When Everett De Morier isn’t serving as the territory sales engineer at HIWIN in Huntley, he’s writing.
Courtesy of J.R. Via
J.R. Via
The industrial linear motion control products HIWIN Corporation manufactures and distributes from Huntley seem a world away from Hollywood’s motion picture industry — unless you factor in Everett De Morier.
As HIWIN’s territory sales engineer, De Morier visits Huntley once a quarter from his home office in Delaware to report on company projects in New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. But, in his off time, he writes.
After writing “Crib Notes for the First Year of Marriage: A Survival Guide for Newlyweds” and “Crib Notes for the First Year of Fatherhood: A Survival Guide for New Fathers” in the 1990s, De Morier (who has appeared on CNN, PBS, etc.) spent nearly a decade periodically working on his novel “Thirty-three Cecils,” a fictional thriller set during the pre-smartphone era of 1992.
“I picked it up and put it down several times,” says De Morier of his novel writing process. “For me, all writing projects just start with the beginning, then you fine tune it, and then begin to attach other things to it. You just keep focusing on the part you’re working on now and it begins to create a path. Then you follow it.”
The path led to publishing “Thirty-three Cecils” in 2015 when it won the top fiction prize at The London Book Festival and was named book-of-the-year by Heroic Magazine. So when the film rights were sold, De Morier began adapting the novel into a screenplay.
“I’ve written seven original full-length theatrical plays, all of them were produced,” continues De Morier. “By being the author of the novel the film was based on, and having written so many scripts for the stage, I thought writing a screenplay would be a breeze.”
Yet adapting the work was anything but as De Morier soon found. “There are a lot of rules as far as screenplay format,” the author explains. “You have to keep the films budget constantly in mind — and what works on the page or on the stage, may not work on film.”
Fortunately, fellow writers Brian Esquivel and Robinson McGiffin contributed to De Morier’s screenplay which is being produced by Sunset River Productions, where it is currently in development with plans for a 2019 release.
In the meantime, “Thirty-three Cecils” is available in book form at Amazon or Blydyn Square Books.
SOURCE: http://www.dailyherald.com/submitted/20171023/one-day-job-seven-plays-and-thirty-three-cecils