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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Leonard’s fans tend to stay the course

American Libraries
Bill Ott
Happy Birthday, Dutch

Elmore Leonard’s friends call him Dutch. Many of his fans do, too, and while using a nickname presumes a degree of familiarity to which those of us who only know Leonard through his books aren’t entitled, we can’t help ourselves. We feel like we know him. Leonard’s fans tend to stay the course; his 44th book, Djibouti, will be published in October, and I’m confident I’m not alone among his devotees in being able to say that I’ve read them all. So while I would never drop “Dutch” into cocktail conversation, I’m not above referring to him that way in those one-on-one conversations I imagine us having.

On October 11, Leonard will celebrate his 85th birthday. He has been a professional writer for 60 of those 85 years. He came up the old-fashioned way, through the pulps. While working for a Detroit advertising agency in the 1950s, Leonard wrote western stories. In 1961, he tried writing full-time but was forced to take freelance advertising jobs to pay the bills. (Along with 44 published books, Leonard has accumulated more than 100 rejections in his writing life—but none lately.) In 1969, he published his first crime novel, The Big Bounce, and began selling screenplays to Hollywood (more than 30 of his novels and stories have been turned into movies). It wasn’t until the 1980s, though, that Leonard finally broke through: In 1984, LaBrava won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and the next year Glitz hit the New York Times bestseller list, where many of Leonard’s succeeding books have also found homes.

Although he’s written in many styles and genres, his work more or less falls into three camps: the westerns (including 3:10 to Yuma); the gritty, noir-tinged crime novels, set mainly in Detroit and written in the 1970s (City Primeval may be the best); and the freewheeling caper novels, which have ranged across the country and, recently, the globe. It was in the caper novels—Stick, Pronto, and Get Shorty are my favorites—where the signature Leonard style flourished: comedy threatening to turn tragic as wonderfully idiosyncratic characters try to scratch itches they can’t quite reach.

And what of Leonard’s latest, number 44, which is about a documentary filmmaker in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa (“the gateway to Islam . . . or the backdoor to the West”) to shoot a film about Somalian pirates? He may be 85, but Leonard remains in top form, combining his characteristic flourishes—the back-and-forth banter, always oozing wit but never too smart for the room; the always-startling juxtaposition of the comic ordinariness of daily life against bursts of graphic violence—with a superbly clever bit of storytelling in which most of the action takes place in the past, as the filmmaker and her assistant view film and decide how to structure their documentary.

Mike Lupica once said that “the next best thing to reading Elmore Leonard is re-reading him.” I couldn’t agree more. Someday, after I retire from Booklist, I plan to re-read the entire oeuvre, starting at the beginning and working my way through however many there are at that point.

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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Justified: Portrait of a 21st Century Lawman

Critics at Large
Mark Clamen

There are some TV shows that come out of the gate with such polish and promise that from the very first episode you know you’re watching something special. Justified is one of those shows. Based on Elmore Leonard’s 2002 short story “Fire in the Hole,” Justified premiered on the FX network on March 16th, ran for 13 episodes, and ended with an explosive season finale on June 8th. Already, it’s shaping up to be one of FX’s most consistently solid series since The Shield. A second season has been ordered for 2011. (It airs on Super Channel HD in Canada.)

Read the rest here.

 

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Friday, August 20, 2010

Djibouti Dust Jacket Cover and Review

Publisher’s Weekly Blog
Galley of the Day: Djibouti, by Elmore Leonard
Jonathan Segura—August 20th, 2010

Surely I’ll die before I’m 85, but, if not, I hope to be half as together as Elmore Leonard. His 90-millionth novel, Djibouti, pubs in a couple of months–our review hits Monday–and is a big departure for a guy who’s built his estimable career on westerns and straight-up capers. It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines pirate novel set on the horn of Africa, and it’s the best thing he’s done since The Hot Kid. Yeah, it’s got that trademark Leonard dialogue, diamond-sharp prose stripped of pretension and adverbs, and a ripping plot–but it also has khat-chewing pirates and an east Texas gajillionaire who travels the world packing an elephant gun.
And when people ask you what you’re reading, you get to say, “Djibouti,” which is way cooler than saying, like everyone else on the F train, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Try it. It’s nice. Djibouti.

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Elmore Visits the Set of The Double

photo by Ron Phillips

Elmore visited his new friends, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, director and writer of The Double, shooting this night in Northville, Michigan.  That’s Michael on the left, Elmore, Richard Gere and Derek Haas.

If the names sound familiar, Brandt and Haas wrote the remake of 3:10 to Yuma.

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Sunday, August 15, 2010

Karen Sisco Forever!

It’s a damn shame that Karen Sisco didn’t make it.  The network pulled the plug just as it was getting good.  Show a little love for Karen Sisco.

The opening of the Sisco pilot, based on Elmore’s short story, “Karen Makes Out.”

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Elmore on Politically Incorrect

Sometime in the late 90s.

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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Moonshine War Mini-Documentary

Thanks to Robb for finding this on YouTube, a little mini-documentary the THE MOONSHINE WAR made by the production company, Milo Films.  Can you spot Elmore roaming around the set?

