Dennis Lehane

Bookstores are lined with the works of novelists who've never seen their creations make it to the silver screen -- or who've been burned when they do. So count Dennis Lehane among the doubly fortunate few. First Clint Eastwood made a film classic out of the respected crime writer's "Mystic River," with that scorching, Oscar-winning performance by Sean Penn. Then Ben Affleck made his highly acclaimed directorial debut last month with "Gone Baby Gone."

To many -- movie fans, film theorists and the dozens of young directors who've sought to emulate his two-fisted early style -- Martin Scorsese is the consummate American auteur. He's a filmmaker, that is, with a profound and distinctive personal vision and the clout and courage to put it on screen. But when Scorsese, 67, was working to adapt a tightly constructed thriller by author Dennis Lehane -- a novel that pulls the rug out from under its premise several times -- the director was suddenly in a very un-auteur-like straitjacket.

"Have YOU ever noticed that when they need us, they talk about duty, but when we need them, they talk about budgets?" Spoken today, those words could apply to any number of hot-button issues on the country's mind: war, the notion of service, the collapsing economy. The words, however, emerge from the mouth of a fictional young police officer living in Boston about 90 years ago, about to take part in brutal events that are shaped by and will shape the course of history.

In Dennis Lehane's novels, when the going gets rough for protagonist and narrator Patrick Kenzie, the Boston private eye calls for his boyhood pal Bubba. The big bruiser with the tiny conscience is the latest addition to a growing trend in detective fiction--the use of a sociopathic stooge to keep the hero honorable. As far as I can tell, the trend began 20 years ago when, in Robert B. Parker's "Promised Land," the self-righteous sleuth Spenser first encountered the existentialist hit man Hawk--the start of a beautiful friendship that is still thrilling readers.

When Noomi Rapace and Niels Arden Oplev first met to discuss adapting the bestselling "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" nearly five years ago, one filmmaker's name kept coming up. "We talked about movies that inspired us, and it always came back to 'Zodiac' and David Fincher," the Swedish-born actress, 33, said in a joint interview last week with the Danish-born Oplev, 51. "It was a little strange. " It's not lost on the duo that Fincher would later helm the English-language remake of their Swedish-language thriller.

Despite an unprecedented runoff vote designed to break their tie, both "Seabiscuit" and "Mystic River" were announced Thursday as winners of the 16th annual USC Scripter Award. The award, presented by the Friends of the USC Libraries, honors the best film adaptation from a book or novella. This is the first time the award has been presented to two adaptations in the same year.

Some movie sets abound with producers and studio executives, others teem with entourages of dodgy hangers-on. Ben Affleck invited a slightly different class of visitors to his bank heist story "The Town" — a bunch of real-life criminals. "Pretty much everyone on the set was an ex-con of some sort," says Jeremy Renner, who stars opposite Affleck in the drama, opening Friday, about a quartet of Boston holdup artists whose luck may be running out fast. "And there were probably a couple of guys there who were still robbing banks.

Not everyone had reason to celebrate Sunday night -- what follows is a look at those who went home empty-handed: Amy Ryan: Ryan won a slew of critics awards for her supporting role as a negligent, slatternly mother in South Boston in Ben Affleck's Dennis Lehane adaptation "Gone Baby Gone" but lost the big prize to Tilda Swinton.