Catch author Sandra Brown’s ‘White Hot’ moment

Maybe Sandra Brown should stick to her day job.

The bestselling author took a few baby steps as an actress recently, making a walk-on appearance in a movie called Sandra Brown’s White Hot — and she literally stumbled her way through the scene.

“It was just three seconds,” Brown says. “If you blink, you miss it. It was a scene in the restaurant. My husband Michael and I walk right past the camera.

“They had a temporary floor down and, on the first take, the toe of my shoe caught on the plywood. I nearly went sprawling into the camera. The director was like, ‘OK, we’ll do that one over.’

“And all I could say was, ‘It seems I’ve forgotten how to walk.’ ”

White Hot, which is based on Brown’s 2004 thriller, premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel.

It stars Shenae Grimes-Beech (formerly of 90210), Sean Faris (Pretty Little Liars) and John Schneider (The Dukes of Hazzard).

Brown, who lives in Arlington, has written 67 New York Times bestselling novels and has more than 80 million copies of her books in print. Yet this is only the fourth title of hers to be adapted for the screen.

“I have had a lot more than that optioned over the years, some for feature films, some for TV, various networks,” Brown says. “But for whatever reasons — and it usually had nothing to do with me or the material — the movies never wound up getting made.

“When you consider all the obstacles that get in the way, it’s amazing any movie ever gets made.”

But this one, in which Brown gets an executive producer credit, was meant to be.

It started with a typical pitch meeting: Jim Head, a producer who has brought two other Brown books to TV (Smoke Screen, in 2010, and Ricochet, in 2011), was having lunch with Michelle Vicary, Hallmark’s executive vice president of programming.

Their conversation went a little something like this:

“She said, ‘We’re wanting to get some different material. If we could get somebody like a Sandra Brown …’ He asked, ‘What would you say if I get you THE Sandra Brown?’ That’s when she opened her briefcase to show she had a copy of one of my books with her. She said, ‘I am her biggest fan!’ ”

That’s the definition of a motivated buyer.

White Hot is the story of Sayre Hoyle (Grimes-Beech), a San Francisco interior designer who returns to her Louisiana hometown after her brother’s death. Sayre moved away 10 years earlier, cutting all ties to her windbag father, Huff (Schneider), a corrupt factory owner who runs the town with an iron fist.

Sayre soon suspects the police chief is wrong when he says the death was accidental. She proceeds to turn the town upside-down — sifting through a mountain of secrets and lies — while Huff’s dreamboat lawyer, Beck Merchant (Faris), sometimes offers assistance and sometimes gets in her way.

Needless to say (because this is a Sandra Brown story), Sayre and Beck throw off white-hot romantic sparks. It gets steamy and sweaty at times. Never mind the fact that the summer-in-southern-Louisiana tale was actually filmed in Vancouver in winter.

White Hot differs from the usual Hallmark movie offering in many ways.

For starters, Brown’s story is grittier than the “cozy” mysteries that typically air on the network. In fact, the book’s violent ending had to be toned down.

“The network wants to be edgier, so they can bring in younger viewers,” Brown says. “But there were elements of the story that they would not touch with a 10-foot pole — and I can’t blame them — because the last thing they want to do is alienate the core audience.”

White Hot also breaks the mold in that Hallmark movies typically celebrate familial love and small-town values. In this story, family and small-town life turn out to be anything but desirable.

Brown — whose next book, titled Sting, comes out Aug. 16 — can’t say enough good things about the cast.

“Shenae is very petite, but when she gets in some of those scenes, she brings a lot of heft to the role,” Brown says. “Sean was great, too. And they both are absolutely gorgeous.

“And I was thrilled to have John Schneider. He was the perfect Huff. He had the chops to play that character so well.”

Brown also marveled at the army of behind-the-scenes types who kept the production running smoothly.

“I work with many talented people on every book, but much of the time it’s just me at a keyboard,” she says. “So it amazes me every time watching how many people it takes to make a movie.”

This story was originally published April 13, 2016 at 12:05 PM with the headline "Catch author Sandra Brown’s ‘White Hot’ moment."