Elmore Leonard, 1925-2013

I was at the after-party, or as they used to call it back then, the party, for the premiere of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown in 1997, at this nice nightspot in Times Square that I think was called The Kit Kat Club or something, and I happened to be standing at the bar close to the kitchen door, and there was Abel Ferrara, and we were kind of standing at either side of the path down which various servers streamed out carrying huge platters of food. It was amusing. "It's a Harvey party," Ferrara observed. "Eat, drink, and be merry." Feeling sufficiently emboldened by the festive vibe, I asked Ferrara how he, who had made a movie, the ill-fated 1989 Cat Dancer, from an Elmore Leonard book some years prior to Tarantino's film—an adaptation of Leonard's Rum Punch—thought Quentin had done by the maestro. "He did great. Got the tone just right. Did you see Get Shorty?" He rolled his eyes. "God. So studio-ized. Every time they shoot Travolta from a low angle they've got the fucking key light giving him a halo." I knew what he meant. Jackie Brown wasn't exactly what you could call flat in terms of its lighting, but its opening shot of Pam Grier on the moving walkway at the airport set the visual tone, one of exceptional clarity. I liked Get Shorty better than Ferrara did (and Leonard himself acted as executive producer on its sequel, Be Cool), I think it's pretty entertaining, but its patina of Hollywood slickness was really unnecessary, to the point of being kind of distracting once you noticed it. 

One ought never mistake clarity for artlessness. Especially in prose. Here's a passage from Leonard's 1976 Swag: 

Frank was waiting in the T-bird, in the lot behind the Berkley Theater on Twelve Mile Road. They changed from their suit coats to lightweight jackets, took off their ties, and got their revolvers out of the glove box. Frank put on sunglasses; Stick, a souvenir Detroit Tiger baseball cap. They left their suit coat and ties in the T-bird, got in the Impala, and drove over to the A&P on the corner of Southfield and Twelve. On the way, Stick said he almost took the car with the pink-and-white pompoms all over it. He didn't because he was afraid Frank might feel a little funny riding in it.

It was a good-looking A&P, in a high-income suburban area. But Frank didn't like all the cars in the parking area. Too many.

They drove back to a bowling alley-bar on Twelve and Berkley to kill some time and had a few vodkas-and-tonic in the dim, chrome-and-Formica lounge. Sitting in a bar in the early evening reminded Stick of Florida. He didn't like the feeling.

The writing is lean, arguably "plain," and has a compelling tautness to it. The standard thing to say about such stuff is that not a single word is unnecessary. Okay, but as a thought experiment, how about that "souvenir?" Arguably in 1976 a baseball cap was more a takeaway purchase from a sporting event than a standard urban or sun-shielding wardrobe item, so there is that. But the word is also exceptionally apropos to the character Frank Ryan, an arriviste in the criminal world who engineers a partnership with the more experienced Stick, who for a while has no choice in the matter. A substantial part of Leonard's art was in knowing his characters well enough to imbue them with the traits that will add up to their destiny in unobtrusive, organic-seeming ways, all of which enhanced the pleasure in the reading. 

When I was just learning to read seriously, a lot of literary types were bemoaning, and not without reason, the absence of Chandler and Hammett. It took me a little while to figure out that  while those guys were indeed worth mourning, I myself was in fact  living in a golden age of genre fiction, because Donald Westlake/Richard Stark, Charles Willeford, George V. Higgins, and Elmore Leonard were alive and kicking and writing. And now Leonard, like those contemporaries of his, is gone. And like all the writers mentioned, he is irreplaceable. And aside from his books, he's got his name attached to more quality movies than most first-stripe directors these days do. I'd like to take some time today and watch one of them, but I've got something else to do first, and it's something that I am grateful to have learned from Leonard and a few others, which is to get some writing that isn't this done today. 

Comments

[Oliver_C]

Still Tarantino's best film by a country mile, and if saying that exposes me to accusations of hipsterism or contrarianism, so be it.

[Petey]

He had good timing, from my limited POV. After plowing through a couple of his books as a pup, I've JUST (within weeks) finished reading his ENTIRE crime output in sequence, all the way from 52 Pick-Up in '74 to Out of Sight in '96, (with Tishomongo Blues and Road Dogs added in as a nod to the late work), in a relatively short time period. Incredibly good stuff. It all just goes down so smooth. Not a dud in the bunch. Dude knew what he was doing at a profound level. RIP.

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And in this time of grieving and rending of garments, I shall mention the joyous news that Dancing Aztecs just got put back in print in my favored dead-tree form factor. Tasty stuff.

[lipranzer]

I'd like to put in a good word for "Touch", the one oddball entry in his catalog, as well as even for the Paul Schrader movie (though it doesn't quite measure up to the novel). His style takes what could have been unbelievable and/or maudlin and makes it moving and believable instead (I seem to remember in an intro to one edition of this novel that it was his personal favorite of all of his works, but I may be remembering wrong).