In this comedy drama set during the late Prohibition era, a federal agent attempts to make some real money before the alcohol ban is lifted. He sets his sights on the whiskey cache of an old army buddy, but just before they strike a deal, two ex-convicts frighten the buddy away. The creeps then murder the town sheriff and his deputy and begin looking to get a hold of the moonshine. The agent decides to help his friend defeat the thugs. One of the crooks ends up killing the agent and taking four locals hostage. In exchange for their lives, he wants all the whiskey. The moonshiner acquiesces and tells him that the booze is stashed in a graveyard. The greedy crook races off and begins digging. Unfortunately instead of hooch, he finds dynamite and blows himself up. To celebrate his death and the end of Prohibition, the town decides to have a blow-out of their own. Naturally the buddy provides the booze. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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Sunday, August 08, 2010

Tarantino’s Angst:  Jackie Brown and its worried-man blues

LA WEEKLY
By Karina Longworth

A film built around ticking clocks, perhaps it’s fitting that Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown today plays as a time capsule — but of which time? Dialogue indicates it’s set in 1995, a date with which the lax LAX airport security, baroque beeper dialing instructions and scene set in Sam Goody would seem to be of a piece. But within the confines of relative realism (this may be the least cartoonish film to which Tarantino has signed his name), the writer/director plays with temporal and factual detail. The shopping complex that serves as the stage for the film’s central action is introduced with a title card: “Del Amo Mall — the largest indoor mall in the world.” In reality, the Del Amo Fashion Center (it was renamed in 1981) surrendered its bragging rights to the Mall of America in 1992. With this overstatement, Jackie’s food-court chain smoking (which would have been outlawed by the statewide smoking ban of January 1995) and the invention of a department store called Billingsley to house the central caper, the filmmaker incorporates this real L.A. location into his own unmistakable body of myth.

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Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Jonathan Storm: FX series “Justified” on target with audiences and critics

Philadelphia Inquirer
By Jonathan Storm
Inquirer Television Critic
Inquirer television critic Jonathan Storm is reporting this week from the television critics’ press tour in Beverly Hills. These items originally appeared in his blog, “Eye of the Storm,” at http://www.philly.com/ philly/blogs/storm.

Justified hits the FX bull’s-eyes - however many of them there might be.

“It’s hard to hit both targets,” FX chief John Landgraf told TV critics Tuesday morning at their summer meeting - and then listed three.

“We’re always trying to make very commercial, very entertaining, very popular shows,” he said. (One target.)

“We try to take familiar genres and treat them very differently, with our own style.” (That’s another.) “Justified is our try to do a Western,” Landgraf said, citing Western heroes from Gary Cooper to John Wayne. “We want to deconstruct that hero over time.”

Based on a character created by Elmore Leonard, Justified stars Timothy Olyphant as a decidedly unheroic U.S. marshal working in the back hollows of Kentucky (that’s sure a different spot to have a Western), with a delightful cast of lowlife criminals. Olyphant is just super with his big white hat and distinctively self-assured gait.

“A lot of people really got what we were trying to do,” Landgraf said. “It got the best premiere numbers we’ve ever done and held beautifully throughout the season.”

And the show, like so much of the fare on FX, was embraced not only by the audience but by critics (third target), most of whom can’t stop raving about the series.

More and more movie stars are gravitating to TV, Landgraf said. “I think it has become almost a status symbol for an actor to have a cable show.”

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Saturday, July 31, 2010

Booklist Review of Djibouti - “Marvelous entertainment.”

Booklist
Bill Ott

At age 85, crime fiction grand master Leonard remains in top form.  He has a new subject—Somalian pirates—but the signature Leonard elements remain in place and are shining as brightly as ever; the back-and-forth banter, always oozing wit but never too smart for the room; the cast of wonderfully idiosyncratic characters, each capable of a star turn; the always startling juxtaposition of the mundane against the violent.  This time mixed in with all that, Leonard gives us one of the trickiest plots and cleverest turns of storytelling.  Dara Barr is an award winning documentary filmmaker, recently arrived in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa (the gateway to Islam…or the back door to the West.”) to film Somalian pirates in action.  With her assistant, a 72-year-old sailor named Xavier, Dara armed with a concealed “spy camera,” sets off onboard the Buster in search of pirates.  She finds plenty, but she and Xavier also land in the middle of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a tanker loaded with liquefied natural gas.  Portions of the tale are related in real time, but much of the narration comes in the form of Dara and Xavier viewing film of what’s already happened and debating how to structure the film.  This curious dramatic technique works magnificently, taking you inside the characters in a way that straight, action-oriented narration could never do.  Leonard never tells a story in the expected way, but this time he outdoes himself.  Marvelous entertainment.

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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

What is the Best Elmore Leonard Film?

You can just mention the title if you want, but we want to know why a particular film is the best.

Is it just a good film on its own merits?

Is it a good Elmore Leonard adaptation.

Do you just like a particular actor or actress?

I’m sure you will have more reasons.

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Friday, July 23, 2010

Flying ‘Sparks’

Back Stage Blog Stage
BYLINE: Jenelle
(Nielsen Business Media)—

I was finally able to see the short film “Sparks” that Gordon-Levitt premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.  The film is only available on the Wholphin No. 9 DVD, which I managed to get through Netflix.  Based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, “Sparks” is a really fun and original piece of filmmaking starring Eric Stoltz as a man investigating a failed rocked star (the excellent Carla Gugino) who may have burned her own house down.

I learned about the film when I recently interviewed Gordon-Levitt, and he explained that he met Elmore Leonard’s granddaughter when he was shooting the film “Killshot,” based on a novel by the author. “She wanted to adapt this short story of his and asked me if I wanted to direct it. It was perfect because the material was solid, I didn’t have to second-guess myself on any of that.” While he says he identified with both characters, he intentionally didn’t want to make a particularly personal film. “I’m glad that on my first try as a director I didn’t try to plumb the depths of myself, because it was such a learning experience. Having done it now, I feel ready to do something more personal.”

Gordon-Levitt has a real eye behind the camera; “Sparks” is a visually striking film—bright and colorful—with sharp dialogue and some creative staging that I highly recommend. He also gets great performances out of his two leads. Most of all, the film begs the question: why isn’t Gugino a bigger star?

