Why I hate the show JUSTIFIED, even though I have never watched it, and never will.

Yesterday, a picture came across my Facebook feed from Back Home, and it kind of broke my heart. Those of you that know me best know that heartbreak is not something to which I often admit, but this time… yeah. Heartbreak.

Apparently some folks from the F/X television show Justified were in town, doing research for their series. “Back home” for me means Powell County, Kentucky, forty or so miles southeast of Lexington and more or less the sort of small Kentucky town where most of Justified reportedly takes place.  I say “reportedly” because although I am vaguely familiar with its trappings, I’ve never actually seen the show, and for a particularly good reason which I am about to explain to most of you for the first time, I never will.

More on that in a minute, though. For now, just know this picture came across my news feed and as soon as I saw it, I hung my head, smacked my fist on the table, and typed a few different angry Twitter and Facebook updates that I immediately deleted before I made too big of an ass of myself in public. I did manage a single, somewhat sane post about it, though, in sharing that pic through my page so the rest of the world might somehow share in my miserable moment. (Didn’t you?)

Anyway, here is my post, and the photograph in question:

 Yes, that was the “sane” version of my post. The first few attempts were a bit more harsh and featured many, many F-bombs.

So who are the people in the picture? The gentleman in the police uniform is James T. Kirk, police chief of the Clay City department , Clay City being one of the two primary towns in Powell County. (I grew up on the other, rural end of the county.) Yes, his name is really James T. Kirk, at least, he told me it was really James T. Kirk back in the days when we both frequented the same public basketball courts. Another funny story about him is that in 1994, he was playing outfield in a baseball game and in between pitches, shouted “O.J. IS INNOCENT!” and shut the game down for a few seconds while everybody paused to control their laughter. This was maybe 2 or 3 days after OJ Simpson killed his wife and her boyfriend. It really doesn’t have anything to do with this story I’m telling you now, I just find it amusing.

Anyway, James T. Kirk. Chief of Police in Clay City, Kentucky. I am sure that his nose for justice is a bit more refined these days.

The rest of those people in the picture? The guy in the red shirt could be local, I’m not sure; he kind of has the same haircut I do. The other folks, well, those must be the aforementioned Justified folks. I don’t know any of their names and they certainly don’t know mine, but I do know that seeing them in Powell County, Kentucky, smiling and playing up their “Hollywood” status, makes me want to pick up my chair and shove it clean through the center of this damn computer screen.

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Chances are, if you’re reading this, you are aware that I wrote a novel a couple of years ago called Sewerville. (If you’re not aware, and you were wondering why this site is called Sewerville.com, consider that mystery explained.) It’s a dark, emotional book, with a clutchful of amoral characters – mountain gangsters, corrupt lawmen, drug dealers, drug addicts. Crime abounds; a lot of people die. A dead cow even figures into the plot. It’s pretty seedy stuff, as you would expect from a book subtitled  A Southern Gangster Novel. Also as you would expect from a Southern gangster novel, family ties and dark histories run throughout.

I don’t mind saying, I’m proud of that book.  (I also don’t mind saying that if you haven’t read it, you should saunter on over here and remedy that situation.)  It expresses what I wanted it to express, readers give it mostly positive reviews, and I guess a writer can’t ask for much more than that.

Full disclosure: there are a lot of places and characters in Sewerville that are taken from Powell County. Those close to me already know that, and those who aren’t close to me probably still assume it. Nothing’s ripped straight, but a lot of real bits and pieces are combined to make a new, and yet still familiar, fictional whole. Some might cringe at the nastier parts – the meth making, the prescription drug abuse, and so forth – but hey, that’s the way it is. Not just in eastern Kentucky, but throughout rural America.

I always thought somebody could make a movie set in that world. In fact, I’ve been trying to do that for several years.  Sewerville the novel actually began life as a screenplay called The Mountain, which was named for the Steve Earle song of the same name about Eastern Kentucky coal miners that features these lyrics:

I was young on this mountain but now I am old  

And I knew every holler, every cool swimmin’ hole  

‘Til one night I lay down and woke up to find  

That my childhood was over and I went down in the mine

There’s a hole in this mountain and it’s dark and it’s deep  

And God only knows all the secrets it keeps  

There’s a chill in the air only miners can feel  

There’re ghosts in the tunnels that the company sealed

For me, those lines are about so much more than coal mining. They’re also about how we’re haunted by our own pasts, and how hard it is to outrun the ghosts no matter how hard we try, and how in a place like fictional Sewardville, Kentucky, it’s just about damned impossible.

Like I said, I thought it would be a good movie.

At the time I was first thinking that, I also was trying to break into the world of screenwriting. I had written a few that were mostly bad, and a couple that I thought were pretty good. The Mountain was the third. I wrote the screenplay in the latter half of 2000, while I was working for a production company in Nashville, and I felt like it was the best I could do at the time. Upon completion, I gave it to the folks that owned the production company, (I’m keeping them anonymous here) and as it turned out, they liked the story as much as I did. I figured, okay, these guys love it, this will be easy. We’ll get this thing made in a year or two and my screenwriting career will take off like a jackrabbit with a lit firecracker up its ass.

Now understand, I know very little – I know less than very little – about the film business. Actually I know only one thing: it takes a fucking miracle to get a movie made. It takes a fucking miracle, and that is the absolute truth. It’s just too easy for people to find an excuse to tell you “no, ” for marketing reason this or budgetary reason that. Whether we’re talking a big studio tentpole with a $250 million bankroll or the tiniest independent film financed by the savings accounts of dentists and foot doctors, trying to get a “yes” on these things is like trying to squeeze water from your own belly button. Yes, some people have done it, but nobody’s ever had fun doin’ it.

And when it comes to The Mountain, my friends have gotten close to a “yes” more than once.  So far, though, it just hasn’t happened for us.

One of the times we got the closest, thought, was in 2007-8, when my friends approached a prominent cable channel with the idea for a television series based on The Mountain. The show would be set in the same Eastern Kentucky world as the film script; the main story and characters would be the same, plus we’d add several more characters and plotlines, enough to flesh out the show universe and support  an entire series across multiple episodes and seasons.

Basically, the first twenty-five pages of the screenplay were expanded and became the pilot script, while the rest of the movie’s plot played out over the course of the first season, along with all the other new ideas we worked in.   I thought it was a little weird at first, thinking of our little movie in this new light, but by the time we put together the whole story, I could see it really working. It was a solid, emotional tale, and just as importantly, it had a unique setting and group of characters that just weren’t on TV at that time.  If they were on TV, they were hillbilly caricatures. We made them something more. Our story was dark, violent, but also (I dare say) thoughtful.

The contacts at F/X agreed.

F/X, the home of Justified.

This was before Justified, of course.

More accurately, as we would find out later, it was at the same time they were developing Justified.

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PART II of this story comes tomorrow. Just to foreshadow, I’m not suggesting Justified ripped off The Mountain/Sewerville; I’m being very clear about the fact that they were only developing both at the same time. It happens. From what I understand, it happens a lot.

But this story is not about Justified.  It’s about Sewerville, and it’s about me. And I’m going to tell you the rest of it in a few hours, because that picture of some Justified folks showing up in my home county – the county that served as the basis for the novel Sewerville, which came from the script for The Mountain, which became the would-be television series that was in the hands of F/X at the same time as Justified, the same Justified which today reaps critical acclaim and millions of fans… well, like I said. That picture of Chief of Police James T. Kirk and the smiley folks from F/X peeled back an old wound.

So, I had a little heartbreak yesterday. Bear with me on this.

See you tomorrow.

Aaron