Also, I was one of those happy few who watched "Karen Sisco", the TV spinoff of OUT OF SIGHT (still my favorite movie adaptation of Leonard's work), and boy I wish that had gotten a fair shake from the network.

[Petey]

"I'd like to put in a good word for "Touch", the one oddball entry in his catalog"

Agreed. One of my faves. (Maximum Bob squeezes in a bit of that book's themes, while being more strictly 'genre'.)

"though it doesn't quite measure up to the novel"

NONE of the movie adaptions do, no matter how good. He was that good a writer.

But agreed again. Schrader's adaptation is quite good fun. As with all good Dutch adaptions, Schrader didn't try to do too much with it other than just bring it to the screen. You will believe Skeet Ulrich IS Jesus...

[Petey]

And Glenn wins, if not the internet, then the Best Dutch Obit Of The Day.

Why talk Ten Rules of Writing when you can show!

(Plus he's got the Glenn-requisite genuinely interesting 'n' hip celeb nugget.)

[Not David Bordwell]

Oh, man, I cannot second lipranzer's thoughts on "Karen Sisco" enough. The role was perfectly tailored to Carla Gugino's beauty and brains, Robert Forster was a brilliant bit of casting as her dad, and Bill Duke was great as her stoic, Castillo-like boss. One image I will never get out of my head from that show is Karen plowing through a fifth of bourbon after getting shot—something easy to imagine Sonny Crockett doing, but not some broad. I think too many producers (or maybe just Danny Devito killed that show.

Reading around the obits and appreciations, does anyone know what to make of the critical consensus that the early(ish) Westerns (THE TALL T, original 3:10 TO YUMA, HOMBRE, VALDEZ IS COMING) and late "neo" noirs (GET SHORTY, JACKIE BROWN, OUT OF SIGHT, even "Justified") are the only ones to get the Elmore Leonard tone/vibe right?

Of the films Leonard wrote, JOE KIDD is kind of a flaccid mess, one of the laziest Eastwood vehicles apart from the ice cold Duvall perf. But that was made when the genre had run out of steam. MR. MAJESTYK is pretty underrated, though, IMHO.

Maybe it's already too late to start this conversation, but I'm genuinely curious as to the august commentators' opinions about why nobody could make a decent Elmore Leonard movie for about twenty years.

Oh, also curious about everyone's first Leonard novel. Mine was FREAKY DEAKY.

[Petey]

"Maybe it's already too late to start this conversation, but I'm genuinely curious as to the august commentators' opinions about why nobody could make a decent Elmore Leonard movie for about twenty years."

Cuz no one understood that you were supposed to do as little modification to the book as possible.

(My guess is that Get Shorty broke the floodgates because Dutch seemed to write it with the express intention of showing the industry how to just film the damn book.)

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And while I still think Glenn had the best Obit, the Onion's effort is reasonably humorous.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/elmore-leonard-modern-prose-master-noted-for-his-t,33559/

[Brad Olson]

I feel like the film version of 52 Pick-Up is getting short shrift in all the film-related reminiscences (as it always has) - before Get Shorty and Out of Sight and Jackie Brown "got it right," 52 Pick-Up already had, especially in the genius casting of the trio of bad guys, Glover and Williams and Trebor are all perfect

[lipranzer]

52 PICK-UP is indeed somewhat underrated (and Glover is a great bad guy), but it is limited by the fact Leonard's humor isn't there.

[Chris L.]

Oliver C: "[Jackie Brown is] still Tarantino's best film by a country mile."

Amen to that, and I plan to revisit it soon. Somehow I wish QT would do the same; it sounds odd after he just won an Oscar for writing, but that Leonard-style disciplined storytelling really curbed his excesses in a way we haven't seen lately.

[Kurzleg]

Chris L: "it sounds odd after he just won an Oscar for writing, but that Leonard-style disciplined storytelling really curbed his excesses in a way we haven't seen lately."

That's an astute observation. I imagine QT feels the need to out QT himself with each new effort, or at least to meet the expectations that viewers have for each new QT film. Don't have time to look it up, but I believe JB is the one QT film that's not an original QT script. If true, it might explain why JB is a sort of outlier.

[Josh Z]

[Insert obligatory rejoinder here about how none of Tarantino's scripts are "original."]

[Griff]

Abel Ferrara's ill-fated movie of an Leonard novel was actually called CAT CHASER. The picture doesn't work, but it's not uninteresting. It has a sharply drawn (and scary) Charles Durning performance and some unusually intense work by Kelly McGillis.

[Mr. Ziffel]

Nice obit, Glenn. I read 52 PICK-UP back when I was around twelve in the late seventies and gobbled up everything he did, or had done, after that. I grew up in Detroit, so his death resonates; the passage you chose is an example of how well he knew that setting. He was a wonderful writer, and a pretty cool dude as well, so he will be missed.

