Tom Cooper's "The Marauders"

Tom Cooper’s work has recently appeared in Oxford American, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, Willow Springs, and dozens of other magazines and journals. He lives in New Orleans, where he writes and teaches.

Here Cooper shares some ideas about casting an adaptation of his first novel, The Marauders:

I think it would have to be a cast of unknowns. Time and again Hollywood fucks up big time, casting people who are just hideously, hilariously, wrong for their parts. I haven’t seen it, won’t see it because life’s too short, but there’s this new movie out---I think it’s called The Delivery Boy, something like that---with Janelle Lopez. And she plays this classics professor, this hot classics professor, and to make sure this fact isn’t lost on the audience, she wears horn-rimmed glasses and a t-shirt that says “You Had Me At Herodotus”. She’s sitting around in her underwear reading Flavian poetry, rubbing lotion on her legs, and she has a crush on the pizza delivery boy. Things get racy and dangerous. Extra pepperoni. Dumb as hell.

Yeah, so unknowns. Local unknowns. Low budget, indie. I like to think The Marauders would make a great movie, but it would have to arrive from a certain sensibility. Recent movies, I’m thinking Blue Ruin, Stakeland, Cold in July, You’re Next, Mud, Joe. Stuff like that.

Visit Tom Cooper's website.

--Marshal Zeringue