It’s hardly Vancouver news, but I’m pretty excited about this and thought some of you would like to hear about it too. Variety is reporting that Walter Salles and Francis Ford Coppola’s treatment of Jack Kerouac’s legendary 1957 novel On The Road has been green lit. The film will star Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, and Kristen Stewart as his wife Mary-Lou. Shooting starts in August with a $25 million budget.
Though a lot of my reading as a teenager put me on the path toward writing, On The Road was one of the biggies (Miller, Hemingway, Flaubert, and Thompson did the rest). While I have no doubt I’ll leave the theater thinking the book was leaps and bounds better than the film, it’ll be an exercise in wonder nevertheless.