Finally getting serious about this writing thing, author Cormac McCarthy has moved beyond the niche market of novels written on musty paper and sold his very first spec script, The Counselor. The author whose books All The Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country For Old Men have all been adapted for the screen by other people is at last cutting out the middleman with The Counselor, which was just picked up by the same producers of The Road. According to one of them, Nick Wechsler, The Counselor screenplay “falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac’s novels”—a complete lack of quotation marks, yes, but also a “masculine world” (interrupted here by two rare-for-McCarthy female leads) and characters who find themselves trapped in bleak and brutal situations. This time it’s a lawyer in the Southwest “who thinks he can dip a toe into the drug business without getting sucked down.” And yes, that also sounds a bit like Breaking Bad as written by Cormac McCarthy, and no, absolutely nothing about that sounds less than awesome.