—Jenelle Riley

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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Is E-Book Sales Milestone Worth Cheering?

Deadline.Com
By MIKE FLEMING

Amazon.com is crowing that for the first time, its e-book sales volume has surpassed hardcovers. Am I the only one who sees this as an apocalyptic sign for the great pleasure of book reading? Amazon’s basing its assertion on sales figures for the last three months, when buyers were lining their Amazon Kindles with summer beach reading. Amazon chief Jeffrey Bezos marvels that the milestone is more remarkable given that Amazon has only been selling e-books 33 months, as opposed to the 15 years it has been moving hardcovers. A report on the milestone in The New York Times indicates that within the next decade, less than 25% of books sold will be in print.

As for e-books, I’ll give the last word to Elmore Leonard, who’s still cranking out his customary 3 to 4 pages each day from 10-6, even as he prepares to turn 85. “To me, a book is a book, an electronic device is not, and love of books was the reason I started writing,” Leonard told me recently. “I don’t have a word processor, e-mail, any of that stuff. I write in longhand mostly, then put it on my typewriter as I go along. I don’t have any interest in any of that electronic stuff, but I’m going on 85, and won’t have to worry about it too much longer.”

What about the rest of us, Elmore?

Read the rest of the story here.

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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

New Elmore Leonard novel in 84 Days

From the HarperCollins catalog:

Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker, is at the top of her game. She’s covered Bosnian women, Neo-Nazis and post-Katrina New Orleans (for which she won an Oscar), but now she’s looking for an even bigger challenge. So she and her right-hand-man - a 6-foot-six, 72-year-old, African-American name Xavier - head to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa to tackle modern-day pirates. Once they start filming though, they find a whole lot more than they bargained for. They quickly learn that almost nobody in Djibouti is what he seems. A whole mob of colourful characters patrols the surrounding seas, including a pirate chief who keeps a BMW in Djibouti and a cultured Saudi diplomat with dubious connections. There’s a billionaire American who plays different roles as the moods strike him. He loves champagne and firing his 600-calibre elephant gun. If his girlfriend Helene gets seasick or bored, he won’t marry her. And there’s an Al Qaeda terrorist from Miami with very lofty ambitions, who wants to blow up something big. What Dara and Xavier don’t know is which guy is going to get the prize - and what they’ll have to do if they want it.

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Saturday, July 17, 2010

EXCLUSIVE - Elmore’s Chapter in Naked Came the Manatee

From Amazon:

Originally published as a serial novel in the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine, Naked Came the Manatee resembles a literary game of telephone, with each writer contributing a chapter and passing it on to the next, who then makes the most of what he or she is given. The result is a novel with wildly fluctuating styles and more crazy plot curves than a daytime drama, but thanks to these 13 masters of the craft this roller coaster of a book is almost as much fun to read as it obviously was to write.—

Dave Barry starts the madness in Naked Came the Manatee, introducing a 102-year-old environmentalist named Coconut Grove and a manatee saddled with one of Barry’s favorite monikers, Booger. Carl Hiaasen closes down the party, and in between, 11 of Florida’s literati, including Elmore Leonard, John Dufresne, and Edna Buchanan, make twisted offerings to the affair: three severed heads, all bearing a remarkable resemblance to Fidel Castro; four murders; some sex; some espionage; even an appearance by Jimmy Carter and one by Castro himself.

Elmore’s chapter, The Odyssey, pays as little attention possible to this rambling compilation.  His is the second to last chapter and a little gem of a story on its own.  Brought to you here for the first time.

JOE SERENO CAUGHT the Odyssey night clerk as he was going off: prissy guy, had his lunch box under his arm.

“I saw it this morning on TV,” Joe said. “So there was a lot of excitement, huh? I thought the cops’d still be here, at least the crime scene guys. I guess they’ve all cleared out.

You hear the shots? You must’ve.”

“I was in the office,” the night guy said.

Joe wondered how this twink knew he was in the office at the exact time the shots were fired. What’d he think, it was soundproof in there? But the cops no doubt had asked him that, so Joe let it pass and said, “it was the two guys in one‑oh‑five, wasn’t it?”

Read the Odyssey.

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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Elmore at Butler University on Dec. 6.

On Jan 6, Elmore will give a lecture at part of Butler University’s Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers series.

For a full schedule for the series, call 940-9861.

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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The Strand Magazine Award (Video)

Elmore Leonard receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Strand Magazine, Wednesday, July 7, 2010 at the Midtown Executive Club in Manhattan.  Standing next to Elmore is Andrew F. Gulli, Managing Editor of The Strand Magazine.  http://www.strandmag.com/

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Friday, July 09, 2010

Elmore Wins Lifetime Achievement Award from The Strand Magazine

Otto Penzler introduced the lifetime achievement award honoree Elmore Leonard. Leonard who has been described as the greatest living American crime writer has authored scores of novels, screenplays and short stories. Leonard thanked the judges and paid tribute to many of the writers who influenced him.

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Rum’s Punch

Elmore and I don’t agree with Julia’s assessment of Jackie Brown, in fact, we think the total opposite!  Jackie Brown was the truest of all adaptations.  But what the hey, have a rum punch!

Newsweek
BYLINE: By Julia Reed

Several years ago, when Quentin Tarantino made Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch into a film called Jackie Brown, it captured almost none of the book’s genius. Leonard’s work is deceptively multilayered, full of mood and pitch-perfect rhythm and action that seems entirely unforced. Most important, there’s never been an Elmore Leonard novel that contains a single thing it shouldn’t.

