E-Mail This Article to a Friend ON THE DARK SIDE Newton’s Dana Adam Shapiro on succeeding as a college dropout BY DEIRDRE FULTON

Growing up in Newton, Dana Adam Shapiro had a rather normal upbringing. "I didn’t really experience all that much of a dark side," the author and filmmaker recalls on the phone one afternoon from New York City, where he now lives. "My family is kind of ... nice." But Shapiro found himself peering beneath the suburban veneer. "I would always imagine the darkness," he says, "because it wasn’t there."

This month, Shapiro’s fascination with the dark side will show up in two impressive debuts: his book, The Every Boy (Houghton Mifflin), and his award-winning movie, Murderball (THINKFilm).

These days, he jets between movie premieres and book signings (with two Sundance Film Festival prizes, including the 2005 Audience Award, under his belt), and is adapting The Every Boy into a "coming-of-age suburban gothic" screenplay slated to be made into a movie by Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company. It’s therefore safe to say that Shapiro’s life has become far from normal.

All this from a guy who didn’t graduate from college, and to this day considers himself lazy. "I kind of fucked off the last semester, and planned on maybe cleaning up the mess at some point," he says of his time in the mid 1990s at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Instead, he met 24-year-old David Getson, who in 1997 was about to launch Icon Thoughtstyle magazine. (Icon, tailored to successful 24- to 34-year-old men, profiled successful business, political, and entertainment figures.) Shapiro — who had never taken a journalism class — showed Getson a sample story "about a college senior who kills a skinhead with an icicle," and got hired.

At Icon, Shapiro wrote his first pieces about independent filmmaker John Cassavetes and O.J. Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey. Later, he made waves with an 11-page profile of Johnny Depp that riled Depp’s publicist and agent (out of 6000 words, according to a New York–magazine gossip item at the time, Shapiro used only 19 to talk about Depp’s new movie, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). When the fledgling print publication Icon fell victim to Internet competition in 2000, Shapiro was hired to edit the non-music features at Spin magazine. After two years, he left Spin to work simultaneously on the book and the movie.

"These were not ideas that were cheered on pretty much by anybody," the 31-year-old admits of the two projects. "So the fact that even one of them got made is shocking. The fact that both got made and they’re both coming out ... is very, very strange."

On the surface, they’re drastically different endeavors. The book is a quirky coming-of-age tale that begins with a 15-year-old boy’s death, and goes on to tell the stories of his young life and loves. The movie is a real-life adventure that follows several quadriplegic rugby players through two years of triumphs and challenges.

But even between fictional suburban kids and real-life quadriplegics, there are common themes. Both stories reckon with the tension between the superficial and what’s inside. Shapiro acknowledges an affinity, on display in both projects, for "things that you would either stare at or look away from." And The Every Boy is a fast-paced 211 pages; Murderball packs two years of footage into 86 minutes. "Maybe my attention span’s just short," Shapiro suggests. But a more believable explanation is that his style (and journalistic background) doesn’t allow for much meandering.

"Murderball is not a film about quadriplegia," he explains. "It’s very much about these quadriplegics. It’s a very story-driven, character-driven film. Likewise the book. It’s all basically the same thing — storytelling."

Dana Adam Shapiro will read from The Every Boy at the Brookline Booksmith on July 18. Murderball hits Boston theaters July 22 (check Phoenix listings for times and locations).