Two women are driving west. Eighteen men didn’t make it.
That’s the entire pitch for Days of Rain and Blood, and it could only have come from Rod Hewitt. He spent forty years writing and directing crime pictures for the screen: hitmen, vice cops, counterfeiters, men on the run. His first novel, out now from Fine Cut Press, is that whole career poured into one desert highway. Film 14 made the trailer for it, and the trailer above is where to start.
Who Is Rod Hewitt
Hewitt is a Los Angeles screenwriter and director who came up in the last years of the independent crime picture, when a filmmaker could still get a gangster movie made on nerve and a modest budget. He wrote and directed The Verne Miller Story (1987), with Scott Glenn as Verne Miller, the real-life Prohibition hitman, bank robber and disgraced South Dakota sheriff who was the only gunman ever identified in the Kansas City Massacre. Released overseas as Gangland, it remains the only feature ever made about Miller, a man who was buried with military honors and murdered by the mob in the same lifetime.
He followed it with a run of hard-edged genre films through the nineties. The Dangerous (1995), co-directed with David Winters, put Robert Davi, Michael Paré, John Savage, Joel Grey and Elliott Gould into a New Orleans revenge story. Strip Search (1997) sent a vice cop through the nightclubs of the city looking for a missing girl. Back to Even (1998), which Hewitt wrote and directed, followed a counterfeiter in debt to a bookie and on the run from the mob, with Lorenzo Lamas and Craig Wasson. He also wrote Sworn Enemies (1996) and Forbidden Warrior (2004).
Look at that list and a pattern shows. Hewitt has always been drawn to people who live outside the law and pay for it, and to Los Angeles and the desert around it as the place where those people end up. What a film could only show in ninety minutes, a novel lets him take apart slowly. Days of Rain and Blood is the book that career was building toward.
The Book
On a desert road outside Los Angeles, a yellow Rolls-Royce sits with its hood up. Behind the wheel is a con man who has never once stopped for anybody. Then a red Porsche pulls over.
Cottie and Gina are former calendar models with a toolbox and a score to settle with every man who ever made them. Dalton Paine is a broken-down bull rider turned skip tracer, hired to recover a stolen Rolls and a wedding ring worth more than his life. Three couples share one highway from Las Vegas to the sea. The bodies pile up between them.
“If you can’t find hell on earth, then you’re lost.” Gina, Days of Rain and Blood
Hewitt writes the desert the way a director shoots it. Cars appear and disappear in the heat. Las Vegas floats up out of the dark like mist. Motels, dry rivers, windmills, rain. The book has a tagline on its cover and it earns it: The good go to heaven. The bad come back to life.
The Trailer
A director’s novel deserved a director’s trailer. It was shot live, on location in LA, with actors, a camera crew, and Hewitt’s late German shepherd Achilles standing by. Hewitt sat for an on-camera interview during the shoot, and his voice runs through the piece the same way it runs through the novel: dry, unhurried, and certain about where the story is headed.
The look came straight from the prose. Hewitt’s Los Angeles is overexposed and gold. His desert is red at the edges. The trailer is graded to match, so that someone who watches it first and opens the book second lands in the same place.
“Don’t be scared, baby. We’re not going to live forever.” Gina, Days of Rain and Blood
Get the Book
Days of Rain and Blood by Rod Hewitt is available now from Fine Cut Press in hardcover, paperback, and ebook. Visit the book page at Fine Cut Press or buy it on Amazon. Follow Fine Cut Press on Instagram at @finecutpress for the rest of the Cottie and Gina campaign.
The trailer was produced by Film 14, which makes live-action book trailers, book teasers, author videos, and book launch kits. If your novel deserves the same treatment, tell us about it.
