A Capone Diaries Novella | Historical Fiction | Robert General
Before the headlines.
Before the myth.
Before Al Capone became a name America would never forget.
Alphonse Capone is fourteen years old, growing up in Brooklyn and trying to figure out where he belongs.
The son of Italian immigrants, Al is pulled between family, faith, friendship, first love, and the rules of a neighborhood already teaching him what strength costs. He wants what most boys his age want — to matter, to be seen, to become someone.
But belonging has a price, and he just doesn’t know yet what that becoming will demand.
Small choices begin to carry larger consequences. Loyalty gets complicated. Promises become harder to keep. And the boy behind the future legend begins testing the rules and relationships that will help shape the man he becomes.
Just… Call Me Al looks past the mythology to imagine the human being who came first—not the kingpin, not the caricature, but a restless Brooklyn kid whose story has not yet been written.
This is not the story of Al Capone the legend.
It is the story of Al before the world knew his name.
Written by Robert General, Just… Call Me Al is the opening story in Capone Diaries, a historical fiction series exploring the people, relationships, choices and consequences behind the public figure history remembers.
Published by Argo Media Arts.
BEYOND THE PAGE
The Capone Diaries did not begin as a book series.
It began on screen.
The project originated as From Capone, With Love, an award-winning television pilot screenplay built around a larger, multi-season vision of Al Capone’s life. Although the series was never produced, the story continued to grow — with more than five seasons of narrative mapped across the characters, relationships, conflicts, and historical events surrounding Capone’s rise and fall.
Rather than leave that world waiting for a green light, Robert General began rebuilding it through fiction.
That process became The Capone Diaries.
Just… Call Me Al is the entry point: the story of fourteen-year-old Al before the mythology takes hold. The first full-length novel, Kiss Brooklyn Goodbye, is complete and planned for release in 2027, with additional novels continuing the larger arc originally conceived for television.
The books are allowing that world to become deeper before it returns to the screen.
They can live intimately inside Al’s perspective — inside the private reasoning, relationships, contradictions, and small decisions that history will later reduce to headlines. They give characters room to breathe, relationships time to change, and consequences space to accumulate.
And the world surrounding Al grows with him.
Early-twentieth-century Brooklyn streets. Italian-American homes and neighborhoods. Churches, docks, shops, schoolyards, dance halls, back rooms. Family kitchens and neighborhood corners before they become historical locations.
Then the canvas expands.
Brooklyn gives way to Chicago. Family story collides with organized crime, politics, celebrity, violence, and a country transforming around the people living through it.
That evolution makes The Capone Diaries inherently cinematic.
But the opportunity is not simply period imagery or familiar gangster iconography.
It is the chance to watch history become history.
A Brooklyn street before anyone knows it matters.
A friendship before anyone understands where it will lead.
A young man making a choice without knowing what generations later will say about him.
That is why Argo approaches the property from the inside outward — beginning with people rather than legend.
The long-term vision is to return The Capone Diaries to television as a multi-season scripted series, now supported by fully realized novels, a richer narrative world, and the creative and producing relationships necessary to move the property toward production.
The television series will not simply duplicate the books.
The novels can bring us closer to Al.
Television can open the lens — allowing Mae, the Capone family, friends, rivals, neighborhoods, criminal organizations, political forces, and other characters to carry stories of their own across a much wider canvas.
That movement between forms is central to how Argo Media Arts thinks about intellectual property.
Development does not always move in a straight line.
A screenplay can become a novel.
A novel can deepen a television world.
A character discovered in prose can reshape a future scene.
Historical research can reveal an entirely new story thread.
And an idea that once waited for production can continue evolving until the right people and circumstances arrive.
The medium may change.
The story keeps developing.
For The Capone Diaries, that creates room for novels and novellas, multi-season television storytelling, character-focused companion stories, historical and visual development, concept work, and a continuing story world capable of growing across media.
But every version begins in the same place.
With the people.
The goal is not to reproduce the Al Capone audiences already think they know.
It is to make them temporarily forget that they know how the story ends.
Because before there was a legend, there was a boy, then a husband, a father, a friend, an enemy, and a man making decisions one day at a time.
Before there was a legend, there was a life.
And that life is still being written.
Psychological Thriller | Magdalena Adic
Screenplay Adaptation by Robert General
Some people collect objects.
Others collect the moments when people finally reveal who they are.
The Eye Collector is a psychological thriller about obsession, control, identity—and the disturbing intimacy of being watched.
The deeper its characters are drawn into the truth, the harder it becomes to know where observation ends and manipulation begins. Loyalties fracture. Perception becomes unreliable. And the distance between victim and participant begins to disappear.
At the heart of the story is a question more unsettling than the crimes themselves:
What happens when someone doesn't simply watch you—but studies you closely enough to know what you will do next?
The Eye Collector enters the darker territory beneath a conventional thriller, where understanding another person can become a form of possession and being truly seen may be more dangerous than being hidden.
Written by Magdalena Adić Turčin, The Eye Collector opens The Collector Series, followed by The Mirror Collector and the forthcoming The Echo Collector.
The property has already moved beyond the page. A feature-film screenplay adapted by Robert General is complete and the project is currently in development through Argo Media Arts, bringing the novel’s psychological tension, morally complex characters, and distinctive visual identity into a cinematic form.
You can hide from someone who is looking for you.
But what if they already know exactly where to look?
BEYOND THE PAGE
Some stories expand when they move into another medium.
Others reveal something that was there all along.
For Argo Media Arts, The Eye Collector belongs to the second group.
The Eye Collector is no longer simply a novel with screen potential.
Its feature-film screenplay is complete, and the project is currently in development through Argo Media Arts.
Adapted by Robert General from Magdalena Adić Turčin’s novel, the screenplay translates a story built through psychology, interiority, and the gradual erosion of certainty into a distinctly cinematic language.
The challenge was never simply to reproduce the novel’s events on screen.
It was to discover what cinema could reveal that prose expressed differently.
The novel creates its tension through psychology, interiority and the gradual erosion of certainty. On screen, those same ideas can live somewhere else—in a pause that lasts too long, a reflection that does not feel accidental, an empty room, an unanswered look, a detail the audience notices before the character does.
That translation is where adaptation becomes creative development rather than reproduction.
Robert General's screenplay adaptation takes Magdalena Adić Turčin's original story and asks a new question:
What can the audience see that the reader was once allowed to think?
That shift opens an entirely new visual language for the property.
Eyes. Glass. Reflections. Darkness. Surveillance. Fire. Evidence. Empty spaces. Images that can mean one thing when first encountered and something very different once the truth begins to surface.
These elements are not decoration around the story.
They are part of how the story thinks.
And The Eye Collector is only the beginning.
The world continues through The Mirror Collector and the forthcoming The Echo Collector, allowing characters, consequences and unanswered questions to evolve rather than simply reset with each new story.
That creates opportunities across novels, feature-film development, visual concept work, cinematic teasers, character-driven material and the continuing expansion of The Collector Series as a psychological story world.
Argo's role is not simply to move the same story from one format into another. It is to identify what each medium can reveal that the previous one could not. The novel can enter a character's mind. The screen can make us afraid of what is standing just outside the frame. Visual development can establish a world before a single scene is filmed. Each form adds something. None should dilute what made the story distinctive in the first place.
Character first. Atmosphere second. Spectacle only when the story earns it.
The ambition is larger than adapting a thriller. It is to build a psychological world audiences can recognize, enter and continue following — one in which seeing clearly does not necessarily mean understanding what you see.
The book opened the door.
Beyond the page, we discover what was waiting on the other side.