political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his Joseph Antonelli novels reflect that experience.
The New York Times called The Defense "an accomplished first novel" which "leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again." The Judgment was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel of the year. The latest Joseph Antonelli novel is The Privilege.
D.W. Buffa lives in Northern California.
Here the author dreamcasts an adaptation of The Privilege:
When my first novel, The Defense, was published in l997, the first question almost everyone who knew me asked was, “Is it going to be made into a movie?” The second question, almost always, was, “Who do you think should play the lead?”Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
I was surprised. I should not have been. What we see on film has become, for many of us, the measure, not just of a novel’s success, but of its importance. It is, for that reason, often assumed that the author must have had a particular actor or actress in mind when he created at least some of the characters who fill the pages of his work. And, let me confess, when I first started writing I would sometimes wonder who might be able to show on the screen what I was trying to describe with my pen. I knew that Leopold Rifkin, the judge in The Defense, could have been played perfectly by Ben Kingsley. I could see him doing it. Horace Woolner, the district attorney, could only have been played by James Earl Jones. The defense lawyer, the same Joseph Antonelli who is the defense lawyer in The Privilege, - well, he was always a problem. John Garfield could have done it, but Garfield had been dead for nearly half a century.
Now, more than twenty years later, trying to cast The Privilege, I wish that instead of 2021, it was 1950. It would have been easy then. Antonelli, the lawyer who never loses, would be played by Glenn Ford, and Tangerine, the woman he lives with, a woman so good looking that even other, beautiful, women are not jealous, by Ava Gardner. Charles Laughton would have been unforgettable as the professor of philosophy who raises questions no one had heard in a courtroom before, and only Orson Welles could have played the enigmatic James Michael Redfield. Now, today, the choices are not as easy, but if choices have to be made, George Clooney would play Antonelli and Sean Penn would play Redfield.
My first choice to direct The Privilege would be Francis Ford Coppola. He has been known to do interesting things with stories about Sicilians, and what better Sicilian to portray than Joseph Antonelli who, like every good Sicilian, has his own understanding of what justice means. A second choice would be a director whose name I do not know, the director of the Italian motion picture, Open Doors, the best courtroom drama ever put on film.
Q&A with D.W. Buffa.
--Marshal Zeringue
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