Brad Tyer's "Opportunity, Montana," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape by Brad Tyer.

The entry begins:

Here's the fun of this exercise for me: Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape will never be a movie. The book's murders are entirely tangential, and fish are the only ones having any sex. The story traverses 10,000 years, and it doesn't always go in order. I had when I wrote it and have now no cinematic ambition or expectation for the book. It's a story I think is best told in book form. If I'd wanted to make a movie, I'd have made a movie.

But let's say  Terrence Malick directs it, all maddeningly ponderous long shots of landscape and weather. I see Montana's three 19th century Copper Kings, who took their fortunes and left the state with a ring of poison, as a tense Steve Buscemi, a fat Jack...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Brad Tyer's website and the Opportunity, Montana blog.

My Book, The Movie: Opportunity, Montana.

--Marshal Zeringue