Originally Posted by undercoverlover
ive never heard of elmore leonard, could you name of their books i might have heard of them?
That's sad. Also probably not true. I'm sure you know and like movies from Elmore Leonard books, you just don't know the name Elmore Leonard.
Elmore is a writer who's work has been adapted into movies since the 1960s. He's also tried his hand at screenwriting, but his strength is as a novelist. He has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, and has great fun putting quirky characters in genre plots.
He's known best for his crime fiction, but he's also written a bunch of Westerns and a few other pieces that are difficult to slot in any easy genre. And while Hollywood has been making his books into movies for nearly forty years, they didn't get it right until a man named Scott Frank did the adapting with
Get Shorty (1995). Frank is the screenwriter who finally cracked the Elmore Leonard nut, and good adaptations have followed in its wake (including another by Scott Frank himself). Like magic, all the sudden everybody seemed to "get" how to do it. And notably for all you fanboys out there, Tarantino gives most of the credit to his dialogue style to reading Elmore Leonard novels.
The three Leonard movies everybody probably knows - and that are probably the best of the lot too:
Get Shorty (1995 - Barry Sonnenfeld),
Jackie Brown (1997 - Quentin Tarantino) and
Out of Sight (1998 - Steven Soderbergh). I also like
Touch (1997 - Paul Schrader),
Hombre (1967 - Martin Ritt),
3:10 to Yuma (1957 - Delmer Dawes),
52 Pick-Up (1986 - John Frankenheimer) and
Mr. Majestyk (1974 - Richard Fliescher). Most of the others (and there are many) are flawed in lots of ways, everything from the script to the budget to the director and too often all three.
Be Cool, Leonard's sequel to
Get Shorty, will be in theaters soon, with Travolta reprising his role of Chili Palmer and a whole new slew of supporting characters played by the likes of Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn and Cedric the Entertainer. Unfortunately Scott Frank didn't adapt the screenplay this time, so we'll see how it turns out. The trailer is decent enough, but the trickiest thing to get with Elmore's stuff is the all-important tone. Hopefully they nailed it as well as
Get Shorty did.
Also coming late this year is
Tishomingo Blues, directed by and co-starring the great Don Cheadle. This one I have high hopes for and could be quite interesting.
Leonard has over a couple dozen books in print, and still comes out with a new one every year or so.
So, still say you don't know who Elmore Leonard is?
BUT, as to Leonard's writing related to the specific topic of this thread, I'd never put his name onto such a list. He's a terrific writer, but the plots are often afterthoughts or merely a loose framework. Leonard is all about character and dialogue. His story writing, per se, is actually pretty weak. A master of tone and attitude, but doesn't seem to give a flip about plots and often abandons narrative strands midway through his books. It works great for him, but would seem to preclude him from such a discussion as this.
I think, anyway.