Sunday, January 11, 2009

The War Next Door: "Culiacán" / "Narco"

Mitch Bykerk and I have begun developing a project, alternating between the tentative titles "Culiacán" or "Narco".  It deals with the extremely fascinating and currently ongoing drug war in Mexico.  A war which, to date, has been described as twice as worse as the War on Terrorism in terms of casualties, both civilian and military.  This is going to be a "script first and ask questions later" project, meaning that budgetary concerns are not in play here.

We have discovered a main player in this true story that we think would make for an interesting central character.  Our plan is to make this as accurate as we can to the real life situation and to fictionalize as little of it as possible.  Once you've delved into the media and wealth of other material available, I think you'll find the concept gripping without much need for embellishment.

I have compiled a list of reading material for those interested in working on this.  Contact either one of us with questions, concerns, ideas, and so on if you are interested.

4 comments:

Shane B said...

Sounds cool. Just make sure you make a completely different take to you story that some others that already exist... Joe Carnahan's 'Killing Pablo' comes to mind.

Also, I think there is a film called 'Narc' so you might want to go with the other title... just a thought.

Other than that, this sounds cool. When do I get to read the first draft?

blake said...

Two Carnahan projects there. Yeah, the original title we came up with was Culiacan, so we'll probably go with that for now.

Killing Pablo thankfully deals with Escabar and Columbia, so I'm hoping we don't have too much of a comparison issue. This conflict is literally still happening and hasn't reached the boiling point quite yet. When it inevitably spills over into America, that's when things are really going to take off.

You'll of course be on of the first to read it when it's ready, friend. So far, we're still in the outlining stage. It'll all be on me and Mitch's Celtx soon enough.

blake said...

My the way, the Killing Pablo thing sounds EXACTLY like the fake Entourage movie "Medellin" that Vinny Chase is trying to do.

Ty said...

I don't know to much about the current drug war however I like the sound of the project and will do some homework.