By Neal Wooten
On the day this article runs, I have a Zoom meeting scheduled with a movie producer from Los Angeles about making my book, With the Devil’s Help, into either a movie or prime docuseries, like for HBO or Showtime. My movie agent will also be in the meeting.
Let me interject here to say that I didn’t even know I had a movie agent until a few months ago when my literary agent told me how much he loved my book. But the movie agent emailed me and said he thinks we should shoot for the docuseries and retain rights to a movie and hopefully get two bites from the same apple. Two bites? Sounds awesome, considering I didn’t even know I had an apple.
I have been compiling a list of friends and relatives who might be potential folks to be interviewed and going through old VHS tapes and pictures that could also be used. That would be the neat thing about a docuseries is having real people in it. If the producer wants to do an actual movie, that’s a much larger project requiring a script, actors, director, etc. Tom Cruise is the only actor short enough to play me if he could only add a hundred pounds.
Either way, it will be neat to have something I created made into a big or small screen adaptation. And, as crazy as it sounds, it won’t even be the first. Next month, a movie company in South America begins the process of turning my comic strip into an animated movie. It was hoped it would land with Disney+, but anywhere it lands will be great.
I began the comic strip nine years ago. In the U.S., it’s called Brad’s Pit and is about a guy named Brad who adopts an adult pit bull from the shelter and their life together. In South America, where it has been more popular, we changed the name to Pancho el Pit Bull. Pancho has been featured on many TV shows and in major magazines, where he is often referred to as a canine Garfield.
They say it is now the most popular cartoon in South America, and we signed a six-book deal with the largest publisher of Spanish books. Now, the movie company will hire a script writer from Argentina as well as hire voice actors and musicians and turn it into a movie.
It all seems kind of crazy for a former pig farmer from Sand Mountain. It will be just like the lyrics from the Buck Owens song: “Biggest fool that’s ever hit the big time, and all I gotta do is act naturally.”
