Caught on Film

Brandon Newman, the only child to survive the Oklahoma City bombing and now the latest box office heartthrob, has his pick of the best scripts in Hollywood, but the part he wants most is the one he can’t have—the troubled teenage misfit famously banned from the big screen by the late J.D. Salinger. Determined to outwit and outhustle a legal trust charged with enforcing the author’s copyright, Brandon plots an illicit, underground production with the help of an unlikely band of coconspirators, including a bar owner he met in rehab, a precocious prep-school teenager, and a doomsday-prepping mobster. Driven by a profound sense of brotherhood and a conviction that Salinger’s book belongs to the world, he dismisses red-alert risks to his fame, his fortune, and even his life as he chases his dream from the backstreets of Brooklyn to the shores of Sag Harbor to the steps of federal court. Although Brandon ultimately finds himself in a seemingly no-win position between the FBI and the mafia, the greatest threat to his well-being turns out to be a missed connection so unexpected it causes him to question the roots of his dream and to ask whether it is the success of his project that he should fear most.