Monday, February 08, 2010
Elmore, Peter and Chris Leonard at the 2010 Tucson Festival of Books
For the second year in a row, Elmore and his sons Peter and Chris will appear together on a panel at the 2010 Tucson Festival of Books.
2010 TUCSON FESTIVAL Presented by Arizona Daily Star, The University of Arizona, & Diamond Children’s at University Medical Center
WHERE WORDS & IMAGINATION COME TO LIFE
free to the public, workshops, food, children’s events, book-signings, meet authors, & poetry readings
March 13-14 2010
Uiniversity of Arizona Campus
Tucson’s Second Festival of Books
The Tucson Festival of Books is a free weekend celebration of reading to benefit local literacy organizations. The 2010 Festival will take place on the UA camp;us with more than 400 authors, 150 exhibitors and 24 venues.
Best-selling mystery writers Elmore Leonard (MR. PARADISE, GET SHORTY) and J.A. Jance (the Joanna Brady mystery series and recent release LONG TIME GONE) are among the notable authors. Also scheduled to appear Phil Caputo, whose memoir (A RUMOR OF WAR) was one of the definitive books about the Vietnam War; and Alice Hoffman, whose novel (PRACTICAL MAGIC) which was made into a feature film; and Michael J. Gelb, (WINE DRINKING FOR INSPIRED SPEAKING) who is an inspiring speaking and corporate consultant in addition to a renowned author.
For more event information, or if you’d like to join the Tucson Festical of Books as an author, sponsor, exhibitor or volunteer, visit our website at TucsonFestivalofBooks.org
permalinkSaturday, February 06, 2010
Ask Elmore Leonard - Time Magazine
The Detroit-based writer’s gritty plots and ear for dialogue have made his dozens of crime novels and Westerns into bestsellers: among them, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, 3:10 to Yuma have been made into hit feature films. His 1985 book Glitz became a best-seller and solidified his reputation as one of the best American crime writers. In his latest project, Leonard will executive produce the FX drama Justified, for which he created the character of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. Submit your questions for Elmore Leonard here, then read the interview in an upcoming issue of TIME magazine.
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Thursday, February 04, 2010
“The Elmore Leonard Dialog Award”
At a site called Sweet with Fall and Fish, AJC has a nice rhapsody about Elmore’s work.
You Should Read Elmore Leonard
Delroy Lindo as Bo Catlett in Get Shorty.
“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page you write in ‘Fade out’ and that’s the end, and you’re done.” - Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty
My preferred method of recommendation is quoting an author’s work. As you can see from the paragraph above, Elmore Leonard is funny, real, and spare. He’ll never come up with a line so poetic that hipsters want it tattooed across their shoulders, but if there’s another writer as masterful at revealing character through dialog, I’m taking nominations. Whoever you want to bring forward, it would still be called the Elmore Leonard Dialog Award.
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Saturday, January 30, 2010
Split Images: “Lovers and Killers”
Here’s the very first book review Elmore got in Newsweek, during the period of the early 1980s when the critics discovered him en masse. Walter Clemons was among the first to get what Elmore was doing.
Newsweek
March 22, 1982
Walter Clemons
Split Images. By Elmore Leonard. 282 pages. Arbor House. $12.50.
permalink“The squad-car officer wondered at first if Mr. Daniels was a movie star. He had the features and that kind of sandy brown curly hair some movie stars had and never seemed to comb… People were always seeing movie stars around Palm Beach and Mr. Daniels mentioned George Hamilton twice.” Robbie Daniels, a boyish 41-year-old Detroit multimillionaire, stands outside his Florida mansion explaining how he came home late from the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre and shot a burglar in self-defense.
Robbie is a killer, of course. Elmore Leonard has so many cards up his sleeve that he plays this one faceup near the start, as Robbie nervily talks a big game of murder to stolid Detective Kouza, who cursorily wrote off the first killing as justifiable homicide and now resigns from the force to become Robbie’s chauffeur. Even when we see Robbie at work, lying to his victim as he performs an impeccable murder in an underground parking lot in Detroit, we still don’t know what he’s up to. Kouza, who asks, is given a curt explanation: “Practice.” We are kept off balance throughout this icy, understated thriller. The honest cop who dogs Robbie and Kouza tells odd lies to the woman he loves. Leonard even works a shocking switch on the pluckyheroine-goes-alone-to-dangerous-rendezvous ploy. The book’s single most brilliant scene, a face-off with two ex-con cowboys in a highway Bar-B-Que Pit, is acutely observant of place and contemporary role-playing.
Specificity is Leonard’s strength. The action shifts between sleazy-glamorous Palm Beach and recession-scarred Detroit during the winter and spring of 1981, when the Jean Harris trial and the assassination attempt on President Reagan are topics of conversation. Robbie’s motive for murder, when revealed, is both trivial and sickeningly precise. If you care to get Important about it, “Split Images” says something about machismo, casual violence and uncertain American identity. Since Leonard himself is so expertly unassuming, I would rather just say that this is the most original crime novel I’ve read since Alan Dennis Burke’s “Getting Away With Murder” last year.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Justified Poster
Badass!
Hombre Means Man, Man
“Ritt directs with a steady hand, and the dialog by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank bears listening to.” - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (4/21/67).
“Take a large portion of Stagecoach, a small chunk of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a dash of Broken Arrow for flavor and Paul Newman to play the leading role…What will you get? You’ll get Hombre…” - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (3/22/67).
“Paul Newman is excellent as the scorned (but only supposed) Apache…Richard Boone is very powerful, yet admirably restrained as the heavy.” - Variety.
Read about Hombre here:
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Elmore Leonard likes the Colts
Who dat goes to Hollywood:
By Dave Walker, The Times-Picayune
permalinkHollywood—The setting: The Television Critics Association TV Tour, a twice-annual event to which critics from across the continent travel for many nonstop days and nights of question-and-answer with TV people.
The question I asked everybody: So, who do you like in the Super Bowl?
The answering party this time: New Orleans native Elmore Leonard, whose short story “Fire in the Hole” provided the template for the upcoming FX drama “Justified.”
He’s pulling for the Colts.“I’m rooting for Indianapolis, because of Peyton,” he said. “He’s unbelievable.”’
Leonard added that an upcoming novel is set partly in New Orleans, and he hopes to write another one right away set almost entirely there.
“I think I have one relative still in New Orleans,” he said. “Katrina sent ‘em all running.“I want to set another story in New Orleans. Part of my new book, ‘Djibouti,’ is set there. That’s where the documentary filmmaker (protagonist Dara Barr) lives. It begin and ends in New Orleans.
“I want to (set) my next book (in) New Orleans, because it’s too good to miss.”
Friday, January 22, 2010
Justified key art at FX.com
The FX website is showing a rotating banner ad on their homepage for Justified, as seen above. It’s pretty cool. They’re finishing up work now on the Justified website. By mid February, the publicity campaign leading up to the March 16 premiere will begin.
permalinkRaylan Givens - “You root for him”
CableFax Daily
TCA Special Section
permalink“Justified” (Mar 16 debut) begins life with a fine pedigree. Star Timothy Olyphant is well known as the tough-guy sheriff of HBO’s “Deadwood,” exec prod Graham Yost worked on HBO’s “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” and the pilot is based on an Elmore Leonard short story about a contemporary Kentucky-based deputy U.S. Marshal named Raylan Givens. Clips shown at TCA suggested plenty of violence, including much gun play. While the part allows Olyphant again to don a cowboy hat (as he did as Deadwood’s Seth Bullock) he jokingly downplayed similarities between the series: “[Deadwood] is ending, and this one is beginning.” Yet Givens contrasts with other FX heroes. “He’s a good guy… you root for him,” Yost said. While the pilot is based on a Leonard story, and the author is listed as an exec prod, he won’t write scripts. Subsequent eps will be written based on the way FX’s writers think Leonard would have written them, Leonard says. “I’ll write another [Raylan Givens] short story for sure” and ideas for the series, he said. “If
they use them fine, if not, that’s ok, too.”
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
In appreciation of Robert B. Parker - 1932-2010
Christian Science Monitor
By Marjorie Kehe / January 19, 2010
Some of us have known Robert B. Parker almost as long as we could read. I remember first picking up a “Spenser” novel in 1979, when I was 21 and had just moved to Boston straight out of college. By the time I put that book down (I remember that I turned the last page while sitting in a North End cafe), I had somehow become a Bostonian.
