Liam Neeson ''attached'' to take a ''walk'' among the ''Tombstones"

[First webposted in 1976 by Biko Lang......]


Lawrence Block, master storyteller with a worldwide following on the

printed and the pixelated page, recently

took to his home office blog in New York, high up on the 12th floor of

an building on West 12th Street, to tell

his fans a bit of happy news.



"'A Walk Among the Tombstones', the tenth book in my Matthew Scudder

series, is scheduled to begin filming in February next year," Block,

still going strong at 74, said. "Scott Frank, who

wrote the screen adaptation, will direct; the extraordinary Liam

Neeson will star as Matthew Scudder. I couldn’t be happier. Neeson as

Scudder struck me as a wonderful idea back when I saw him portray

Michael Collins in the eponymous film. I can’t think of anyone I’d

rather see in the role.''



Straight from the horse's mouth. Larry Block is in Seventh Heaven!



He added: Plans call for filming to commence in February in — get this — New York City. Readers often ask who’d be my ideal Matt Scudder (or Bernie Rhodenbarr, or Keller) and I usually change the subject. But now it’s safe to tell you that, ever since I saw him in 'Michael Collins', Neeson has been up at the top of my personal Scudder wish list. I couldn’t be happier about either the star or the writer/director, both of them genuine artists and brilliant professionals. My book’s in good hands.''



"A Walk Among the Tombstones" was first of all a great detective yarn

by master storyteller

Block, the tenth book in his ''Matthew Scudder'' series, and now

Neeson is attached to play Scudder

in Frank's screen adaptation of the chock-a-Block thriller. with

initial filming set to begin in Manhattan in

February 2013 -- if all goes as planned,

and of course, as film fans and The Wrap readers know these

announcements don't always pan out or proceed as

hoped for.



But Neeson is ''attached'' and the Scudder movie hopes to be part

of a three-year deal between Exclusive Media and Cross Creek Pictures.



"The hope is that 'Tombstones' will shoot in February, presumably once

Neeson has completed work on 'Non-Stop'," says a source.



Who's Mathew Scudder?



By the tenth book in the popular Scudder series, which began in 1976

and resulted in "A Walk

Among the Tombstones" being published in 1992,

he's become ex-cop, an unlicensed private detective and a recovering

drunk. He gets hired to try to find a woman

who has been kidnapped, and the more he learns the more he realizes this

is a very big story with an even bigger backstory.



Scudder made it to Hollywood once before when Jeff Bridges played him

"8 Million Ways To Die," according to Block. He also told me it's not

the first time that ''A Walk Among The Tombstones'' got greenlighted.

Harrison Ford was scheduled to play Scudder in the earlier deal but it

never worked out.



If "A Walk Among The Tombstones" makes it to the silver screen, Block

will be one of the happiest men on Earth, he said in a recent email.



On Block's blog, fans were quick to congratulate the veteran -- and

prolific! -- writer.



"That is just so cool about Liam Neeson playing Scudder. He’ll be

perfect for the role," said one man. Replied Block "This one’s been a

long time coming. The original book was still in the book stores

when Scott Frank first went to work on the screenplay.''



"As much as I like Jeff Bridges," opined another fan on Block's blog,

"I think Mr. Neeson will be the

definitive screen Scudder. I can’t wait to hear who plays Mick Ballou."



Mick Ballou? He's another of the writer's many characters, and Block

notes: "I’ve a feeling Ballou’s not in the screenplay. This

is the book where he goes to Ireland to dodge a RICO subpoena, and his

participation is thus limited to a couple of phone calls. But if the

film works, they’d love to do more. So perhaps we’ll see.''



About the Hollywood treatment of "8 Millions Way to Die," another

Block blog fan wrote: "I thought Jeff Bridges was an excellent choice,

but was disappointed with the setting change to California."



Block's frank response: ''I thought Jeff was very good — he pretty

much always is, whatever the

role — and Andy Garcia, too, but the film had a lot wrong with it.''



''This film’s been a long time coming, but I think it just might turn

out to have been worth the wait, Block told another fan on his blog.

"It’s a long awaited return of Scudder to the screen, and like you I

think Liam Neeson will do a good job."





One fan said that while she had never thought of Neeson for the

role if a movie was ever made, "now that someone has [fingered him],

it fits nicely," adding: "Fingers crossed that

the script doesn’t get 'Starship Troopered.'"



Block immediately replied on his blog, saying: "We don’t have to worry

about conflict between the writer and the

director, since the estimable Scott Frank is wearing both of those

hats [for this movie]. ''





Chimed on another fan: "Fortunately, I think very highly of the source

material, so I think

the movie will survive the normal [Hollywood] tinkering. I hope you

don’t lose the

extremely well-done side story of the brother, even to the sad end."



Said another fan: "Larry, I’m curious about updated phone technologies

[in the planned movie], if the adaptation is in

the present time."



Block replied: "I suspect there’ll be a lot changed in that respect,

although it’s hard to know. The last I heard, the movie’s going to take place

around the time the book came out, in the 1990s. But that could

change."