The latter, especially, could not be said of the appalling mixtures that lately constitute an actual rum punch, which, when crafted as meticulously as the work of my hero, can offer the same restorative—if slightly off-kilter—faith in the generally entertaining reliability of even the darkest sides of human nature, especially in these hot summer months. Too often, people make like Tarantino and show off by trying out not-quite-successful retro references (think ceramic pineapples or paper umbrellas) or adding such heavy-handed ingredients as limeade and cranberry-juice cocktail.

Now food historian Jessica Harris has stepped in with Rum Drinks, a book that reminds us that rum punch is as old as rum itself, a strong quaff perfect “for a world that required a little muting around the edges,” specifically the brutal culture of the sugar-cane-growing islands of the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries. By the 1600s, the per capita intake of Barbados was 10 gallons, much of it (by the ruling classes, at least) in the form of planter’s punch, in which individual planters would offset rum’s original oiliness by mixing it with cane syrup, citrus juice, and a touch of island spice.

After Facundo Bacardi figured out how to refine rum, the newly smooth beverage could be made into elegant daiquiris, including Hemingway’s favorite, the Papa Doble (a double shot of white rum with grapefruit juice as well as lime), but also blended with a variety of canned and bottled ingredients, which is where the trouble began. Thankfully, Harris’s 50 recipes are for proper cocktails and punches, including those with at least two different rums. “What sets rum apart from other spirits is that it likes to be mixed with itself,” says mixologist Dale DeGroff, whose planter’s punch includes light and dark rums and is “rosied up” with grenadine. Like Harris’s book, it’s a reminder of days past—which weren’t always exactly rosy. Rum fueled the transatlantic slave trade for more than 300 years, a pirate gave Captain Morgan Rum its name, and Churchill once dismissed British naval traditions as “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” But therein lies another of rum’s twisted pleasures—it has the kind of history to which a Leonard character could easily relate.

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Thursday, July 08, 2010

Justified Emmy Nomination for “Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music”

Congratulations to Rench and Tone-Z of Gangstagrass for the Emmy nomination for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music for their track “Long Hard Times To Come”.

In receiving the nomination, Rench said:

“I am excited that Justified is getting recognized with an Emmy nomination for having a great theme song. The show took a leap and used Gangstagrass, and it is great to see them rewarded for taking a chance on something creative and unusual. T.O.N.E-z and I are still in shock that we are Emmy nominated.”
- Oscar “Rench” Owens

“I was happy to hear that the Main Title music from Justified was nominated,” said Elmore.  The music of Gangstagrass really captures the mood of the show.  Congratulations to Rench and T.O.N.E.-z.  I will be rooting for them.”

Click below for the lyrics to “Long Hard Times To Come”.

 

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Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Will Graham and Tim Get Emmy Nominations Thursday? (We Think So)

FilmReview Online.Com

The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
BYLINE: Alex Strachan, Canwest News Service

The Emmy nominations are announced Thursday.
—-
Brace yourself for a season of firsts. The Emmys have been accused in the past of rewarding the same faces in the same programs, but when this year’s nominations are announced Thursday, there may be a sea of new names and fresh faces among the old familiars.

That’s because, for the first time in years, new comedies and dramas have asserted themselves on prime-time TV’s small screen. When the Emmys themselves are handed out Aug. 29, weeks earlier than usual, Emmy voters may still prove to be mad for Mad Men and perennial comedy winner 30 Rock. This time, though, the attention will be focused on the nominations as never before.

First-time nominees on the drama side may include Justified’s Timothy Olyphant, who has earned stellar reviews in the first-year thriller from author Elmore Leonard and Canadian writer-director Graham Yost

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Sunday, July 04, 2010

The Western Novels of Elmore Leonard

Elmore wrote nine westerns between 1953 and 1998.  Four were published in the 1950s, (The Bounty Hunters, The Law at Randado
, Escape from Five Shadows
 and Last Stand at Saber River
.) ,

One in the Sixties, (Hombre). Three in the Seventies (Valdez Is Coming
, Forty Lashes Less One
 and Gunsights), and one in the late Nineties, (Cuba Libre.)

Technically, Cuba Libre is a historical novel, but Elmore describes it as a “tropical western”.

Read about Elmore’s Westerns below.

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Friday, July 02, 2010

Justified: “where extended chit-chats erupt into very violent conclusions”

The Straits Times (Singapore)
BYLINE: tay yek keak, couch grouch

You do know we’re not allowed to shoot people on sight anymore?’ US marshal Raylan Givens (Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant) is reminded in the justifiably compelling Justified.

The man is a walking anachronism, a cowboy from the Wild West, transplanted to his rural, redneck hometown in Kentucky to take the heat off after shooting a bad guy too publicly in swanky Miami.

The place, though, is full of talkative baddies whose primary function is to provide a sounding board and a target board for the lawman to fire off both his gun and his mouth.

Welcome to a, well, new kind of talk show as detailed by Elmore Leonard, America’s premier crime fiction writer of the black-comedy genre, where extended chit-chats erupt into very violent conclusions.

The South loves yarn spinners and people continue talking here even when there is a bullet in their belly.

Based on Leonard’s (Be Cool) short story, Fire In The Hole, this series is great for viewers who like their drama to go with a drawl, draw of guns and inhabitants drawn in gritty, funny arsenic doses.

Leonard’s penchant is to look at the underbelly of the underbelly, where crooks, fugitives, racists, goons and inbred lowlife live to give the upright marshal a kind of urbane-exterminator aura as he saunters in with his cowboy hat, badge and a gun in his hip holster.

The marshal is forceful but reasonable, polite with escape-clause choices which nobody seems to take up.
‘Second option, next time I see you I kill you,’ he recommends.