Parker was a prolific writer who churned out more than 60 books in his lifetime, working in genres including Westerns and young adult novels. But it was as a crafter of detective fiction that Parker will be best and most fondly remembered, and most particularly for his 37 novels starring Spenser, the tough but lovable Boston private detective whose name was spelled like that of the poet.
Spenser was a former boxer. He traveled light and talked tough. But he loved his city, the Red Sox, his girl (psychiatrist Susan Silverman), and his running buddy (Hawk, an equally tough and casually beguiling fellow crime-fighter).
Parker himself started life as an academic. He wrote a PhD thesis on detective fiction and worked as a college professor before he discovered his true vocation as a novelist.
Two more of his books, “Split Image” and “Blue-Eyed Devil,” are scheduled for publication this year. But last year’s release, “The Professional,” will now be the final word on Spenser.
Fittingly perhaps, Parker, who spent so much of his life shaping books, is reported to have died sitting at his desk in his study in Cambridge, Mass.
I called Elmore to tell him that Robert Parker was at a bookstore in downtown Birmingham and asked him if he would come downtown for a little photo op, and he did. This was back in 1983 or 1984. We hung out for a while. Elmore introduced me and said I did his research. Parker fired back: “I do my own research!” Elmore dug Parker the man and his work and so did I. He will be missed.
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FX’s ‘Justified’ shoots for same tone as Elmore Leonard’s ‘Fire in the Hole’
New York Daily News
By Cristina Kinon
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
What Would Elmore Do?
That’s what “Justified” creator and executive producer Graham Yost asks himself and his writing team everyday as they build on crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole” to create the new FX series starring Timothy Olyphant.
“Justified,” premiering March 16 at 10, features Olyphant as one of Elmore’s most popular characters, Raylan Givens, a deputy U.S. marshal who only shoots to kill. While “Fire in the Hole” was the guideline for the series pilot, it was on Yost’s shoulders to extend Leonard’s vision through the rest of the season.
“That was the thing that was most frightening. Could I hit that same tone?” Yost told reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour Sunday. “I think we’re doing a good job.”
Leonard is credited as an executive producer on the series, but he says that’s more of an honorary position.
“I’m game,” Leonard said. “I’m ready to come up with anything they want.”
Yost says the reasons for adapting “Fire in the Hole” as a series include the fact it’s set in Kentucky, a location you don’t see often on TV; Leonard’s sense of character and humor; and the element of unexpected violence.
“I like the entertainment value of the show,” said Yost. “I thought it would be a change of pace for FX a little bit in that, while it’s a violent show, Raylan Givens is a hero. He’s a good guy, and you like him, and you’re rooting for him.”
“I like the fact that [Raylan is] not a yeller,” Yost added. “He just tells it like it is, and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
Olyphant, whom we last saw in FX’s “Damages” and previously on HBO’s “Deadwood,” doesn’t mind being typecast as the aggressive, brooding type, though he does think Raylan is a significant departure from Seth Bullock of “Deadwood.”
“Both characters wear hats, but after that, they really start to become their own thing,” Olyphant said. “I think that anyone who knows Elmore’s work, there’s a delicateness to it, and a tone to it, that’s just so appealing to me. It’s so fun.”
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Graham Yost on Shooting ‘Justified’ in Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
BYLINE: Rob Owen, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PASADENA, Calif.—Filming the pilot episode for the upcoming FX series “Justified” in Western Pennsylvania last spring, executive producer Graham Yost came away with a specific memory of Pittsburgh while staying at the Omni William Penn Downtown.
“There were an incredible amount of fireworks going off, it seemed like every night,” Yost said. “They’d echo around all the buildings and I could see them out my [hotel room] window.”
While there were fireworks in Pittsburgh, there was more of a slow burn on the set of the pilot, which was largely filmed outside of Pittsburgh. Timothy Olyphant stars in “Justified” as deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens who is re-assigned to Harlan, Ky., after a broad daylight shooting in Miami that he deems “justified.” Olyphant’s Givens is an old-school hero, a speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick kind of guy.
“I like that Raylan doesn’t have to yell,” Yost said.
The show’s setting—Western Pennsylvania plays rural Kentucky in the pilot—appealed to Yost.
“It’s a different place to do a show,” he said.
Filmed under the title “Fire in the Hole,” the name of the Elmore Leonard short story the pilot is based on, the project was briefly known as “Lawman” until A&E came up with the docu-reality show “Steven Seagal Lawman.”
Leonard is an executive producer on “Justified,” something he said is honorary—he’s not working in the writers’ room—but he’s clearly a fan of the program. He plans to write another Givens short story that he said producers of the TV show will be welcome to adapt.
Yost said there are no plans to come back to Pittsburgh for additional filming during season one; maybe in season two if the show is successful. For episodes beyond the pilot, the production crew is doing its best to make areas around Los Angeles resemble Kentucky.
“Frankly, we’ve been waiting for the rain to come and green up Los Angeles,” Yost said. He praised the Pittsburgh crew that worked on the pilot and said he offered some of them jobs to work on the series in Los Angeles but found many were working on movies filming in Western Pennsylvania last year.
For the pilot, “Justified” used Kittanning to play parts of Harlan, and also filmed in Washington, Pa. No specific town in California has been used as Harlan.
“We just use little pieces here and there,” Yost said, “because small towns in California don’t look like small towns in Kentucky.”
permalinkSunday, January 17, 2010
“Justified” Debuts Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Los Angeles Times
Yvonne Villarreal
TCA Press Tour: Timothy Olyphant says ‘Justified’ is a ‘different animal’ from ‘Deadwood’
Don’t let the cowboy hats and gunfights fool you: FX’s newest drama “Justified” isn’t a classic western.
In the crime drama, Timothy Olyphant plays Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, a modern-day lawman with a 19th century-style of justice. The role isn’t too much of a stretch for the actor, who portrayed 19th century merchant-turned-sheriff Seth Bullock in HBO’s short-lives series ‘Deadwood.” But this new venture isn’t a carbon copy, Olyphant insists.
“Both characters wear hats, but after that they really start to become their own thing,” Olyphant said. “[‘Deadwood’] is over and this one is just beginning. I think anyone that knows Elmore’s work ... there’s a tone to it that’s just so appealing. It’s a different animal than what ‘Deadwood’ was.”
‘Justified” was developed by Graham Yost (’‘Speed”, “Boomtown”) and is based on the popular character featured in several books and short stories by novelist Elmore Leonard, who serves as an “honorary” executive producer.
“I started reading Elmore Leonard’s stuff back in the early ‘80s with ‘La Brava,’ ” said Yost, who also serves as an executive producer. “The thing that’s always gotten to me about Elmore’s writing ... I loved his sense of character, that things were unpredictable. I thought it would be a change of pace for FX ... Raylan is a hero and he has stuff haunting him and he’s a human being. He’s a good guy and you like him and you’re rooting for him.”
While the base of the character and story comes from Leonard’s work, the challenge comes in making a whole series out of it.
“That was the thing I was most frightened of,” Yost said. “Were we going to be able to deliver? ... We’ve done a good job. We have every available book by Elmore to get the flavor and style and then we started kicking around story ideas.”
The writing team even sports WWED (What Would Elmore Do?) bracelets.
But should they ever run out of ideas, they could just look to the master. Leonard said he planned to write another short story based on the character.
“I don’t want to write for, specifically, what they’re shooting,” Leonard said. “I want to come up with a new idea and give it to them. If they like it, fine. If they don’t, don’t use it.”
The series premieres in March.
permalinkOut of Sight and Jackie Brown Creator Gets Justified
Star Timothy Olyphant and the show’s producer talk about the new FX series.
by Eric Goldman
January 17, 2010 - 3:10 to Yuma, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown - Hollywood has long seen the value in the work of Elmore Leonard, whose clever, witty crime stories are the perfect fodder for film and TV series.
Coming soon to FX is Justified, the latest adaption of Leonard’s work. Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Hitman) stars as US Marshall Raylan Givens, a character from Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole,” among other stories. Today at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour, Olyphant discussed the series, along with Leonard himself (who has an executive producer credit) and Executive Producer/Showrunner Graham Yost.
