Along the lines of “The Page 99 Test,” we have “My Book, The Movie” — a blog that solicits authors to ponder who they might cast in the hypothetical big-screen version of their book. Setting the tone is a Faulkner quote about the movie business at the top of the page: Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder. Nice.
So I took a crack at figuring out which thespian I might sign up to play young Ryan in “Losering”; and it was an interesting exercise because I had already kind of gone through the same process in reverse for another book a very long time ago. Check that out here, or at the Campaign for the American Reader. Given the filmic angle, I find it fitting that this turned up on the same day as the Academy Awards.
ADDENDUM (12/16/2014): Ryan and Johnny Depp are pretty close friends and collaborators, it turns out.
Losering Books 
Johnny Depp doesn’t play a kid in any of his movies, and I think this part needs to be played by a someone young Ryan was a kid during Whiskeytown both in age (~24) and maturity. I’d pick Ezra Miller from “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, or maybe his costar from “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” Logan Lerman, they both seem to have the range and could do the emotion.
Worthy choices both!
Robert Downey Jr. is too old now, has to be a young actor, but man, he’s the only one I can think of who in his young days could have nailed it, He’s got the charisma and nuanced instincts as an actor to captured all the manic vortex of our subject’s personality so brilliantly at war with itself. Downey can DO that.
Yeah, he would be interesting — I’m thinking back to “Less Than Zero,” which was a pretty terrible movie; but Downey was rivetting. And I love him in the ongoing Sherlock Holmes series, too.
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