Is The Rivals of Amziah King based on a novel? The screenplay is credited to "James Montague", a name that belongs to nobody
The Rivals of Amziah King feels like a book. A big, verbose, sprawling American novel with digressions about bee colonies and potluck etiquette, the kind you'd find dog-eared in a lake house.
So naturally, half the audience walked out of Matthew McConaughey's grand return to movies wanting to buy the source novel. Here's the problem: it does not exist. And neither, technically, does the screenwriter.
Who the hell is James Montague?
Roll the credits and you'll see "Screenplay: James Montague." Search for the novelist James Montague and you'll find nothing but a Shakespeare-adjacent shrug. That's because James Montague is director Andrew Patterson — it's the pen name he's used since his debut The Vast of Night, what Screen Daily calls his usual pseudonym. The man commits to the bit so hard that "James Montague" is also listed among the film's producers. One guy, two credits, zero novels.
So no: this bluegrass-soaked tale of an Oklahoma beekeeper (McConaughey, operating at maximum alright-alright), his estranged foster daughter Kateri (astonishing first-timer Angelina LookingGlass), and a ruthless honey-theft underworld was not adapted from anything. It only reads like literature.
The film has "based on the beloved novel" energy, and the beloved novel is one Oklahoman's imagination wearing a fake mustache.
Where it actually came from
The novel-that-isn't grew out of Patterson's own dirt. He was born and raised in Oklahoma and still lives there, and the film is set among the kinds of small communities he grew up twenty minutes from. He told Letterboxd Journal plainly: "It takes place where I was born and raised." His grandparents farmed in Altus; the potlucks, the jam sessions, the honey operation filmed in loving industrial detail — that's memory, not adaptation.
A few more receipts for the "original American oddball" file:
- Patterson developed the script for years, and Denzel Washington circled the lead before McConaughey — the sticking point was creative control, which Patterson wouldn't hand over. To a legend. For his second film. Respect.
- This is McConaughey's first movie in roughly seven years, and once you see the character — mandolin-playing backwoods philosopher with a monologue about the truths and lies in every potluck dish — you get why this was the one.
- While editing, Patterson would call Steven Soderbergh for advice, and told TheWrap about the most Soderbergh note imaginable: "Cut the movie to 60 minutes just to see it." (He didn't.)
The best compliment a screenplay can get
Critics keep circling the same reaction: this thing zigs where every screenwriting manual says zag, wanders into narrative cul-de-sacs on purpose, and leaves you convinced there must be 400 pages of source material somewhere. There aren't. There's just a director who invented a novelist, credited him twice, and dared you to notice.
If "James Montague" ever does publish the novelization, I'm pre-ordering out of spite.
Previously we wrote: Hell's Kitchen winners: where are they now? All 24, including the ones who never took the job