By the way, according to sources, Block's Scudder character was first

introduced in his 1976 novel titled ''The Sins of the Fathers.'' It

was suggested by some critics that Scudder's struggle with alcoholism

may have been parly autobiographical. While Block has repeatedly

refused to discuss the subject, citing AA's own tradition of

anonymity, in a column he wrote for Writer's Digest magazine, he did

write that when he created Scudder, "I let him hang out in the same

saloon where I spent a great deal of my own time. I was drinking

pretty heavily around that time, and I made him a pretty heavy

drinker, too. I drank whiskey, sometimes mixing it with coffee. So did

Scudder."



''A Walk Among the Tombstones" appeared in print in 1992. so it's been

a long 20-year wait for a film version. Fingers crossed.

http://www.movieinsider.com/m771/walk-among-the-tombstones-a-/

GEORG ANTON -- Austrian actor making mark in China and Hollywood

Ever wonder how a European or American man goes to China looking for work as a businessman or business consultant or English teacher, what have you, and ends up becoming an actor in Chinese movies and TV show with a nice resume to boot?

Meet Georg Anton, 29 years old, a native of Austria, who is now hitting his marks -- and making his mark -- in Beijing!

PHOTOS:
http://www.georganton.com/gallery/

"Did I come to China for acting? No. Not at all. I would have never thought that there could be

a life as an actor in China. When I came to China, I had already put all my creative endeavors

aside and I was all business: looking for business opportunities, work experience, and, well,

adventure,"  he said.

His early background: "I had been creating, directing and acting in my own little films

since I was 12 years old, shooting on my brother’s video camera. I pursued filmmaking throughout

my teen years, shooting shorts, volunteering on indie sets, jobbing at an ad production

agency, and taking courses. I was thinking of maybe becoming a director. But then, when it came

to decide about university studies, I just didn’t have the guts, dropped it completely because

I thought there couldn’t be a decent future in creative work. So I studied business. It was

only years later, far away in China, in a nightclub which we were allowed to use at a studio during day hours, at

the Beijing Actors Workshop, that I discovered the true essence of all my past interest in

filmmaking, in public speaking and in marketing team-building workshops: Acting! In it’s

pure form. And I also discovered my great love for it," Anton told us.



So to make a long story short, how did Georg Anton get to Beijing and the acting life?



"It was late in 2006, the last few months of my studies at the Vienna University of Economics and

Business Administration. Everybody seemed to be gearing up to scramble for bank jobs and

accounting firm internships, and I just didn’t want to be a part of that. So, let’s go somewhere

far away, Asia sounds good, China sounds even better. Every other day there were some news

on China and nobody seemed to have a real clue, so let’s go and see for myself. I looked for

internships (my mind was still set on business after all) and got one offer in Hunan Province

and one offer in the city of Tianjin. An Austrian-Chinese friend in Vienna said Tianjin was a good bet, and that’s what I took. Just a quick one-month crash course in Mandarin at a

community college in Vienna, collected my business degree (missed the ceremony), and two

days later I arrived in Tianjin at a small Chinese import-export company. That was in February

2007," Anton shared.



What followed were those crazy, funny, lovable, hate-able, terrible and amazing experiences

that feel so unique to each person yet are so common among all foreigners who arrive in

China on their own – culture shock, standard procedure. Anton added.



"So, after that crazy internship and my decision to stay in China and move to Beijing my “day

jobs” developed as follows: Chinese PR company, freelance English teaching, freelance

business report writing, small European business consulting company," he noted.



But let’s talk about his acting career and where he stands now!



"Once I got to Beijing I heard of the Beijing Actors Workshop (BAW) and joined right away

-- mostly out of curiosity, in search of a creative outlet and to meet people. That was fall of 2007. A

the same time and for those same reasons I also started going to Beijing Improv’s open

workshops, which were (and still are!) for free and bilingual (Chinese/English) and an

amazing place to meet great people and make friends. Both the BAW and Beijing Improv

had just been founded about a year before my arrival in very informal ways by a great bunch

of pioneering creative-minded expats. Those two groups were to become the

nucleus, home and incubator for so many of Beijing’s new performing arts projects of these

years. The Founder of BAW, Canadian filmmaker Patrick Pearce, and his successor American

theater director/producer Anna Grace Carter gathered the creative-minded – foreigners and

curious Chinese alike – organized workshops, courses and put on show after show after show."





Anton continues his story: "I joined many English-language theater productions inside and outside BAW (drama, comedy,

Shakespeare and new original works alike) and was able to grow with the community. The

whole community theater scene was propelled and taken to the next level when Beijing’s first

privately-run theater “Penghao Theatre” opened in mid 2008. Suddenly there was a proper

venue! Again, BAW and Beijing Improv were at the forefront of these new developments and

were among the first to breath life into the new Penghao Theatre, which has now become an

invaluable pillar of Beijing’s independent performing arts scene.