[Kurzleg]

Josh Z: "[Insert obligatory rejoinder here about how none of Tarantino's scripts are "original."]"

I meant "original" in the sense that others aren't credited with the original story. As far as I can tell, JB's the only one where that's the case. (I'm excluding his work with Roger Avary since to whatever degree they're collaborations as opposed to adaptations.) How "original" QTs screenplays are in the traditional meaning of the term is a different question.

[Jeff McMahon]

Just as a corrective to the "outlier" idea above, I like Jackie Brown just fine, but I also think it's a film a lot of filmmakers could have made. QT's movies since, like them or not, are the work of his very particular voice, and I value them accordingly.

[Oliver_C]

'Kill Bill', 'Southland Tales', Kurosawa's 'Dreams' -- undeniably unadulterated from an auterist viewpoint, but I myself find their 'purity' detrimental, like some lovingly-reared, perfectly-spotted dalmatian who's profoundly (tone-)deaf.

[Petey]

"Just as a corrective to the "outlier" idea above, I like Jackie Brown just fine, but I also think it's a film a lot of filmmakers could have made. QT's movies since, like them or not, are the work of his very particular voice, and I value them accordingly."

I agree entirely. Quentin's original writer-director work is quite enjoyable. And folks who don't see that are poorer for their blurry eyes.

But there's also the fact, that, given the limited number of features Quentin knows he has left, he'd be quite reasonable to want to do what gives him the most fun, which is likely original writer-director work.

However, at the same time, it's too bad. Don't get me wrong. Soderbergh, Schraeder, and even Sonnenfield all did reasonable justice to Dutch books. But there is still something about Quentin that makes him IDEAL for this particular adaptation task. I can't think of anyone off the top of my head I'd rather have bring LaBrava or Freaky Deaky to the screen than Quentin.

[John Warthen]

I'm going to toss a name in here, unmentioned in the citation of a Leonard-Higgins-Willeford-Westlake/Stark canon, because Leonard-lovers might not have heard of Ross Thomas. Seems to me Leonard's later novels showed more affinity for Thomas's 25 books than for anyone else's. Lots of similarities: plots without dawdle, exuberant chatter, a shared interest in American roguery, and wit you could shave ice with. Thomas showed more interest than Leonard in politics and labor unions, less in picturesque losers. But he took his best title-- THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE-- straight from Twain, and Leonard surely traces from that geneology as well.

[Kurzleg]

Petey - "I agree entirely. Quentin's original writer-director work is quite enjoyable. And folks who don't see that are poorer for their blurry eyes.

But there's also the fact, that, given the limited number of features Quentin knows he has left, he'd be quite reasonable to want to do what gives him the most fun, which is likely original writer-director work.

However, at the same time, it's too bad. Don't get me wrong. Soderbergh, Schraeder, and even Sonnenfield all did reasonable justice to Dutch books. But there is still something about Quentin that makes him IDEAL for this particular adaptation task. I can't think of anyone off the top of my head I'd rather have bring LaBrava or Freaky Deaky to the screen than Quentin."

I enjoy QT's original work just fine. I also share your sentiment about QT focusing on his own scripts to the exclusion of other source material. The style of JB seems to consciously mirror Leonard's writing style, which suggests that QT is challenged by the work of others and tries to serve the story as opposed to his own impulses.

[Jeff McMahon]

Oliver_C, I think what you're saying is that just because something is "auteurist", it doesn't make it GOOD.
Picasso and Brahms did some stinkers in their time, too.

[Petey]

Well, maybe I'll take back my producer's suggestion of Quentin for LaBrava. Maybe it's a job for the Coen Brothers instead...

[Oliver_C]

Well, yes, Jeff, certainly Homer sometimes nods, and my embrace of auterism has never, pace Truffaut, extended to advocacy of a director's every film. Also, it's simply that (say) Kurosawa's 'High and Low' -- which was based on an Ed McBain pulp, and had 3 co-writers -- nevertheless seems to encapsulate him far more, and far better, than the self-penned, semi-autobiographical 'Dreams'.

[DeafEars]

The first Leonard flick I saw was MR. MAJESTYK on television, and while I wouldn't say it's the best one by any means, it's pretty darn spiffy, with one of Bronson's best performances - I have a fond memory of watching it with my Pop and realizing at some point that this wasn't an ordinary crime film - around the point Al Letteiri said "Bring the man's melons in."

[george]

Glad to see some respect for MR. MAJESTYK. No masterpiece, but well-made, professional entertainment. And one of Bronson's loosest and funniest performances. It looks better every year.

All I remember about JOE KIDD was the train-through-the-barroom climax, which Eastwood claimed was his idea. He reportedly had some sort of flu during the filming, which may explain his "lazy" performance.