Ahhh, the World Wide Web. Where you can compare muffin recipes, find out the latest movie news (ahem), or check out videos of cats sitting in cardboard boxes. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can order a few kilos of H and hire a contract killer to get rid of the guy who keeps taking your parking spot. That’s the way Silk Road works, the online bazaar where you can order all the extra-legal goods and services your heart could possibly desire.
And according to Deadline, Silk Road will be brought to theaters (though for obvious reasons you won’t be able to buy or sell drugs and murder) by Dennis Lehane, crime novelist extraordinaire and and the writer behind Shutter Island, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and the upcoming Live By Night- all in book form. Yet Lehane’s no stranger to the screenplay, either. He wrote a handful of episodes for The Wire and his first feature film, Animal Rescue comes out next year.
It also helps that the story of Silk Road is so inherently interesting. Only accessible through Tor (a special piece of software that encrypts your internet usage so anyone intent on monitoring you can’t do so), Silk Road is located within the “deep web,” a level of internet far spookier than anything you’d normally run into on Google. The film will follow a particularly foolish individual who attempted to put out a hit on clients of Silk Road and ended up in jail himself. It’s all a moot point now, as the owner and operator of Silk Road was arrested two weeks ago. Still, it’s great movie fodder.
