First-Timer Sells a Script

It's always a thrill to read about some upstart, young first-time screenwriter catching a lucrative break in Hollywood with a spec script, so let's hear it for Cormac McCarthy!

The New Mexico-based writer has reportedly sold a thriller called The Counselor, about a successful, respected lawyer who gets in over his head during a dalliance in the drug underworld. Steve Schwartz, one of the producers who made the acquisition as part of a "sizable deal," told Deadline's Mike Fleming: "Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works."

Fleming adds that the script is "contemporary, and set in the Southwest" -- also unusual for McCarthy, who is previously best known for a slightly obscure oeuvre of novels including Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country For Old Men (the latter of which sparked a brief but ultimately fruitless flirtation with the film industry in 2007). The writer has even entered a representation agreement with ICM. When it rains it pours! Nice work, kid.

[Deadline]