Renée Rosen's "Windy City Blues"

Renée Rosen is the bestselling author of White Collar Girl, What The Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age and Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties as well as the young adult novel, Every Crooked Pot.

Here Rosen shares some casting ideas for an adaptation of her, new novel Windy City Blues:

This is tough because of Cadillac Records, the 2008 biopic about Chess Records starring Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, Beyoncé as Etta James, Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, Columbus Short as Little Walter, Eamonn Walker as Howlin’ Wolf, and Mos Def as Chuck Berry. They were a great ensemble for that film. Their performances, both musical and acting would be hard to top. The only problem as I see it, is that the story wasn’t all there.

Windy City Blues goes deeper into the Chess story and adds in some fictional characters in order to tell the Civil Rights story, which was a huge part of the equation. So to that end, I’ll serve up a few additional actors of my own.

A young Barbra Streisand would be a perfect Leeba Groski.

Lenny Kravitz would be an interesting pick for Red Dupree.

Viola Davis would make a splendid Alieen Booker