Yost said he’d long been a fan of Leonard’s and immediately took to “Fire in the Hole”, when Sony approached him about series, noting, “I loved it and loved that it was set in Kentucky,” noting few films or TV series are.
The series follows Raylan when he’s essentially forced to move from Miami back to his home in Kentucky – where he quickly re-establishes himself as a very no nonsense, not to be messed with throne in the side of local criminals, including a character played by Walton Goggins (The Shield), Raylan shares some history with.
Click above to see the trailer for Justified
Yost said he loved Leonard’s, “sense of character and that things were unpredictable,” and also noted the sense of humor Leonard brings to dark proceedings. He said there have been times in the writers room when they’ve wondered, “What’s Raylan saying next?,” and then asked, ” What’s Elmore have him say next, because that would be good.”
Yost revealed that when he and the writers were starting out, “We got every available book we could get by Elmore and divided them up and started reading them, to get the flavor of the style and the approach.” He showed off his wrist and a bracelet on it that he and all the writers have, which read, “WWED – What would Elmore Do?” Yost smiled and added, “People think we’re in some weird cult, but that’s okay.”
Olyphant noted he too was a huge Leonard fan, and joked that with Justified, he felt, “Finally, someone in Hollywood is going to give Elmore Leonard his shot!” More seriously, Olyphant said that when he was approached about the show, “I was just so excited. I thought, ‘Wow, this could be great.’
It’s been a joy.”
Leonard said his title on the show “is more honorary,” but noted, “I saw the pilot and I thought it was great.” And would he be interested in ever writing an episode? Leonard said, “I’m game!” and added, “I’m going to write another [Raylan Givens] short story for sure.”
permalinkJustified is Unveiled to Television Critics Today
Elmore is on a panel at a Television Critics Association press conference this morning in Pasadena for his new FX show, “Justified” with show creator, Graham Yost and series star, Timothy Olyphant (Raylan Givens.)
permalinkFriday, January 15, 2010
Touch - Too Laid Back?
The Movie Hooligan reviews Touch, a 1997 film directed by Paul Schrader, based on Elmore’s novel.
in the wake of Get Shorty, it seemed that Elmore Leonard could FINALLY be adapted, and the Coens worked on a treatment for his Cuba Libre, for example. Yes, he was no longer confined to the neo-noir ghetto of the likes of Donald Westlake and others… Charles Willeford? He was one hot commodity now, and Touch would be the perfect vehicle for his talent.
Or so it was thought. I dunno. Something about it. It needed more action or something. It was too immaculate, too laid back. It’s about this guy with a very powerful gift, and those first hit by the blast wave that would eventually reach a national television audience. Skeet Ulrich plays the guy with the gift, and everyone else pretty much plays someone who would exploit that gift. Who will it be? Will it be the slick huckster preacher Bill Hill played by a Christopher Walken impersonator? Oh, wait, it’s actually Christopher Walken. Or will it be his pretty former assistant played by ... UNDERplayed by Bridget Fonda? Get that girl a mike! Or will it be the obnoxious Tom Arnold? Seriously, though, he did pretty good. I guess you could say the character was perfect for his ‘90s persona; then again, one doesn’t usually equate Tom Arnold with religious orthodoxy. Does Skeet Ulrich himself long for a life of fame and riches? Will his gift disappear once he achieves either? Who’s exploiting who here? Or could it be that God’s exploiting all of us, and frankly being a bit of a showoff by giving one man Christ-ish powers? I kinda like that last answer, since I thought of it myself.
There are various colorful cameos, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Christopher Walken and Anthony Zerbe are reunited after appearing 14 years earlier in The Dead Zone. Lolita Davidovich takes a break from working with hubby Ron Shelton to make an appearance as a former Catholic turned stripper. She and Christopher Walken give Tom Arnold a theological run for his money. I will say that the music was pretty good. I would give a shout-out to Conchata Ferrell, but really, everyone knows Mr. Deeds is the performance she’ll be remembered for.
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The Top Four: You Pick
Here’s another attempt of an ongoing blog-feeder called The Top Four: You Pick. If you want to play, great.
Pick your top four Elmore Leonard titles and explain however briefly why you choose them and what connection, if any, exists when you put them together. In my example, I chose: Classic Titles from The Last Four Decades. You might chose “books in the trunk of the car as Buddy sped away from the prison.”
Everybody has a different take on Elmore’s work. We want to see what you think. Post your choices in The Dutch Forum
permalinkSaturday, January 09, 2010
Hollywood taps Elmore Leonard again
This time it’s for the FX show ‘Justified,’ starring Timothy Olyphant as Leonard’s Kentucky coal miner turned lawman, Raylan Givens.
The Los Angeles Times
By Scott Timberg
It’s just a few blocks from some of Los Angeles’ best regional Mexican food, but thanks to the magic of television, we’re not in Highland Park but Kentucky coal country. Or rather, in a tiny, cramped hardware store, stuffed with bags of powdered stucco, countless screws and what may be every cleaner known to man.
The magic, though, is starting to fray during a tense morning in which a few dozen chilly people have been standing around since 5 a.m. “Do you need a one-hold strap?” snaps director Michael Watkins, an intense, red-faced man with a crown of white hair who is clearly tired of waiting around. “I can get you a ground clamp!”
The cast and crew rubbing their hands together from the cold and wearing headsets, earpieces and North Face jackets have gathered to shoot a drama based on the work of Elmore Leonard, now called “Justified,” after at least one name change.
The show is a cops-and-robbers drama to debut on FX in March, with an unusual setting and promising pedigree
Go to latimes.com to read the rest of the story.
Read More>
permalinkRaylan Givens - “He’ll pull his gun if he has to, and when he does, he’s generally lethal with it”
Entertainment Weekly
January 15, 2010 Friday
New Shows
BYLINE: Lynette Rice; Tanner Stransky; Kate Ward; Adam B. Vary; Tim Stack; Dan Snierson
JUSTIFIED
FX | MARCH TBA | CRIME DRAMAWHAT IT’S ABOUT
Based on Elmore Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole,” this drama follows Stetson-topped deputy U.S. marshal Raylan Givens (Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant) as he’s reassigned to his native Kentucky, where he confronts some bad guys-and his own personal demons, natch.
WHAT TO EXPECT
The sharpshooting Givens chases down a white supremacist in the pilot, but rassles with plenty of other foes throughout the season, including his outlaw father (Raymond J. Barry) and a fugitive-turned-dentist (Alan Ruck). “Givens is a true-blue hero,” says exec producer Graham Yost (Boomtown). “He’ll pull his gun if he has to, and when he does, he’s generally lethal with it. But he’s not a screaming cop. He’s macho in a quiet way. There’s a little bit of the old spaghetti-Western Clint Eastwood in that.” That’s exactly what attracted Olyphant to the role-not to mention the fact that Leonard is on board as an executive producer. “There’s a wit to it,” Olyphant says. “[With] Elmore’s writing, you kind of feel a little twinkle in his eye.” Yost, who borrowed some of Leonard’s dialogue for the pilot, is confident he can bring Givens’ charm-and fashion sense-to the small screen, thanks to their leading man. “Tim was in Deadwood,” Yost says, “so we knew he could wear the hat.”
-KW
Too bad they got the wrong hat. - g
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Friday, January 08, 2010
Out of Sight - “The Foundation for Everything Good Clooney’s Done Since”
From Being Clooney: Not as Easy as It Looks
By Terrence Rafferty
New York Times
When [Clooney] finally found a role in which he looked entirely at ease, it was in a film that was neither a standard-issue piece of studio entertainment nor quite an offbeat indie, but something in between: Steven Soderbergh’s tricky comic caper movie “Out of Sight” (1998), based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, and with all the noirish eccentricity that implies. Mr. Leonard’s skewed world, in which competence, wit and unfussy romance are highly prized — and constantly endangered, because there are always way too many thugs and morons about — turns out to be an environment in which Mr. Clooney (if not his character) can thrive.
His performance is all sly looks and bone-dry readings, held together by a general air of barely contained exasperation at the antics of the fools and knaves who surround him. And although he’s a thief and an escaped convict, he looks with undisguised admiration at the United States marshal who’s trying to bring him to justice: she knows her job, and she’s Jennifer Lopez besides.
