According to Variety, Scott Stuber of Stuber Prods. has bought the screen rights to the novel titled AMERICAN RUST by author Phillip Meyer, no relation to that Twilight author.
The project will be directed by Walter Salles and the script to be written by Jose Rivera. These are the guys behind The Motorcycle Diaries, the biopic about the younger Che Guevara starring Gael Garcia Bernal.
AMERICAN RUST which is Meyer’s debut novel was recently short-listed for the 2009 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Salles and Rivera are also working on another adaptation based on the novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
That one is about the character named Oscar Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd who dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants because of the curse that has haunted the Oscar’s family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love.
Here’s the official synopsis of the book AMERICAN RUST…
“Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.
Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.
Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.”
