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‘To the White Sea’: Peoples’ best script
Hollywood may be the land of dreams, but it’s also a land of big frustrations. Take David Peoples, who wrote such screenplays and “Blade Runner,” “Unforgiven” and “Twelve Monkeys.”
He and his wife Janet say that the favorite screenplay they’ve ever written has still not been produced. It’s “To the White Sea,” an adaptation of the 1993 James Dickey novel.
Peoples says the movie hasn’t been made in part because it would require a very passionate young actor who wants to do it. “He would have to do what Daniel Day Lewis did for Paul Thomas Anderson in ‘There Will Be Blood,’ ” People says, and so far, that just hasn’t happened.
The screenplay deals with an American gunner whose plane is shot down over Tokyo just before the firebombing at the end of World War II. Muldrow is the only survivor, having parachuted from the plane just before the crash. And he’s the only American in a country that’s under siege, so he represents everything that the Japanese fear about the upcoming onslaught.
But Muldrow is no ordinary man. He was raised in the wilds of Alaska by a drunken father, and he didn’t ever know his mother. He’s a hunter. He’s a redneck. He has been void of human contact. And he has been dropped into an alien world where he suddenly becomes the hunted.
“People say that Dickey’s ‘Deliverance’ is about three yuppies being dumped into redneck country,” Peoples says. “With ‘To the White Sea,’ Dickey dumped one redneck into Japan and watched what happened. It’s James Dickey at his best.”
David and Janet Peoples presented “Twelve Monkeys” at the Austin Film Festival on Saturday night. And they plan to attend several panels on Sunday, after David Peoples appeared with Robert Rodriguez and David Simon on “The Art of Storytelling” panel, hosted by Texas Monthly’s Jake Silverstein.
Photo: David Peoples (right) at the Austin Film Festival Awards. Jack Plunkett/AFF
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By Richard Shepard
January 13, 2011 5:52 PM | Link to this
This was one hell of a book. He lands in the Tokyo docks just as the fire storm is most intense. He hides in the Tokyo sewers and sees many strange things as he begins his journey north. There are many images in this book that are always coming up in my head. Would that the Coens had done it but maybe it wasnt meant to happen that way and who knows if they could carry it off. It would have to be a helluva good movie to do this book justice.