His style in “Out of Sight” is too elusive, too stylized — it’s like lowlife Restoration comedy — to serve as a repeatable, bankable star persona, but it’s the foundation, in a way, for everything good he’s done since then, the theme on which he works his small, increasingly subtle variations. The larcenous gulf war soldier he plays in David O. Russell’s inventive “Three Kings” (1999) is a tougher, slightly bitterer version of his “Out of Sight” character, and it fits.
permalinkThursday, January 07, 2010
“The mad, enthralling novels of Elmore Leonard” by Robert Fulford
(Globe and Mail, July 8, 1998)
Elmore Leonard’s endlessly surprising characters are back in the movie theatres this summer, dancing nimbly through one of his cleverest stories, Out of Sight, with George Clooney as a fugitive bank robber and Jennifer Lopez as a federal marshal whose taste in boyfriends is at best eccentric. Though it may sound like a cold-blooded assembly of standard Hollywood elements (sexy, violent, suspenseful romantic comedy), nothing in Out of Sight feels like a formula. The reason is the mind from which this mad, enthralling novel sprang.
As always, Leonard expertly engineered the plot and shaped characters of fascinating perversity. Steven Soderbergh has directed what may well be the most Elmore-ish film ever drawn from one of his books. It catches Leonard’s deadpan comedy, the farce produced inadvertently by people who are entirely in earnest. He once said of his criminal characters, “I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank.” Of course, they usually get caught, and then wonder what went wrong.
On this sort of material, Leonard has made an astonishing career. At the age of 73 he’s reached a unique status: no other American crime writer has ever been so successful and so admired in his lifetime. Martin Amis mentioned recently in a public discussion that he had spotted several Leonard novels on the shelves of Saul Bellow’s place in Boston. “Bellow and I agreed,” Amis continued, “that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.” Leonard has also become a one-man entertainment conglomerate. Of the 34 novels he’s written, a dozen have been best-sellers and 29 have been made into movies or optioned. Next month, ABC starts a TV series based on Maximum Bob, his 1991 novel, with Beau Bridges as the malicious judge who gives everyone convicted in his court the longest jail term the law allows.
In Out of Sight, the reckless confidence of the Lopez character, Karen Sisco, has attracted everyone’s notice. Leonard isn’t famous for heroines but in earlier books you can see rough sketches for Karen emerging. His 1980 novel, City Primeval, has a smart, tough criminal lawyer, Carolyn Wilder, who keeps on her wall a famous remark by Charlotte Whitton, the mayor of Ottawa 40 years ago—“Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.” Then there’s Kathy Diaz Baker in Maximum Bob, the tough, pretty, take-no-trash parole officer whose energy pushes the story along. Since writing Out of Sight, Leonard has gone further. When he astonished his admirers last winter with Cuba Libre, a historical novel that takes place in Cuba in 1898, he put Amelia Brown near the centre of the book. At the beginning she’s simply a kept woman, but she has ideas of her own and a manic determination to carry them out.
Long-time Leonard fans love to watch him twist his characters till they become interesting and create the terrifying U-turns in plot that bring his narratives to life. He’s a manipulator and a genre writer as well as an author of high talent. Considering his exalted position, he gives remarkably down-to-earth interviews about his career. He started out writing westerns, he says, because that’s what the market wanted. Then, “The market dried up, and I had to switch to crime.” Amis and Bellow may say there’s no one like him (and they’re right), but he’s never claimed to be entirely original. “I learned by imitating Hemingway….until I realized that I didn’t share his attitude about life. I didn’t take myself or anything as seriously as he did.”
All stories about authors involve breathtaking devotion to craft. Anthony Trollope getting up every morning to write for a few hours before going out to organize the British post office. Gustave Flaubert spending a whole morning just inserting a comma, then in the afternoon taking it out. Character is destiny: that’s what the lives of writers tell us, the same sort of thing you’ll often find inside their books.
In the 1950s Leonard worked in a Detroit advertising agency, writing ads for Chevrolet. That drove him crazy, he’s said, “Because you had to write real cute then. I had a lot of trouble with that. I could do truck ads, but I couldn’t do convertibles at all.” He began getting up at five a.m. to write fiction for two hours before going to the office. “I wrote most of five books that way. I had one rule: I had to start writing before I put the water on for coffee. And I couldn’t pick up a magazine. If I hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be talking.”
There’s something sweetly obsessive (and altogether admirable) about that story, the man denying himself coffee till he got some work done. I find even more charming the simple but hugely ambitious rule of writing that he claims he’s lived by: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
permalinkMonday, January 04, 2010
Coming Soon - JUSTIFIED
In a couple of weeks, the producers of Justified, based on Elmore’s novella, “Fire in the Hole,” starring Timothy Olyphant, will show off their new show to television critics. We should know then the exact date that the show will premiere, perhaps as early as late March.
permalinkSaturday, January 02, 2010
“I can’t imagine not having a good book close by”
For “Books Go Everywhere”
The Library Network.
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Thanks to my sister, who used to read to me when I was little. I’ve always loved books. Growing up I must have read everything from “Cinderella” and Little Goody Two Shoes” to “Treasure Island and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Next came Raphael Sabatini’s The Sea Hawk,” “Scaramouche and the Don Sturdy series of adventures. Pretty soon I was reading Book-of-the-Month Club selections, novels written by contemporary authors. I discovered Ernest Hemingway and decide that, more than anything else, I wanted to be a writer someday. This meant reading not simply for enjoyment but with a special purpose, to learn how to tell stories.
I’m always amazed when I’m in someone’s home and see no evidence of books. Or when someone tells me he never reads novels, doesn’t have time for that. Really? You don’t need a special time or place to read. You can take a book with you wherever you go and find moments to entertain yourself, or to learn about something you’d like to know.
I can’t imagine not having a good book close by, one that I can’t wait to begin.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
New Up in Honey’s Room Paperback from Einaudi
Su Nella Stanza di Honey
Another superb Italian cover from Einaudi. Why don’t American publishers do covers this kick-ass?
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Brilliant-But-Canceled Shows of the ‘00s
Time Magazine
Posted by James Poniewozik
As long as we’re remembering the decade in television, here’s a list of a dozen shows that could have been among the decade’s best, but lasted only a season or two (or less) before being snuffed out.
KAREN SISCO. The short-lived Elmore Leonard adaptation captured the hard-boiled melancholy of the character from Out of Sight.
More...
permalinkMonday, December 28, 2009
Elmore says: “I’m so glad that I chose Westerns…”
”... at that time rather than some writers’ workshop where you’re just writing something experimental or you’re writing something that’s contemporary about your life and you come out with just a pointless short story.”
Gambit Weekly
Leonard’s early writing years take center stage as his Western stories, published by long-dead pulp weeklies and monthlies such as Western Story and Dime Western Magazine, have been collected in one volume for the first time: The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (William Morrow).
While many of the stories conform to the Western canon (relentless heat, senseless violence, distrust between Indians and whites), they offer ample plot twists and derivations, cinematic storytelling and the author’s trademark sharp dialogue.
OTHER THAN BRIEF FAMILY MIGRATIONS TO OKLAHOMA and Texas during his boyhood, Leonard never spent any time in the American West chronicled in his short stories. He wasn’t even much enamored with cowboys-and-Indians lore beyond a weakness for Hollywood oaters filled with gunfights and Monument Valley vistas. But Leonard did see an opportunity to learn storytelling and make money at the same time, which convinced him to tackle Westerns.
“I wanted to make some money at it while I was learning to write,” he says. “It takes 10 years to find your (writing) voice. If you can be selling while you do that, it’s all the better.”
He began by reading books about Arizona during the late-1800s. For scenery and setting, Leonard subscribed to Arizona Highways, combing the magazine’s lavish pictures and captions for local color. “It told you what that cactus was called that was crawling up the side of the canyon. Otherwise I could be out there and not know a thing about it. That was the beauty of it.”
Thus his Westerns offer snippets of description, enough detail to make the reader believe he is ensconced in the land of saguaros. Pine trees are wedged in close among the bare, rolling hills, Leonard writes. Or, he’s noting the clumps of mesquite and catclaw amid sun-glare that creates shimmering waves of hazy heat.
Lest one get bored with such lengthy examination of source material, blame this reviewer, not the erstwhile Western writer. Leonard, even in the early works on display in this collection, doesn’t abide back-story, lengthy descriptions of weather and setting—or simple good guy-bad guy confrontations.