Boy, how times have changed since Dennis Weaver’s urban cowboy McCloud ambled into New York City in the 1970s.

The modern world is lined with all sorts of crass complexities, and Olyphant is a thoughtful, laconic Clint Eastwood of genteel mannerisms until his ungentle manners explode.

He has an ex-wife and an outlaw father to mull over.

Here is a fresh character of such movie-sized proportions it tells you that TV is now the best home for scriptwriters.

Which other show can give you darkly comic philosophy on the go before a dumb blaze of glory?

‘When you shot the thug in Miami, was there food on the table like this?’ a villain asks at the dining table before the shooting starts.
Southern hospitality, I tell you, has never looked this good.

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Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Emmy Nominations for Justified?

We’ll know soon enough.

The 2010 Prime Time Emmy voting ended yesterday and in a little over a week, on July 8, the nominations will be anounced live from the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre at the TV academy’s headquarters in North Hollywood.  The Emmy broadcast is on August 29.

FX is promoting these nominations.

OUTSTANDING DRAMA SERIES
Graham Yost, Executive Producer
Elmore Leonard, Executive Producer
Carl Beverly, Executive Producer
Sarah Timmerman, Executive Producer
Michael Dinner, Executive Producer
Fred Golan, Co-Executive Producer
Don Kurt, Producer
Gary Lennon, Producer

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES
Timothy Olyphant as “Raylan Givens”

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES
Erica Tazel as Rachel Brooks”
Joelle Carter as Ava Crowder”
Natalie Lea as “Winona Hawkins”

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES
Nick Searcy as ‘Art Mullen”
Jacob Pitts as “Tim Gutterson”

OUTSTANDING GUEST ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES
Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder”
Raymond J. Barry as “Arlo Givens”
Alan Ruck as “Roland Pike”

OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR A DRAMA SERIES
Graham Yost “Fire In The Hole”

OUTSTANDING DIRECTING FOR A DRAMA SERIES
Michael Dinner “Fire In The Hole”

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Sunday, June 27, 2010

Walton Goggins and Ray McKinnon’s Award Winning Short Film

 

Fans of Justified know Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s alter-ego nemesis from Harlan, Kentucky, the guy he dug coal with as a boy.  Devotees of The Shield remember him as the wildly entertaining Detective Shane Vendrell.  But did you know that Walton Goggins and his creative partner, Ray McKinnon won an Academy Award in 2001, for the live action short, The Accountant?  Walton produced and acted in the film; Ray wrote and directed, as well as playing the role of The Accountant.  Walton and Ray also collaborated on two other features,  Randy and the Mob and Chrystal.

The Accountant is a must see.

Check Out the Website for The Accountant.

The 2001 Academy Award Winning ® Best Action Live Short film tells the story of a mysterious accountant whose remarkable mathematical skills just might save the O’Dell family farm. Armed with a keen ability to add, an unquenchable thirst for bottled beer, and a stack of receipts, the accountant takes the O’Dell brothers on a strange journey that explores the plight of America’s family farms and hidden corporate conspiracies. Shot entirely on location in Georgia, the film stars writer/director Ray McKinnon (O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU / HBO’s DEADWOOD) and Walton Goggins (THE SHIELD) (38 minutes, Color, Dolby SR, Letterbox.)

Ray McKinnon played the short lived Mr. Duke in Justified Episode #7, Blind Spot.

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Saturday, June 26, 2010

Don’t Forget Road Dogs

Justified gets a lot of the attention in Elmore Leonard news lately.  The show has turned a lot of viewers into reader of Elmore’s work.  The new converts want to know where to start.  I say start with Road Dogs, Elmore’s most recent novel now out in paperback.  Click below to read the amazing reviews Road Dogs received.

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REVIEW: Justified Season One

TV Overmind

Who could have known that Justified would turn out to be another show about cowboys with Daddy issues?

When the pilot episode for one of the year’s best new series (based on the character created by novelist Elmore Leonard) came to an end, Raylan’s (Timothy Olyphant) ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) told us all we needed to know about what made the trigger happy US Marshal really tick: “You’re the angriest man I’ve ever known.”

What this prophetic line could not have foretold, however, was that the series would veer away from Raylan’s struggle with his own inner Hulk to focus on the codes men adapt in order to cope with the sins of their fathers.

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Monday, June 21, 2010

Looking Back at Season One

What was your favorite episode, scene or character from Season One?  What would you like to see happen in Season Two?  Below are episode summaries from the Justified Production Blog.  Thanks to vjboyd.

Episode 1.13 : Bulletville
Episode Premiere : June 08, 2010

Episode 1.12 : Fathers and Sons
Episode Premiere : June 01, 2010

Episode 1.11 : Veterans
Episode Premiere : May 25, 2010

Episode 1.10 : The Hammer
Episode Premiere : May 18, 2010

Episode 1.09 : Hatless
Episode Premiere : May 11, 2010

Episode 1.08 : Blowback
Episode Premiere : May 04, 2010

Episode 1.07 : Blind Spot
Episode Premiere : April 27, 2010

Episode 1.06 : The Collection
Episode Premiere : April 20, 2010

Episode 1.05 : The Lord of War and Thunder
Episode Premiere : April 13, 2010

Episode 1.04 : Long in the Tooth
Episode Premiere : April 06, 2010

Episode 1.03 : Fixer
Episode Premiere : March 30, 2010

Episode 1.02 : Riverbrook
Episode Premiere : March 23, 2010

Episode 1.01 : Fire in the Hole (Pilot Episode)
Episode Premiere : March 16, 2010

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Sunday, June 20, 2010

Tim Gets Elmore

From Timothy Olyphant Online

Elmore’s books have been really successful so I assume that the show does well for the same reason that his books do so well. I think they’re very subtle in how smart they are and they’re so terrifically entertaining. The characters are so wonderfully drawn and at times they make you laugh. You’ve got comedy and there’s drama and it’s rather simple. It’s mostly characters that are really driving the stories. The performances on the show are fantastic, the writing’s fantastic – all the ingredients for something special.”