''I had auditioned and had been accepted into Beijing Improv’s English performance troupe in

early 2008. That was at a time when it was fairly easy to get in, but fairly “hard” to perform

– i.e. in bars, without stage, without much audience. Well, boy did that change! Co-founded

and lead through all these years by New Zealander Lottie Dowling and American Jonathan

Palley (who both have non-acting full-time jobs), Beijing Improv can truly pride itself to

have brought a new art form to the city. Beijing Improv today comprises an English language

performance group, a bilingual Chinese-English performance group and two open and free

weekly workshop groups and hosts the pan-Asian Beijing Interactive Improvised Arts


Festival. Apart

from that, multiple spin-off groups in various languages have formed around Beijing Improv

and created a true improv community. I am honored to be part of the English performance

group, which has now had several years of monthly sold-out shows with 200+ audience

and is regularly featured in the media as Beijing’s number one comedy performance. We

are constantly building on our own very international and multicultural improv style and

have toured to Hong Kong and Seoul. Importantly, Beijing Improv has always been and

still is completely not-for-profit and donates to local charity. Performers and organizers are

all unpaid, all have “real” jobs, and as far as I know, no member except for me is actually

pursuing an acting career in Chinese film and TV.''



So, let’s talk about film and TV.



''In 2008, I had my first just-for-fun one-line appearance in a Chinese TV series called “Lost

in LA” (迷失洛杉矶) in which I (very stiffly) played an American doctor. But really, from

2008 to 2010, acting was still just a hobby, albeit one that took up all of my free time, with

late-night theater rehearsals and weekend gigs. During that period, I acted in twelve theater

plays, in monthly improv shows and in three short films, and participated in six commercials

and corporate films. By 2010, my full-time office job had gotten more and more intense and

stressful up to a point where I realized that I just couldn’t be happy working at a desk and

forever fearing Mondays. At the same time I already knew that there were opportunities for

white-faced foreigners in Chinese films and television. Then, a very successful and much-

lauded theater performance in which I played multiple characters (including Seinfeld’s

George Costanza) ignited my wish to act professionally, while troubles at the office “helped”

me to make my decision to let the office life be and try acting full-time. There were Chinese

agents who had wanted to arrange bigger acting jobs for me for some time already, and so I

could finally tell them the good news that I was now available. Summer 2010.''



''So, I was taken to an audition and got the part of American WWII officer in a 32-episode

Sino-Japanese war TV serial. The series is called “The Locked-Up American Envoy” (锁定

美军特使) and, guess what, I’m the American envoy. It’s a “Saving Private Ryan” kind of

story, where my character is the center of the story, while the real lead roles and heroes are

the Chinese who save me and my secret documents from the hands of the Japanese. There is a

little love story too…it was a good role. And I heard it was originally intended for a Chinese

to play it as a Chinese-American, but then they went with me for the white-guy idea. That was

September 2010.''



''Well, from then onwards it was just acting, acting, acting. Guest-star gigs, principal roles,

regular and lead roles, TV and films. Everything. I can count six TV series, three feature films

for television, and four movies for the big screen. My most recent part was in a US indie

feature film production called “Train Station” by CollabFeature. It was shot in 40 different

countries in a collaborative way and I had the honor of being picked as their lead actor in the

China segment.''



''In late 2011, I also went to Los Angeles. for my first time to check out the city and scene and take

acting classes. During that short time I was cast in three short films and was offered two more

parts. One offer was even for a small part in a feature film, but by that time I had already

departed for China again."



''Most of my Chinese projects are still in post-production, but “The Locked-Up American

Envoy” was already out on national television earlier this year and another TV serial with

me in a principal/regular role, called “Final Hit” (绝杀) is being broadcast regionally in

many parts of China at the moment. I really liked the “Final Hit” production, because I had

a good role from beginning to end (playing an American secret agent in 1940s Shanghai),

because I could largely act in English, and because I was acting opposite Luoyong Wang, a

Chinese-American actor once called “the first Chinese on Broadway.” A modern-day movie

(“New Red River” 新红河谷) in which I play the romantic interest of Hong Kong-Canadian

lead actress Theresa Lee is also about to be released, and I’m very excited about that. While

TV series are great for gaining public exposure, I am happy to be developing towards film,

because film is demanding more from me and pushes me to work on my craft as an actor.''



''I am currently in discussions with a Chinese movie, a foreign independent production and a

new theater project…let’s see what happens.''



The future?



''It’s going great here for me in China, but of course I also look towards Hollywood. And in a funny way, Hollywood

is now looking towards China. But rather than “Hollywood” I should say “the international

film scene”. My future as a Chinese-speaking western actor on the international stage will

depend largely on the new Chinawood-Hollywood relationship, international co-productions

and new local productions on an international level. The global film business is now targeting

global audiences, creating more opportunities for Asians, Europeans, and internationally-

skilled folks like me. I have already achieved moving from television towards movies and

towards working with both Chinese and western directors. My desire is to strive for top-notch

acting and to work and learn in top-quality productions on an international level. In the years

to come, this can happen in China as well as it can happen anywhere else.''


QUOTE: "I didn’t come to China for acting. Acting happened to me. And I realized that I love it."



A few facts and figures:

Georg Anton's Chinese name is (乔治·安东).
Hometown: Vienna, Austria
Speaks 5 languages.

Break a leg, Georg, the future awaits you!