As with his contemporary crime novels (Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, Freaky Deaky), Leonard’s West is edgy, unpredictable and driven by dialogue. Leonard lets his characters talk and talk and talk and, all the while, pages riffle past in a blur.
“I’m so glad I stayed with a commercial market.”
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Friday, December 25, 2009
Road Dogs in Review AND Merry Christmas
Two Thousand Nine was the Year of the Road Dog. Here’s a repost of excerpts from some of the outstanding reviews of Elmore’s latest hardcover.
Bookmarks Magazine assembled some of the best review quotes about Road Dogs.
The critics, thrilled with Leonard’s latest novel, unanimously praised it as another success in a long line of groundbreaking successes. Leonard’s revolutionary, minimalist style—including his disdain for long descriptions and tedious scene setting—sends the plot racing along on deliciously deadpan dialogue between vivid, engaging characters, a few of whom readers already know and love. Amid the murder andmayhem, Leonard also poses larger questions about the varying degrees of loyalty and treachery in relationships. Readers new to Leonard don’t need to return to the earlier novels to appreciate Road Dogs, but they probably will once they’re hooked. Leonard’s fans will deffnitely share the critics’ hopes that Jack will return for a third performance.
Boston Globe *****
“The fun in the best of his novels—and this is the best in years—stems from the fact that Leonard starts turning the screws on page one and never stops. The dialogue crackles; the supporting characters are crisply drawn; and the story achieves almost instant escape velocity.” STEPHEN KING
Christian Science Monitor *****
“The story glides along and, before you know it, it’s way past your bedtime but Jack Foley is too charming to shut off the lights just now. In lieu of filler, Leonard revs the plot, dials up the banter, and gets out of the way.” ERIK SPANBERG
New York Times *****
“Foley has the brains, Cundo the machismo and Dawn the shamelessness to make this one of Mr. Leonard’s most enjoyably sneaky stories. ... Mr. Leonard, now 83, still writes with high style, great energy, unflappable cool and a jubilant love of the game.” JANET MASLIN
Washington Post ****
“Road Dogs is yet another gem in a career that has endured for more than half a century and given us 42 novels. ... Each [character] ismotivated by some mixture of greed and lust—with a bit of stupidityoften added—and the novel unfolds as a masterpiece of duplicity.” PATRICK ANDERSON
NY Times Book Review ****
“Droll and exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance of a master now in his mid-80s, Road Dogs—underlying its material of sex, violence and money, and beyond its cast of cons and thugs and movie stars—presents interesting questions. Can a grown person change? Speci"cally, can a man abandon an expertise that wins him respect but makes a mess of his life? Can anybody trust anybody? Is love ever true? Is friendship ever real?” ROBERT PINSKY
Oregonian ****
“Leonard is a master storyteller. ... Road Dogs evolves from a cheerful and moderately grisly buddy story into a taut study of people striving to manipulate each other without being manipulated in turn.” KATHERINE DUNN
Providence Journal ****
“Here they come again: Elmore Leonard’s larcenous, murderous, plot-spinning, yarn-spouting robbers, ex-cons, bimbos and lawmen in a terrifically funny and quirky novel that delights and shocks as much as it entertains and astounds. ... Leonard writes in such a deliciously deadpan manner that he makes his characters talk about murder and conspiracy the way we might plan a dinner party.” SAM COALE
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Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Rwanda - “Strange Setting for Elmore Leonard Book”
Not really.
The Reading Journal: Pagan Babies By Elmore Leonard
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I’ve never been to Rwanda where some 800,000 humans were slaughtered by their own people for no reason at all. Like the others, it is a place of unimaginable terror. It is also a strange setting for an Elmore Leonard book. A guy who usually sets his tales in Detroit. Yet Rwanda is exactly where he opens Pagan Babies, and that right in the aftermath of the genocide.
The story focuses on Terry a priest who lived in Rwanda during the time of the genocide who has become tired of seeing the perpetrators of that atrocity not see a trial, and not be punished in anyway. He sets a plan in motion which eventually takes him to more typical Leonard territory, Detroit. There he meets a lady, mixes with the mob and works a con or two.
It is top-form Leonard. The dialogue sparkles, the action is fast, furious and fun. Beyond the fairly brief bits in Rwanda the rest of it is pretty much vintage Leonard too. The man might not change formulas very often, but he’s is so constantly solid in his abilities that it doesn’t matter. It certainly doesn’t here.
Monday, December 21, 2009
“Justified” Trailer
permalinkSaturday, December 19, 2009
Short run for ‘Maximum Bob’
Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio)
Rich Heldenfels, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio
So many people ask me when the Maximum Bob TV Series will be on DVD. To all of you, I’m trying to answers, It isn’t easy. TV critics like Rich get them too. This from his mailbag:
permalinkQ: Several summer seasons of replacement series ago, we watched “Maximum Bob.” It starred one of the Bridges brothers. Absolutely hilarious! What ever happened to that show and why wasn’t it ever picked up as a regular series on prime time TV?
A: Based on the novel by Elmore Leonard, the series originally aired on ABC in August and September 1998. Beau Bridges starred as “Maximum Bob” Gibbs, a tough judge; the cast also included Liz Vassey and Kiersten Warren. The production team included producer-director Barry Sonnenfeld, who had done well by Leonard with the big-screen adaptation of Get Shorty. If the ratings had been good enough, ABC would have ordered more than the seven original episodes. Unfortunately, the show did not measure up, and was soon gone. But it still pops up on lists of shows canceled too soon.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
New “Justified” Trailer From Time
‘Justified’ Trailer—Um, Awesome?
By: Chris Jordan
It’s high noon for the bad guys on the upcoming FX series ‘Justified.’
The exclusive new trailer for the series opens with star Timothy Olyphant as lawman Raylan Givens shooting a bad guy at a beachside resort.
“You know we’re not able to shoot people on site anymore,’ says Givens’ commander.
‘He pulled first,’ quips Olyphant’s Givens.
Then Givens finds himself returning to the backwoods of Kentucky, where bad vibes, bullets and even rockets fly. It looks like Givens’ quick-draw style is the only thing that can save this humble town.
Olyphant, perhaps best known for his role as Seth Bullock on HBO’s ‘Deadwood,’ hasn’t let his gun get too cold since ‘Deadwood’s’ demise and, in fact, seems to have a much quicker trigger finger now. Twenty seconds don’t go by without Givens shooting or threatening to shoot someone in the trailer.
Well, sometimes you can only get justice at the end of gun.
Olyphant’s laconic Givens echoes the great Hollywood Western stars of the past, like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Let’s see if they can keep it up for a whole show, much less a series.
Graham Yost (‘Boomtown,’ ‘Speed’) developed ‘Justified,’ which is based on a popular Elmore Leonard character. The novelist is an executive producer. FX has ordered 13 episodes.
‘Justfied’ changed it name from ‘Lawman’ earlier this year to avoid confusion with the reality show ‘Steven Seagal: Lawman,’ which premiered earlier this month on A&E. The series is set to debut in March.
Watch the ‘Justified’ trailer here from Time
permalinkTuesday, December 15, 2009
The Justified Writing Staff
The eight Justified writers, left to right: Benjamin Cavell, Wendy Calhoun, Graham Yost, Elmore, Fred Golan, Clay Humphrey (standing behind), Gary Lennon and Benjamin Lobato.
The eight writer: Chris Provenzano, left, (with Elmore and Justified producer, Don Kurt.)
permalinkYou don’t often get to the faces of the writers of TV or movies, except occasionally on an awards show or this website. Above, is the entire writing staff of Justified, who, a couple of weeks ago, all came out to the set of Justified in Santa Clarita, CA to meet Elmore.
Justified, for new visitors, is the FX TV series based on Elmore’s Raylan Given’s novella, “Fire in the Hole.” Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan Givens.
All the writers have blue wristbands that say, “What Would Elmore Do?”
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Elmore in History of Elements of Style
Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style by Mark Garvey
“Stylized is a lovingly crafted history that explores Elements’ staying power and takes us from the hallowed halls of academia to the bustling offices of The New Yorker magazine to the dazzling days of old Hollywood—and into the hearts and minds of some of the most respected writers working today.”
