Larry Watson's "As Good As Gone"

Larry Watson grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and received his BA and MA from the University of North Dakota and his PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah. He is the author of the novels Let Him Go, Montana 1948, American Boy, In a Dark Time, White Crosses, Laura, Orchard, and Sundown, Yellow Moon; the fiction collection Justice; and the chapbook of poetry Leaving Dakota.

Here Watson shares some ideas about casting an adaptation of his new novel, As Good as Gone:

I’ve been asked in the past, when there’s been a flurry of film interest in a novel of mine, whom I’d like to see play certain characters. And though it’s just an exercise in fantasy (after all, the producers will decide that the female octogenarian poker player will work better as a nine-year-old boy who’s a chess genius) I’ve never been able to play along. I can see my characters very clearly, and I just can’t substitute another face in my imagination. In As Good As Gone, however, I can get in on the game because a few reviewers have already been casting the movie in their remarks about the novel.

Clint Eastwood, Sam Elliott, and Robert Duvall have all been suggested as the right actor to play Calvin Sidey, the cantankerous aging cowboy who has signed on to watch his grandchildren while their parents are away. I admire those actors, and I’m sure any of them would be terrific.

And for Calvin’s love interest, Beverly Lodge, let’s use actors who have paired successfully with those men before. Meryl Streep with Clint Eastwood, Anjelica Huston with Robert Duvall, and Katharine Ross with Sam Elliott--a real-life couple for many years.

Visit Larry Watson's website.

The Page 69 Test: As Good as Gone.

--Marshal Zeringue

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