9/8/2023 2 Comments Was man on fire a true storyThere was one person who I didn't quote in the book, who said to me, "Don't put this in your book, but I kind of miss the arsons because I really felt like my life meant something at that time because I really felt like I knew what my community needed from me and I could do that in a really tangible way." And so one of the things that I hadn't expected to find was how, while the community was being burned down, the community was also knitting itself together in really close and unexpected and kind of lovely ways, too. Although the book was adapted into an earlier film version in 1987, the presence of Denzel Washington in the central role gives the narrative an edge in the adaptation. Some people had the advantage of hindsight, so some people were sort of philosophical and sort of circumspect about it. Directed by Tony Scott, the 2004 action thriller movie ‘Man on Fire’ is based on the eponymous novel by A. It took me a couple of years to report this. On how the fires brought the community together night after night?" So I think there really was a sense of betrayal, and rightfully so. Why are you doing this thing that's calling us out of bed every night at 3 a.m. You know that all of us are pulling double shifts at the chicken factory, or we're working ourselves to the bone already. But there still was a sense of, especially among firefighters, "You knew us. In a lot of ways, people always assumed it would be one of their own because the idea was this place is in the middle of nowhere why would an outsider drive here just to burn it down? So I think in some ways it wasn't a surprise that the person lived there. On how locals responded when they learned the fires were set by one of their own So it wasn't that the county became this desolate place, but it just became a different place, and it became a place that represented what America used to look like and then what a lot of it looks like now. People were driving their cars, and if you're driving your cars, you don't go through Accomack. Science Arson Forensics Sets Old Fire Myths AblazeĪnd then, you know, trucks came along. That is not usually what happens in cases of arson, and I wanted to know what had gone wrong in their relationship to change it from this sort of simple, hopeful love story to a night where two folks would get in a minivan, drive around town, stop at Walmart and then go burn down some buildings. You know, that's what first drew me to write the long article that I did to begin with, because when the arsonists were arrested and it was a man and a woman and they were engaged and they were in love - that's really weird. On what Smith and Bundick's relationship was likeĬombustible. And so you couldn't ask for a more epic human experience than everything that was wrapped up in this story for me. over the course of five months it had a community that was in a panic it had the setting of a place that used to be the richest rural county in all of the United States and has now fallen into disrepair, which is the reason they had all of these abandoned buildings to begin with.
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