Elmore, of course, is all over this book.
permalinkElmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing…at just over one thousand words, makes Strunk and White look like wind-bags. It’s a fun list of brief, slightly idiosyncratic pointers (Number I: “Never open a book with weather”) aimed primarily at fiction writers hoping to bring to their work some of the crackle and punch of Leonard’s own fiction. Leonard says he had a copy of The Elements of Style on his shelf for years and used to consult it occasionally, though he seems now to have misplaced it. No matter; he’s long had Elements’ key points well in hand.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
The Westerners by C. Courtney Joyner - Chapter on Elmore
The Westerners: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Writers and Producers
permalinkActors, writers, directors and producers who helped1define the genre offer unique insight about western1movies from the early talkies to the present. Interviewed here are Glenn Ford, Warren Oates, Virginia Mayo, Andrew V. McLaglen, Harry Carey, Jr., Julie Adams, A.C. Lyles, Burt Kennedy, Edward Faulkner, Aldo Sambrell, Jack Elam, Andrew J. Fenady, and Elmore Leonard. Movies they discuss include Red River, The Searchers, 3:10 to Yuma, High Noon, Bend of the River, Rio Bravo, The Wild Bunch, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, among many others.
C. Courtney Joyner is a screenwriter with more than 20 produced films to his credit. He has contributed chapters to a number of books on film history and his articles have appeared in Wildest Westerns, Fangoria and Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Elmore Visits the Set of “Justified”
While in L.A. to receive the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, Elmore visited the set of Justified, the FX TV series based on his novella, Fire in the Hole scheduled to premiere in March, 2010. Elmore is executive producer of Justified and wanted to meet the producers and writers, and especially Timothy Olyphant, who plays his favorite character-creation, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens.
The set Elmore visited was an apartment court on a busy street in Santa Clarita, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles. The entire writing staff for Justified had come out to meet him. Head writer, Graham Yost, told Elmore that he had given each member of his writing staff a blue wristband with the initials “WWED” – WHAT WOULD ELMORE DO? “It was encouraging to meet the writers, Elmore said. “They get me. They want to pick up my sound in dialog and that’s the key to getting my stuff right.”
After the writers had a chance to talk to Elmore and pick his brain about the show and its direction, Tim Olyphant came over to meet him, asking many questions about Raylan and Elmore’s work in general about which he was quite versed. Elmore said: “Seeing Tim in person confirmed the impression I already had from the Justified pilot. Tim is perfect for the part; his voice, his manner, he’s got Raylan down – the laid back Federal marshal.”
Later, on the Fox lot, Elmore met with John Landgraf, FX Network President, to discuss the show and its direction. “I was very pleased with the level of commitment at FX to making Justified a big success and true to my work,” he said.
FX has two series trailers ready; one, in fact, already aired during a recent Sons of Anarchy episode. These trailers when released wide will generate a lot of buzz and excitement for the show. Producer Sarah Timberman showed me Episode 1, which is the real test of any series, transitioning from pilot to series. Here the writers of Justified had to show their Elmore Leonard savvy. The good news is that Episode 1 maintains the Elmore Leonard sound and attitude, drawing elements from the pilot and the Fire in the Hole novella. I can’t be specific, but there is a fantastic surprise in this episode that will delight hard core Elmore Leonard fans.
I have high hopes for the series and so does Elmore. In fact, he may write another Raylan story; one that could then be incorporated into Justified, perhaps as the opening of the second season. All the writers and producers are excited about this possibility.
In sharp contrast to ABC’s abandonment of the Karen Sisco series, FX is behind Justified fore the long run.
Special thanks to Sarah Timberman, Carl Beverly, Graham Yost; and Michael Dinner for arranging our visit to the set of Justified and for being cool people.
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Thursday, December 03, 2009
PEN Center USA awards fete Elmore Leonard
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Los Angeles Times
Carolyn Kellogg
The PEN Center USA literary awards, held Wednesday night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, made for an odd intersection of worlds. Book people are somewhat less glamorous than movie people—more glasses, lower heels, generally less camera-ready—but at this event, they’re cheek and jowl. Two attendees who slipped out a little early found themselves waiting at the valet stand next to Warren Beatty, who just happened to be at the hotel—Hollywood really does go to the Polo Lounge.
The PEN event itself didn’t have quite that star power, but it did have Elmore Leonard, the author of close to 50 novels, on hand to receive PEN’s lifetime achievement award. Leonard, whom friends call Dutch, said he first stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1969—in what might have been a maid’s room—for $28 per night. He was working on adapting one of his books for the screen, and at night would go up Sunset Boulevard to catch the Grateful Dead at the Whiskey A Go-Go. That movie didn’t turn out so well, but later pictures made from his books, did: “Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight,” “Jackie Brown,” “Mr. Majestyk.”
Presenting the award to Leonard was his longtime friend, the legendary movie producer Walter Mirisch (“The Magnificent Seven,” “In the Heat of the Night”). In his carefully prepared introduction, Mirisch said Leonard has “an uncanny ear for crooks, cops and babes”; near the end, he turned the page and came up blank. A long, uncomfortable silence stretched as Mirisch checked through his papers, apparently missing the final page of his speech. “To hell with it,” he finally said, smiling, to relieved laughter, and ad-libbed his way through the end.
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Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Elmore Leonard to receive lifetime achievement award from PEN USA Tonight
Elmore will receive PEN USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award tonight at The 19th Annual Literary Awards Festival, known as LitFest. PEN USA is the Los Angeles-based professional writers organization, the division of PEN International representing writers west of the Mississippi.
Elmore’s award will be presented by his good friend, legendary film producer, Walter Mirisch. LitFest prizes go to ten writers for outstanding work in 10 separate genres.
Past recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award include: Ray Bradbury, Woody Allen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Betty Friedan, Larry Gelbart, Vaclav Havel, Walter Mosley, Christopher Isherwood, Neil Simon, Jane Smiley, Robert Towne, Billy Wilder and Gore Vidal.
Tickets, which are discounted for members, are also available to the public, as the event serves as a fundraiser for the nonprofit organization.
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FX’s Former Lawman Gets Justified
Time Magazine
Posted by James Poniewozik
In Justified, which debuts in March (date TBD), Olyphant plays the lead role of Deputy U.S. Marshal “Raylan Givens.” Givens is a modern-day 19th century-style lawman, enforcing his brand of justice in a way that puts a target on his back with criminals and places him at odds with his bosses in the Marshal service. Justified was developed by Graham Yost (Boomtown, Speed) and is based on the popular character featured in several books and short stories by famed novelist Elmore Leonard. Yost wrote the pilot and will serve as Executive Producer/Showrunner of the series. Leonard is Executive Producer, along with Sarah Timberman (Kidnapped), Carl Beverly (Kidnapped) and Michael Dinner (Karen Sisco), who directed the pilot episode. Produced by Sony Pictures Television and FX Productions. FX has ordered 13 episodes of the series, which is shot in Los Angeles.
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Unknown Man #89 - Down and Dirty
The 80s Avon’s paperback cover for the great Unknown Man #89. These old covers stir memories of reading Elmore in the early days….
What cover stirs you?
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Road Dogs “Never Fails to Thrill”
Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, priced £18.99.
No-one writes crime novels like Hollywood favourite Elmore Leonard, and he has returned with a typical tale of colourful hoodlums on the hunt for another scam.
Leonard – the man behind Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and the Stephen Soderbergh movie Out Of Sight – digs up some old cons for his new novel, with Out Of Sight ‘s Jack Foley opening Road Dogs back in the slammer.
The prolific bank robber has pretty much given up on freedom and accepted a lifetime behind bars, but that’s until the arrival of new room-mate Cundo Rey, whose crack lawyer gets him out pronto.
While he should be in the Cuban hustler’s debt, Foley subsequently shacks up with Rey’s wife Dawn on his release, and the two contrive to pinch the jive-talking midget millionaire’s assets.
Great dialogue, great characters; 84-year-old Leonard, releasing his 47th novel, never fails to thrill.
9/10 Review by Richard Mulligan
permalinkFriday, November 27, 2009
Tishomingo Blues - Playing All the Angles
Here are a couple of comps I did for the Tishomingo Blues dust jacket. I always fool around with covers.
I tweeted the line “Going to Tishomingo to get my hambone boiled.” That is from the 1926 blues song, Tishomingo Blues by Peg Leg Howell. It is not the same as the 1917 ragtime tune of the same name. Elmore heard the blues version and remembered it. He had a future title. The rest of the verse goes, “Because those Atlanta women let my hambone spoil.”
