Stone's adaptation of "The Deep Blue Goodbye" will be titled "Travis McGee".
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The iconic director Oliver Stone is set to direct a big-screen adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s excellent genre classic, The Deep Blue Goodbye (the first in a series of 21 character-driven suspense novels). This is excellent news for your critic, as he is currently hard at work on a biography of the author. It’s also encouraging news for MacDonald’s rabid fan base. This include countless celebrities and literary figures (Kurt Vonnegut described him thusly: “To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”), as well as millions of devoted readers.
Less encouraging is the director’s choice of actors in the lead role. Leonardo DiCaprio recently told Variety he is attached to the project. For many, it’s difficult to fathom the pretty DiCaprio as Travis McGee, the pale-eyed knight errant, hardened by years of sunshine, love affairs and violent confrontations with thieves, murderers and villains.
Nevertheless, champions of MacDonald are largely supportive of the project, dragging, as it does, a significantly underappreciated scribbler back into the light of popular culture.
I’d tend to take note of anything said by Vonnegut (originally a ‘Jr’), having cut my SF teeth on his ‘Sirens of Titan’ (’59) and the phenomenon of a chrono-synclastic infundibulum (sounds like the technobabble from later versions of Star Trek).
I must look up this MacDonald chap’s works, but hope that Stone can somehow extract a strong performance out of DiCaprio, who seems to have the screen charisma of a Kevin Costner.