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Dutch Landscape -Elmore Leonard got Hollywood

Written by (The Magazine of WGA, West)
by Tom Nolan
portraits by Andy Sacks

A real treat for readers,  The Summer 2010 issue of Written By has a fine feature on Elmore’s career in Hollywood by Tom Nolan with portraits by Andy Sacks.  Tom, who has an extensive writing career, is also an actor, who played the part of Lloyd in The Moonshine War, which Elmore wrote and adapted.  Andy Sacks shot Elmore’s 1985 Newsweek cover.

Included with the Nolan piece is the publication of Elmore’s powerful non-fiction piece, Impressions of Murder.  In 1978, Elmore followed the Detroit Felony Homicide Squad 7 around for months and wrote a seminal feature for The Detroit News that reads like his fiction and spawned his most famous Detroit cop novel, City Primeval - High Noon in Detroit in 1980.

You can Read the piece online here

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

“Always Writing”

Written by Dylan Callaghan
WGA West

Many people populate a one-on-one conversation with Elmore Leonard. Speaking to him from his home outside Detroit, it’s clear that as beguiling a conversationalist as he is, as keen and sincere a listener, he is always at least a little bit somewhere else, with the menagerie of characters he’s created over a boundlessly prolific, nearly six decade writing career.

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Saturday, June 12, 2010

What’s Next for Raylan and Boyd?

TV Guide
by Adam Bryant

WARNING: The following story contains spoilers from the Season 1 finale of Justified.]

Few were left standing at the end of Justified’s bloody first-season finale, but among the survivors was Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder, a character who has escaped death twice this season.

In the finale, Boyd, who was originally intended to die in the pilot, survived a shootout between his friend/nemesis Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and two Miami drug-cartel assassins. Even though Raylan spent much of the second half of the season trying to put Boyd back in jail after he blew up a meth lab, he still lets Boyd give chase to an assassin instead of bringing him in.

“We hadn’t planned that the arc would be about Raylan and Boyd, but that became apparent when we decided to keep Boyd alive,” creator and executive producer Graham Yost tells TVGuide.com. “We knew the bad relationship would help form the spine of the season. Heading into the finale we knew we wanted to both resolve some things, get some answers, and yet throw open more questions.

“The big question is, ‘What’s going to happen with Boyd, what’s Raylan going to do?’” Yost continues. “He’s implicated in the murder of a confidential informant from the meth lab, but he has been, in his strange Boyd way, fighting a good fight to try to stop his father from bringing evil to Harlan. So what does Raylan do?”

Justified promotes Walton Goggins to series regular

In truth, Raylan could ask himself that question about many of his relationships. Also in the finale, Raylan learned that his ex-wife, Winona (Natalie Zea), had kicked her new husband out of the house, but Raylan still went to great lengths to protect current squeeze Ava (Joelle Carter).

Additionally, Raylan’s father (Raymond J. Barry) betrayed his son to Boyd’s daddy, Bo (M.C. Gainey). “We realized that Raylan’s father is a pretty bad guy, but it was possible Boyd’s father could be even worse,” Yost says. “There were these parallel tracks of these sons, one way or another rebelling against their fathers. That really intrigued us, and we wondered how we could that to play out and where would we go with that.”

The end result was Boyd holding his father at gunpoint for having murdered the members of Boyd’s newly formed backwoods church. But before Boyd could fire, one of the cartel assassins appeared to kill Bo.

Will Justified’s Raylan Givens be torn between two women?

“We just loved M.C Gainey’s performance, and so we haven’t decided,” Yost says when asked if Bo is really dead. Yost says the same is also true of Johnny Crowder (David Meunier), who Bo shot and left for dead at Ava’s house. “We didn’t see either one of them die. We saw them go down, but we don’t know for sure they’re dead. If we want to keep them alive, we will, but we haven’t decided that yet.”

As for Raylan’s love life, Season 2 might present a more clearly defined love triangle, now that Winona and Raylan slept together again. “[Winona] is freaked out by what happened, but she is interested,” Yost says. “Raylan will always be the true love of her life. That doesn’t mean she can live with him. He stirs a passion in her that Gary doesn’t. ... Raylan’s always going to be the guy for her, and to an extent, Winona’s always going to be the woman for Raylan.”

Yost says that during the hiatus, the writers will re-examine this season to strike a better balance between serialized storytelling and standalone episodes. He also hopes to better incorporate the supporting characters into the plot, as many of them vanished late in the season.

6 Reasons you should be watching Justified

“We got little glimpses into Rachel [Erica Tazel] and Tim [Jacob Pitts] this season,” Yost says. “It was just a matter of money. To keep actors in episodes we hadn’t agreed to was just going to cost us more money, so we had to make hard decisions like that. Had it been up to me, they would’ve been in all episodes, but it’s not my money.”

In addition to answering the questions posed by the finale, Yost says the challenge of Season 2 will be creating new story arcs. Prolific author Elmore Leonard, who created the Raylan Givens character and serves as an executive producer of the show, is working on a new short story, which Yost says may help that cause.

“I’m going to see it in the next few weeks,” Yost says of Leonard’s new work. “We spoke on the phone and he just read me three pages from the story. There was just a moment when I thought, ‘Seriously? I’m listening to Elmore Leonard read me new stuff?’ In my line of work, it just doesn’t get much better than that. If there’s any way we can use it, we will. He’s not following along with the Boyd story; it’s a whole new story.”