What a great experience it was researching Tishomingo with Elmore. Then what a great book he wrote. Definitely a classic. Below is the beginning of Janet Maslin’s New York Times Review. They copped the title from the Times essay that appeared the previous summer.
Leaving Out the Parts Readers Skip
By JANET MASLIN
Elmore Leonard’s latest book features a cool operator with a laid-back style, a wry, sneaky observer of human nature. He enjoys inhabiting the world of crime. He’s a smoothly calculating guy who plays all the angles. And if he takes his time getting what he wants, the important thing is that he knows how to get it.
That describes a character named Robert Taylor, the principal conniver in “Tishomingo Blues.” But of course we’re talking about the author, too. Mr. Leonard, sharp as ever, has concocted another deft, funny book about dueling miscreants, and this time he has staged the duel in costume-party style. There are ways to explain where this fits into the wide panorama of his earlier work, and why this book is a particular success. But Mr. Leonard has stated, in a list of suggestions to other writers, that it’s smart to leave out the parts that readers skip.
So back to the party: it’s a large- scale re-enactment of a Civil War battle, staged in the Mississippi Delta region of the title. And it features at least one dealer in mobile homes ? including one called the Vicksburg that “has like slave quarters in back, where you keep your lawn mower” ? dressing up as a Confederate general. This may be a good time to point out that Robert Taylor, who has his own agenda and is well aware of the Vicksburg, is black.
As if playing some kind of fill-in- the-blanks party game, Mr. Leonard has also built this story around a professional diver named Dennis Lenahan. No small part of the fun arises from wondering just what diving will have to do with the Civil War. But the great, solid thing about Mr. Leonard’s books is the certainty that it will fit, sooner or later, whenever he feels like putting the pieces together. And until that happens, he’s got a fine Southern comedy of manners on his hands.
Read the whole article here.
permalinkSunday, November 22, 2009
Year of the Dog
APP.COM
Leonard’s new thriller keeps readers guessing
By RICK MAKIN • CORRESPONDENT
The prolific Elmore Leonard (more than 40 novels and short-story collections) has come up with a new fast-paced thriller that begins with the two chief protagonists in prison and ends with one of them laid out at a funeral parlor. In between, the surprises never stop coming, for no one is quite what he or she appears to be.
If the ability to make the reader say to himself “Wow, I sure didn’t see that coming” is any indication of writing skill, then Leonard is skillful, indeed.
The protagonists are Jack Foley, America’s most prolific bank robber ever, and Cundo Rey, an artful Cuban whose ticket into the United States was Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift, when Cuban jails were emptied and thousands of very bad guys were allowed to sail north.
They meet in a federal lockup on the shores of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, and the first thing Foley notices about Cundo is that he seems to have unlimited assets on the outside and a lot of respect from the tough guys inside. Foley has 30 years to serve after having been at large for a week and being shot by an FBI agent who spent the prior night in Foley’s bed.
Foley is befriended by Cundo, who eventually tells his lawyer to file an appeal and get Foley released. The odds against this appear to be overwhelmingly long, but the lawyer (she’s gorgeous as well as smart) pulls it off. Cundo pays for it.
Cundo’s time left to be served is getting shorter, but when it becomes clear that Foley will be the first one out, Cundo tells Foley that he owns two multimillion-dollar homes across the street from each other in Venice, Calif. He says his almost-wife lives in one, and he wants Foley to occupy the other indefinitely and make sure his girlfriend isn’t being unfaithful. Can you tell where this is going?
Well, the right answer is yes and no, because there’s a lot going on that you won’t anticipate. Just when you think you’ve figured out who is using whom, another surprise emerges.
One especially interesting touch is Leonard’s command of the street argot spoken by Cundo; it seems authentic without being stereotypical, even though the character is an uneducated lowlife.
One caveat: Leonard’s characters, male and female, us the F-word a lot. But if you can get past that, you’ll find “Road Dogs” an interesting exercise.
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
Out West, When Men Were Quiet And Heroic
The New York Times
By JOHN J. O’CONNOR
Published: Friday, January 17, 1997
permalinkBefore he became an author of best-selling crime novels like ‘‘Get Shorty,’’ Elmore Leonard wrote westerns, developing early on his favorite theme, that ‘‘we don’t control our lives.’’ ‘‘Last Stand at Saber River,’’ one of the best, has now been given a rich and sensitive television production, which can be seen Sunday on TNT. Tom Selleck, who at times seems as attractively embarrassed as Clark Gable used to be about being in the suspicious business of acting, plays Paul Cable, returning in the waning days of the Civil War to his wary family and a world still filled with violence.
Cable volunteered three years earlier, in 1862, to fight on the side of the Confederacy. He returns chastened after a bloodcurdling incident that he doesn’t want to talk about. His wife, Martha (Suzy Amis), is still bitter about his joining up in the first place and leaving her to cope with the rearing of two children and the death of a third. She insists that Cable move the family from Texas back to Arizona Territory (filming was done in New Mexico), only to find that their valley home has been confiscated by two Union-sympathizing brothers (played by real-life brothers, David and Keith Carradine). Lurking ominously on the periphery is Edward Janroe (David Dukes), a seriously disturbed gunrunner who insists the South is winning the war.
This is an old-fashioned western, lean and mean. The landscape is a major character. There are stylistic echoes of the 1929 film ‘‘The Virginian,’’ which starred a new actor named Gary Cooper. The cast of ‘‘Saber River’’ includes Harry Carey Jr., a veteran of such John Ford classics as ‘‘Red River’’ and ‘‘Rio Bravo.’’ There are shootouts, with Martha blowing away more than her share of nasty varmints, and, for a grand finale, there is a hair-raising chase to save a little girl. Mr. Selleck’s taciturn Cable is almost wordlessly eloquent, and Ms. Amis’s Martha is one of the most formidable women you’ll find on a screen nowadays.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The Fall of the Roman Empire: Limited Collector’s Edition
In 1964, Encyclopedia Britannica film producer, William Deneen got permission from Hollywood film producer, Samuel Bronston to use the fabulous sets for The Fall of the Roman Empire to make a series of educational shorts about the Roman Empire. An exact replica of Rome was built near Madrid, Spain for the feature film starring Sophie Loren and Alec Guiness leading an international cast. The three educational shorts produced by Deneen were:
Life in Ancient Rome
Julius Caesar - The Rise of the Roman Empire
Claudius: Boy of Ancient Rome
His writer for these films was Elmore Leonard! This was during a hiatus in Elmore’s writing career when he earned a living doing freelance advertising and wrote a series of Encyclopedia Britannica films for Deneen. Here is an earlier post on Elmore’s EB films.
Educational films are cheesy by nature, but using the incredible sets from Madrid, elevated these three shorts to a different level altogether. They were still badly acted and directed, but they were incredible to look at. As for Elmore’s scripts, they were, well…educational. Get Shorty it ain’t, but it’s an important part of Elmore’s evolution and journey.
If you are a completist and must these films, make sure you get: The Fall of the Roman Empire: Limited Collector’s Edition. Accept no substitute. Otherwise you won’t get Disc 3: “A Collection of Historic Films About Ancient Rome, All Shot on the Film’s Sets!” The regular two-disc deluxe edition does not have the extra disc.
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Interview: Keith Hetherington - Austalian Western Writer
Steve M. interviews Keith Hetherington, an Australian western writer who has had an impressive number of books published in Australia and America. Hetherington has written between 600 and 1000 stories, he doesn’t really know. It’s fascinating to read about a guy who can still maintain a writing career in the western genre. Can you imagine Elmore still writing westerns? I’m sure some reading this can.
Apparently Keith gets good writing, western or not.
Steve M. asked:
permalinkWhich western writers would you recommend?
Which writers would I recommend now? Well, I like Elmore Leonard, both his thrillers and his Westerns - he’s got a style all his own, laconic, tough, knowledgeable.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
FX’s ‘Lawman’ Now Called ‘Justified’
Hartford Courant
Roger Catlin
Names are important to TV shows.
“A lot of you are aware I tried to retitle it,” producer Bill Lawrence says in a letter to critics accompanying episodes of the retooled “Scrubs,” which he wanted to call something else to better reflect its new casting and direction.
ABC, which is premiering the show Dec. 1, understandably wants to build on the original by keeping the brand the name.
