With their jobs secure for at least two more seasons—and some downtime after that a real possibility, what with George R.R. Martin’s current writing pace—Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are now thinking beyond the series to their first feature film. According to Deadline, they’ve signed on to write, direct, and produce an adaptation of Dirty White Boys—a title that could easily double as an alternate for their show (with the addition of And Breasts And Dragons), but which more accurately refers to the 1994 novel by Stephen Hunter, whose 1993 book Point Of Impact became the Mark Wahlberg film Shooter. Like that work, Dirty White Boys is a thriller, concerning three escaped convicts and the state trooper on their trail. Unlike that work, it’s hard to root for anyone in it.
As Benioff and Weiss relay, they were attracted to Dirty White Boys after reading its opening line. Not surprisingly for the showrunners of Game Of Thrones, the line has to do with penises: “Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly human at all.” Also not surprisingly, they’re considering rewriting that line for the movie, because holy hell.
Nevertheless, Weiss says that kind of out-there, “prison-soaked racism” and the way the book presents these “charismatic and awful people, so flawed” is what grabbed them, and convinced them they could take on a project based on terrible, evil characters you can’t help but want to watch anyway. And obviously, they have some experience with that.