Juggling Act

Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne is out, and novelist Pete Dexter is in, to write the adaptation of Kim Wozencraft’s just-published cocaine-and-cops novel “Rush,” which producers Richard and Lili Zanuck bought last year for $1 million.

Dexter, the Sacramento Bee columnist who won the National Book Award in 1988 for his novel “Paris Trout,” was hired because of Towne’s lingering repair work on “Days of Thunder,” the Tom Cruise movie now shooting in Florida.

“I couldn’t wait any longer,” says Richard Zanuck, who had earlier commissioned Dexter to adapt his Western novel “Deadwood” and was pleased with the results.

Dexter, 46, initially cracked the scriptwriting market when Viacom Pictures bought “Paris Trout” and let him adapt it for Showtime. “I’ve done magazines, the column and books,” Dexter tells us. “I thought, why not try this?”

Dexter spends mornings writing fiction, three afternoons a week on his 900-word column and the other afternoons on screenwriting--currently working with director Michael Mann on “The Hat Squad,” a project about a special L.A. 1950s police detail.

“It’s not like I’m carrying the whole thing uphill,” Dexter said of scriptwriting. “You don’t have to spend 10 minutes figuring out a way to hold a sentence together.”