Guest Columnist Scott Rosenberg on October Road's True Story
You can check out new episodes of Scott Rosenberg's October Road on Mondays at 10 pm/ET on ABC.
It was one of the worst winters in New England and I had retreated to the house I grew up in, some 20 miles outside of Boston, to lick my wounds over the dissolution of a seven-year relationship with my girlfriend, Trish. I had decided to write a script. I would call it Beautiful Girls, and I would base it entirely on my friends from home. These guys, my high school crew, had largely remained in our hometown, and most of them were landscapers, snowplow drivers and construction workers. I went so far as to use their actual nicknames. I was hoping my chums would see the movie as a valentine to them; to their myriad struggles; to their noble work ethic; to their histories, with all of their Springsteenian flourishes. And they di