But FX, which is soon to premiere an interesting new drama starring Timothy Olyphant as a modern day U.S. Marshal (as opposed to the sheriff he played on “Deadwood”) under the name “Lawman” has scrapped that name several weeks before the premiere.
The drama, based on a short story by Elmore Leonard and set in Kentucky, is now being called “Justified.”
In one sense, it’s another generic legal term. But FX didn’t change it because it loved the new name as much as it did so it wouldn’t be confused with a reality show from a faded action film star.
“Steven Seagal: Lawman” starts Dec. 2 on A&E, chronicling the actor’s real-life experiences aiding the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana.
“Justified” is at least the third title for the FX series - its first working title was the name of the Leonard short story on which it’s based, “Fire in the Hole.”
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Friday, November 13, 2009
Valdez is Coming: Finally in Finnish
Juri Nummelin reviews Valdez is Coming at pulpetti
Elmore’s best-known western novel, Valdez Is Coming, was just translated for the first time in Finnish (partly due to my suggestion to the publisher). In fact, it was Leonard’s first western translated in Finnish (apart from a short story in Seikkailujen Maailma in the 1950s), which is surprising. Then again, Leonard had only two crime novel translations in the paperback series of the seventies and sixties (both, Mr Majestyk and 52 Pick-Up, are very good and come highly recommended), so there might’ve been some issues with his agent. Leonard’s had a bit of bad luck with Finnish publishers even later on, with publishers changing almost from book to book and the publishers treating him with bad translations and not very good covers and bad marketing. Some of his earlier masterpieces are still left untranslated, so it’s even more fabulous that Valdez Is Coming is now available in Finnish (the Finnish publisher is Bookkari, by the way).
The book is famous also for having been filmed, by Edwin Sherrin in the early seventies, with Burt Lancaster. The film is remarkable for keeping Leonard’s ending intact - in the 2000’s it would’ve been changed into a lengthy gunfight. This ending is more in par with Leonard’s terse prose and the worldview of his characters: do, don’t just tell you’re doing. It’s something deeper than the old advice “show, don’t tell”. Leonard’s style and narration are always about what needs to be done, what’s necessary to do. Thus the emotions of his characters come clear, even though there’s not much talk about them per se.
Valdez Is Coming must be one of the best western novels ever.
A minor bibliographical point: the Finnish edition has the original publishing year as 1970. That was however the year when the book was published in the USA, by Fawcett. The book had come out from the British lending library publisher Robert Hale a year before that, as a hardcover (which seems to be very rare), so the actual first publishing year is 1969.
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Elmore Leonard Dishes Up Incredible Stories Again
The Boston Globe
March 24, 2003
By Michael Prager, Globe Staff
When the Women Come Out to Dance
Readers who have followed the long path of Elmore Leonard know that when he was starting out in the 1950s, still with his hand in advertising copywriting, he wrote short stories and Westerns.
In “When the Women Come Out to Dance,” his 39th publication, he comes back to both, though in the case of Westerns, not exclusively. Strictly, that description applies only to “The Tonto Woman,” which tells of a character kidnapped and tattooed by Indians and banished by her husband to an isolated hut when she is returned a dozen years later.
But “Hurrah for Captain Early,” about a black soldier’s return to discrimination after fighting with valor in the Spanish-American War, is also set in the Southwest. And “Tenkiller,” though set in modern-day Oklahoma, has plenty of Wild West bravado.
“Tenkiller” is the longest of the nine tales and one of only two appearing for the first time in this collection. It is the story of Ben Walker, and it is genuine Leonard in miniature: An Okie makes his way in the world, first as a rodeo champ and then as a Hollywood stuntman. He’s not pure - but he’s good - and he’s known both love and tragedy.
A hallmark of Leonard’s recent work has been how he salts his stories with pop culture references, which reached a crescendo in “Get Shorty” and its unfortunate sequel, “Be Cool.” Though he continues the hip parade throughout this collection, he adds another layer: references to the worlds he has previously wrought.
Walker’s story, for example, could be an alternate outcome for Bear, the genial enforcer for a crooked limo-service operator who ultimately befriends Chili Palmer in “Get Shorty.” Bear’s employer is a black man named Bo Catlett; so is the main character in “Hurrah for Captain Early,” as was a cavalryman in “Gunsights,” an early Leonard Western.
Raylan Givens, previously of “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap,” is a key figure in “Fire in the Hole,” in which an old acquaintance reappears as the sort of guy who knows the country’s going to hell and is bound to prevent it no matter how much blood must be shed.
And Karen Sisco, the federal agent in “Out of Sight” (portrayed by Jennifer Lopez in the 1998 movie), returns in “Karen Makes Out,” in which she falls for a bad guy, again.
Leonard explores another kind of literary recycling in “Chickasaw Charlie Hoak,” in which he takes a minor character from “Tishomin go Blues” and makes the story all about him. Guys like Hoak - who is amusingly, annoyingly stuck on the questionable glory attached to having pitched,
once, in the Major Leagues - have long been part of Leonard’s rich fabric. By developing him into a main character, Leonard shows that every time he sits down with pen and pad, he could go down countless paths. That fact is sometimes lost in his incredibly credible stories, which often seem reported rather than created.
The most unexpected treat of the collection is “Hanging Out at the Buena Vista,” a five-page tour de force that is, simultaneously, Leonard most typical and Leonard most unlikely. To the former point, the plot is carried almost entirely by dialogue, with a quote in almost every paragraph. Leonard often speaks of wanting not to intrude on the story, of wanting his characters to do the work, and rarely has the technique been more refined. Of course, it doesn’t prevent Leonard from sharing his sharp observations, such as when the character Vincent opines that “a woman can get away with a good [hairpiece]. But you see a rug on a guy, every hair in place? You can always tell.” And Vincent again, a couple of paragraphs later, on the health of health care workers: “Some are okay, but they all have big butts. You notice that? Hospitals, the same thing. I’ve made a study: The majority of women who work in health care are seriously overweight.”
So what’s different about this one? There are only the two characters, Vincent and Natalie, and neither is a villain. There’s no hint of crime or a checkered past - just two old folks in a trailer park, looking for companionship as they await their end by cancer.
Could it be that even as he revisits old friends and old haunts, Leonard is about to embark on an entirely new path? Almost certainly not, but it does show that Leonard, even well into his 70s, is capable of anything, and of anything new.
permalinkSunday, November 08, 2009
Out of Sight - Best George Clooney Movie
StlToday.com
Joe Holleman: Life Sherpa
A look at the Best George Clooney films. There could be another one on the list if George decideds to do Road Dogs!
1, Out of Sight (1998)
Jack Foley: A great crime drama about a bank robber who is looking for his last big score, but runs head-on into a nasty group of Detroit hoods wanting in on the action. Hard to beat the combination of Elmore Leonard’s crisp storytelling, Steven Soderbergh’s deft directing and across-the-board strong acting from Clooney, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, Albert Brooks, Dennis Farina and the talented Jennifer Lopez — before she became a diva/celeb.
Read the rest of the story here.
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Thursday, November 05, 2009
52 Pickup Review - Film Noir Pulp Fiction Way Before Tarantino
WiderScreening.Com
Pornhound Goes to the Movies
52-Pick-up is being regularly revisted these days. The film had never achieved the status of Elmore’s big three: Get Shorty, Jackie Brown and Out of Sight, bur Pornhound thinks it’s the best of Elmore’s films: “52 Pick Up was the pinnacle: subsequent big Hollywood hits like Get Shorty were commercialized crap in comparison,” he said.
He wrote:
For the grindhouse-loving, dope-smoking, acid-happy pornhound that I was, 52 Pick-Up was the right stuff, the good shit.
It’s got enough film noir heritage to make it worthy of serious critical analysis, but this was film noir brought to the porn ghetto. Blackmail.
52 Pick-Up is just that: film noir pulp fiction as sleazy as mainstream got in the 1980s. It’s the real deal. Frankenheimer was always morally ambiguous and in 52 Pick-Up he gets to wallow in seediness for the fun of it: villains Chris Glover and Clarence Williams III are radiant lowlifes and Glover relishes the character, making this his finest work. Glover’s portrayal of the blackmailing pornographer is a delight in smarmy amorality, the joy of a smart man turned bad man for the fun of it and surrounding himself in young snatch, his camera (and Frankenheimer’s) partying with naked porn stars.
Read the rest here.
