From DHD: the film adaptation of Craig Clevenger’s novel, The Contortionist’s Hanbook, is moving full steam ahead – Channing Tatum has commited to star in and co-produce the adaptation. Also producing the project are Reid Carolin, Das Films’ Sriram Das, GreeneStreet’s John Penotti, Tim Williams and Sidney Kimmel. Robin Shushan wrote the script.
Tatum will play a forger who moves smoothly from one identity to the next because of a strict code of conduct that keeps him from getting caught or having to deal with his own troubled past. That gets upended when he falls for a beautiful woman with her own dark secret.
Book Jacket:
John Dolan Vincent is a talented young forger with a proclivity for mathematics and drug addiction. In the face of his imending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental healthy authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration. But running turns out to be costly. Vincent’s clients in the L.A. underworld lose patience, the hospital evaluator may not be fooled by his story, and the only person in as much danger as himself is the woman who knows his real name.
Critics say (of the book):
“John Vincent was born with an extra ring finger on one hand. To his constantly broke, jail-bound father, this was just something John had to live with. After years of ridicule by other children, his father gave him a magic book through which he learned some slight-of-hand tricks that helped him conceal his disfigurement from others. That, together with a sharp mind and a knack for replicating signatures and official documents, started John on a path of petty crime. Then he started getting inexplicable and untreatable migraines, which led to a history of drug abuse. As John started going in and out of hospitals for drug overdoses, he deftly learned how to change identities. This life of identity theft, drugs, and crime continues in a downward spiral, until he falls in love and meets his match. He starts to question his own identity, after rejecting it for so long, which eventually leads to some redemption. Clevenger cleverly creates a modern-day Mr. Ripley.”
– Booklist
“Clevenger’s debut novel is a well-crafted but underplotted character study of a brilliant, damaged man who struggles with mental illness and substance abuse as he bounces in and out of prison and a series of hospitals around Los Angeles…Clevenger is a solid writer who does some good work when it comes to creating a noirish atmosphere and smart, compelling characters, but the pace is uneven at best.”
– Publishers Weekly
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