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Friday, June 11, 2010

1300 Beaubein - R.I.P - Detroit police to move into old MGM Grand building

Matt Helms
Detroit Free Press

The city is in the process of purchasing the 400,000-square-foot building near the Lodge Freeway downtown for the Detroit Police Department, Detroit Fire Department and the crime lab.

The decision will move the police department out of its aging longtime headquarters at 1300 Beaubien near Greektown. Over the years, there also had been talk of renovating the old Michigan Central Depot train station into a new police headquarters building.

The fire department’s headquarters has been on Larned across from Cobo Center.

The city will pay $6.32 million for the property on a land contract, Bing’s office said.

“I am glad to finally be able to move our officers into a safe, sound and functional structure that is also citizen friendly and accessible,” Bing said in a statement. “This represents an important step in making our city more operationally efficient ... and safe.”

Bing’s office said the building will be ready by by fall 2012, though some departments may phase in earlier.

MGM Grand opened its temporary casino at the site, a former IRS building, in 1999 and moved in 2007 to its $800-million permanent location at 1777 Third St. with an 18-story, 400-room hotel and more than 100,000 square feet of gaming space.

Come back to freep.com for more on this developing story.

Contact MATT HELMS: mhelms@freepress.com. Free Press staff writer Suzette Hackney contributed to this report.

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Thursday, June 10, 2010

To act in ‘Justified,’ Timothy Olyphant climbs inside Elmore Leonard’s head

The Los Angeles Times
The ‘Damages’ veteran plays a deputy U.S. marshal on the FX series.

For Timothy Olyphant, who plays U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, hearing talk of award nominations — for him and for “Justified” — is welcome news. “The show continues to be a pleasure, and I like the idea that it’s finding an audience,” he says. “You hear the echo back, so that means a great deal. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t.” The former “Damages” actor shared other thoughts on the series, based on the works of Elmore Leonard.

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Graham Yost tries to wed Elmore Leonard’s skill to a TV show, and hopes it’s ‘Justified’

The Los Angeles Times
By Paul Gaita, Special to the Los Angeles Times
There’s an art to adapting a work of fiction into a screenplay, and, like all creative endeavors, it has its own set of pitfalls. Issues of tone, pace and interior monologue — not to mention readers’ expectations — all number among the hurdles faced by the screenwriter who tackles a book or short story.

For television shows, the stakes are even higher. After getting all of those issues right, a series based on an existing work must then extend a story with a finite conclusion over the course of one or more seasons. Results have varied over the last half century of television, with every adaptation that satisfies both viewer requirements and fans of the source material — think “Perry Mason” and “Peyton Place,” “Bones,” “Dexter” and “True Blood” — matched by ones that fall flat, such as “Women’s Murder Club” or “Karen Sisco,” which was based on a character created by crime novelist Elmore Leonard.

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Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Justified Ends with a Bang - Bulletville

Entertainment Weekly
by Ken Tucker

Justified finished out its first season in a way that tied up loose ends, gave us at least one action sequence that could be taught in film schools, and set up a few story lines for next season that should leave anyone who developed a hankering for this show yearning for more, now.

The episode, entitled “Bulletville” (any chance that was a little homage to “Poisonville” in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest?), found the Crowder family at odds with each other. Having blown up the supply of meth ingredients Bo had bought from his Florida kingpin, Boyd knew he was about to face earthly retribution: “I am ready to reap the whirlwind,” he told Ava when he appeared at her house to apologize to her for the trouble she’d been caused by the Crowder clan.

But the punishment meted out by the Crowder paterfamilias was beyond even the son’s imagining. The killing of Boyd’s forest-camp flock, and the beating of Boyd himself, was brutal stuff, and enough to shake Boyd’s faith: “Maybe I’ve just been talking to myself.” (The doom-struck character of Boyd sometimes reminds me the young Jerry Lee Lewis, a God-believer whose cousin is Jimmy Swaggart. The rock & roller can quote the Bible chapter and verse, and said long ago that in choosing his line of work, “All right, I’ll go to hell.”)
In quick succession:

• Raylan tumbled to the idea that his daddy Arlo was in cahoots with Bo, and shot pappy in the arm before the old coot got the drop on him.
• Ava was kidnapped by the Crowders.
• Raylan and Boyd teamed up, in the twosome we didn’t know we were going to get, but boy, was it satisfying to see those two old pals working together.
• The way the unarmed Raylan over-powered either “Heckel” or “Jeckel” (Boyd’s terrific cartoon reference for Bo’s henchmen) and shot him through-and-through with his own gun while kicking Bo’s gun out of the old man’s hand — as I said above, a sequence that could be taught in film school for how to edit a TV action scene.
• What do you think Boyd plans to do when he finds that woman from Florida? And didn’t you find it satisfying that the entire season circled back to the pivotal moment in the pilot, when Raylan shot Tommy Bucks in Miami?
I’d be tempted to say that Justified has achieved a loamy richness to its portrayal of backwoods family life that takes on a complexity worthy of William Faulkner. That is, if I didn’t know that Faulkner’s sort of ornate storytelling is precisely the opposite of the kind of lean narrative-craft that Justified birther Elmore Leonard prides himself in avoiding.
I’m left wondering a few things. Do you think Ava — who’s lit out for the territory — might really, finally take Raylan’s advice and get out of Harlan? There’s a sense in which this character has done about as much as she can do, short of simply continue to be an obstacle/temptation preventing Raylan from reuniting with his ex-wife. (Be seein’ you next season, Winona!)
And do you think Boyd has lost his faith, or is it merely shaken? Me, I’d be happy if he prayed as much as he liked, if he’d just stop talking like (in his daddy’s apt phrase) “a tin-pot messiah.” I like Walton Goggins when he’s tossing hard-boiled dialogue right back at Raylan.
Finally and least important, do you think Raylan will remain hatless into next season?
What did you think of Justified‘s season finale?
Follow: @kentucker

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Sunday, June 06, 2010

The Elmore Leonard Literary Arts and Film Festival Website is Now Up.

