A Walton native has turned his award-winning novel into a screenplay, and a movie based on it will be shot in Binghamton later this year.
Everett De Morier, whose book “Thirty-three Cecils” was released in 2015, said he wrote the screenplay with Brian Esquivel, who is producing the movie.
“It’s surreal,” he said of having his book turned into a movie. “It’s exciting. I’m very excited.”
De Morier attended SUNY Oneonta in 1985 and worked at Red’s Filling Station, a college bar on Market Street. He was raised in Walton, graduated from Walton Central School in 1981 and was the commencement speaker for the 2019 Walton graduation, a media release said.
The book is based in Binghamton, where De Morier lived in the 1990s, and Erie, Pennsylvania, a place he has never been to, he said. Instead, he researched the city online and looked up images of different addresses so he could describe them in his book. He said his description was so vivid, a reporter “asked me how long I lived there.”
He said he will visit Erie later this month when he tours and speaks at Gannon University on March 14 and 15. He will speak to residents as well as to students in several writing and film classes, a media release said. He will be in the Binghamton area on March 16, where he and Kelly Fancher will speak with film and English students at SUNY Broome and cinema students from Binghamton University, the release said. Fancher, a former film commissioner for the Binghamton Film Office, will be migrating to a staff position with the “Thirty-Three Cecils” film, the release said.
While the book takes place in the two cities, the entire movie will be shot in Binghamton, De Morier said. He said it was nice to see that a pub he wrote about was still open. The movie will be shot at different locations within the city including the Belmar Pub, he said.
The pre-planning of the different shots will take between three and four weeks and the movie will be shot in six weeks, he said. The production crew is coordinating with the actors, whose names have not been publicly released, to see when they are available to shoot the movie. He said the movie will be shot out of sequence. For example all of the scenes that take place inside the pub will be shot together.
De Morier said he will be on the movie set from beginning to end, tweaking the script if needed. “Writers are not the favorite people on the set,” he said. “For some reason they want the writers as far away as possible.”
The novel won the top fiction prize at The London Book Festival, the release said. De Morier said it is used in some prisons to teach fiction writing to prisoners.
He has spoken at colleges and has had conference calls with prisoners, and noted that the students often ask how to find an agent and publisher, but the prisoners ask: “How do I make this paragraph better? How do I better my craft?”
Vicky Klukkert, staff writer, can be reached at vklukkert@thedailystar.com or 607-441-7221. Follow her @DS_VickyK on Twitter.