Turner Network TV To Develop Major Television Series — Introducing a New Heroine & Her Band of Adventurers
by Elia Esparza
Turner Network TV (TNT) has acquired Pulitzer nominated, award-winning author’s Luis Alberto Urrea’s adventurous novel Into The Beautiful North to develop into an epic television series.
The drama will bring to life a 19 year-old, athletic, bright, strong-willed, and charmingly naïve Nayeli, who works at a taco shop in her Mexican beachside village and dreams about her father who journeyed to the U.S. to find work. It dawned on her that her dad wasn’t the only man who had left town. In fact, there are almost no men in the village—they’d all gone north. One day while watching the old classic film, The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli decides to go north herself and recruit seven men—her own “Siete Magnificos”—to repopulate her hometown and protect it from the drug-dealing thugs who had recently begun to target the village, anxious to profit from drug-buying American surfers who frequent the nearby beaches. She persuades her loyal band of friends to accompany her on the dangerous journey, and thus the quest begins.
Into The Beautiful North, is present day U.S./Mexico adventure border story. As the Big Book reviewer stated, “Nayeli is an idealistic teenager who is coming of age where she and her friends spend their days working at low-wage jobs and surfing the net for videos of their favorite bands and movie stars, dreaming of a wider world they have little hope of knowing.”
TNT looks to capture the best of Urrea’s novel which “explores, with compassion and humor, the micro-cultures within the border world, from the residents of the Tijuana garbage dump to the upscale neighborhoods of San Diego, and reveals that the distance between them is not as great as one might initially imagine.”
What Nayeli encounters is filled with unforgettable characters as radiant as the Sinaloa sun. There’s Nayeli’s Aunt Irma, who has just been elected the first female Municipal President of the village, a strong woman who no man wants to go against; Yolo, short for Yoloxochiltl a straight-A high school student “simmering with revolutionary ideas.” There’s Veronica aka Vampi, the only goth girl in the state of Sinaloa with her distinctive look: Black hair dyed even blacker, pale makeup, black lips and nails, and a long black skirt. She found her calling on YouTube with bands like The 69 Eyes and Type O Negative. There’s Tacho, the gay proprietor and village restaurant cook, and Matt, a young missionary once stationed in Nayeli’s town. Matt is the first “real live blond boy” Nayeli and her friends have ever seen. He returns to San Diego and leads a normal life until the day he receives a call from Nayeli. And, then there is the amazing Atómico, who was raised in the dumps of Tijuana and armed with a bamboo rod, Atómico brings his unique sense of justice to the journey. His scrappy and maniacal exterior hides a mixture of pride, loyalty, and humble nobility.
If TNT succeeds with transporting this brilliant novel onto our TV screens, they will present a new generation of characters who overcome obstacles by employing their ingenuity and youthfulness, and maybe, just maybe will bring new solutions to old problems– a new drama as irresistible as one young woman’s quest to find herself on both sides of the fence.
Stay tuned for more development news coming soon.
“I am deeply moved by the journey of this book. I wrote it to be subversive–in this political, anti-Latino atmosphere, it seemed revolutionary to create a pop adventure about deeper things. I thought it would be of service to us all to make a book that would cause people who look down on Mexicanos, or undocumented people, or struggling poor women, or gay men, or our beloved cholos, to root for them instead… Well. That’s God’s work. TNT is boldly going there.” — Luis Alberto Urrea
About the Author: www.luisurrea.com Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. A 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction (The Devil's Highway), and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, Urrea is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 16 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, Urrea is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, "I am more interested in bridges, not borders." Into the Beautiful North, is a Big Read selection by the National Endowment of the Arts and has been selected by more than 30 different cities and colleges as a community read. His other books include: The Hummingbird's Daughter, his 2005 historical novel, tells the story of Urrea's great-aunt Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved 20 years of research and writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil's Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications.
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