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Saturday, June 05, 2010

Tumbleweeds in the Bluegrass State

The Rural Blog

By John James Snidow

About halfway through the first episode of FX’s new show Justified, a Confederate-flag-wearing, rocket-propelled-grenade-launching, minority-hating, ex-con, ex-miner, good-old-boy of a Kentuckian pulls out a Mason jar full of a clear liquid and smiles. And the audience knows without being told, just as you know reading this right now, that it’s not gin, it’s not vodka and no, that jar is definitely not water. It’s moonshine.

But moonshine whiskey? In 2010? In times of prohibition, moonshining makes sense. In times of high alcohol excise taxes, moonshining makes sense. In times of poverty in which people have more corn than money to buy booze, well, sure. But I have to believe that it would be considerably more expensive to set up a still in modern-day Harlan County than it would be to go down to the package store and pick up some Kentucky Gentleman ($5.99 for a fifth, gentle reader). So why moonshine?

Maybe it’s just that white lightning—like confederate belt buckles and coal mining—is a trope that signals “Appalachia” to the rest of the country through a thousand unspoken cultural associations. Maybe, but I think there’s something more complicated going on. Moonshine—and by extension the Appalachia created by FX—embodies an outlaw, stick-it-to-the-man attitude toward the government and toward the outside world. It says that this jar—and this place—is governed by our laws, not yours. And that’s Justified in a nutshell.

The cable version of Harlan County is a place where wives don’t call 911 to report their abusive husbands. A victim takes the husband’s deer rifle from the mantel and calmly shoots him while he’s sitting at the dinner table. It’s a place where the bad guys rob the local bank, where the local lawman makes the law but rarely shoots to kill, preferring instead to disarm, disable or just outright embarrass the dimmer-witted local bad guys against whom they are squaring off. There are dozens of poker references and lots and lots and lots of cowboy hats. Black hat bad. White hat good. In Harlan, you have to enforce your own moral code, but it’s easy: just look at the hat.

In short, it has all the elements of a Clint Eastwood 19th Century Western, but without the Clint, without the West, and without the 19th Century. It’s the frontier set in 21st Century Kentucky ridge-and-valley coal country, the latest in America’s continued national fascination with literature of and about the frontier.

Of course, turning Eastern Kentucky into the new Wild West does require playing a little fast and loose with some facts. In reality, residents of Harlan County (Wikipedia map) are more likely to pronounce “your” as the “yer” of Appalachian twang rather than the “yore” of Texas drawl. Lexington is considerably more urbane than the lawless town portrayed in the show, and showing images of white-fenced horse farms of the Bluegrass to represent the landscape of Harlan County is like the characters in The O.C. taking a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge on their way to downtown Los Angeles. Yes, those things are in the same state. But, no.

Hoping to address this geographic flight of fancy, the show’s Web site has a caption that says, “Kentucky Bluegrass and horse country are northwest of Harlan County.” True. So is Louisville. And Chicago. And Seattle. But you can see the position the show’s creators are in: If you want to conjure Appalachia, you have to get yourself some coal miners, but if you’re evoking the spirit of the wild West, you just gotta show some horses.

Still, we shouldn’t get too hung up about fictional geographies, and Justified’s rural landscape—however fictional—and brand of moral clarity fills a cultural niche right now. Ours in an America that has recently loved shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Lost, in which morality (and in one, reality itself) is ambiguous, where villains and heroes alike wear hats not of black and white but of gray. Ours is an America where duels take place between two corporations competing over market share more often than between two men and with life on the line.

And in that kind of America that has no rivals, has no other superpowers against which to fight and in which every semi-urban town looks and feels and acts pretty much like every other semi-urban town, well, perhaps in that kind of America we need a place like Justified’s Harlan County, where urban complexities and ambiguities are stripped away, where the simple morality of the rural landscape rules, and where you know the bad guys by the color of their hats.

Perhaps it’s just a fable, but rural America—in this case rural Kentucky—has often been a place we go to when we need to believe in our myths again. And if, in order to keep those myths alive, Kentucky must hold the place in the 21st Century that the Western prairie held in the 20th, so be it.

John James Snidow, right, is a native of Ashland, Ky., a 2009 graduate of Harvard College and a former researcher for the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Justified appears on the FX cable TV channel at 10 p.m. EDT on Tuesdays.
 

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Thursday, June 03, 2010

First Annual “Elmore Leonard Literary Arts and Film Festival,” November 10-13, 2010

Birmingham, MI—June 3, 2010—The Community House, a nonprofit organization in Birmingham, MI dedicated to cultural, social and educational enrichment, has announced plans to launch the first annual “Elmore Leonard Literary Arts and Film Festival,” taking place November 10-13, 2010 in Birmingham, MI.

The multifaceted event will include a competition for screenwriters and filmmakers as well as a separate teen short story contest for students, ages 13-18 years. A screening of “Fire in the Hole,” the pilot of Elmore’s hit TV series, along with screenings of film entries will be highlighted throughout the week of November 10-13. The festivities will conclude on November 13 with a benefit gala honoring the legendary writer for his contributions to the arts and to the state of Michigan .

Details to follow when the Festival website is operational.

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Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Justified Episode 12 - Fathers and Sons