalls Larry Clark’s Kids but without the exploitation. But finally, it’s the cast of characters that makes this story as vivid as it is, ranging from copycatting social outcasts to gentle-seeming yet ultimately vicious gangster wannabes and coddled borderline sociopaths. These are normal-appearing kids, for the most part, yet morally crippled by their inability or refusal to imagine consequences or even a day after tomorrow.”
Godfrey’s film smarts were proved long ago on the Filmmaker staff, and her power as a writer was proven by her debut novel, The Torn Skirt. The new book sounds great, and I hope that Barsanti’s prediction proves correct and we’ll see if in the theaters as well as the bookstores.
