Get Shorty

Product Information

Some, I've even seen scripts where I know words weren't spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it.

For the movie's plot, Chili recounts Leo's story to Harry in the third person, as if it were a work of fiction. A major Hollywood film starring John Travolta, GET SHORTY has also been adapted for TV with Chris O’Dowd and Ray Romano . Five of his novels – Live by Night, Mystic River, Gone, Baby, Gone, Shutter Island and The Drop – have been adapted into films.Chili retrieves the jacket by punching Ray in the face which leads, a dozen years later, to (stay with me) Chili investigating the faked death of a Miami dry cleaner, which brings Chili to Las Vegas not long before he shows up in the study of a B-movie Hollywood actress named Karen Flores to threaten a deadbeat producer, Harry Zimm, who leads him into the movie business, where he attempts to leave loan-sharking behind and become a producer – along with Harry and Karen – of the film Mr Lovejoy. So Chili is, in essence, pitching an Elmore Leonard story within an Elmore Leonard novel to an Elmore Leonard character (who will ultimately be played by Gene Hackman). He placed them on the page with a kind of pitiless joy; he never sentimentalised them, but that didn’t make him (or us) love them any less. Michael Weir, played by Danny DeVito as Martin Weir, is far less interesting on the page, a flaky talent in the mold of Dustin Hoffman.

If you’ve never read any of Elmore Leonard’s novels (perhaps because crime fiction isn’t a genre that interests you? A murder, a plane crash, a random mugging that wasn’t actually random, a heist that implodes, a child gone missing – these are staple inciting incidents of a lot of crime fiction. When the movies tried to transpose the plot to the screen without giving the characters their full due, they failed. It’s no surprise that so many of Leonard’s books have been snapped up for big-screen adaptations ( Freaky Deaky, Jackie Brown, Hombre and, of course, Get Shorty, to name just a few).

This clutter – banal junk that Harry babbles on about, fictional movie scenes discussed, characters talking about or imagining alternate realities of what might have happened – made the book an uneven read for me. As cool as Chili Palmer, Raylan Givens, Ernest Stickley Jr or Vincent Mora – to name just a few of the laconic badasses who took centre stage at one time or another in his novels. Odd coincidence … I was getting ready for bed, brushing my teeth, when I heard the TV that my husband had on in the bedroom.

Harry thinks he can use Michael’s name to get a big studio deal to make something better than schlock for a change , but he’s got a problem with a drug dealer name Bo Catlett who usually finances his movies to launder drug money. In the end, Get Shorty (a title that is never explained, though “Shorty” has long been rumoured to refer to Dustin Hoffman who supposedly flirted, ad infinitum, with playing the lead in an adaptation of LaBrava) is a celebration of the impulse to tell stories and the corresponding need to hear them. Despite the shortcomings I felt the book had, it will be one I remember, if for nothing else, for the fantastic characters, of which I only mentioned Chili but just about all of them were iconic.As the lure of Tinseltown’s dream-makers and gorgeous wannabe starlets becomes increasingly hard to resist, Chili gets caught up in murder,revenge and romance. All Leonard asked of plot was that it be a serviceable vehicle, but the journey and the people who took it, that was everything. The dialogue is golden Elmore Leonard, with each character's voice so distinct that Leonard rarely needs to modify it with the names of characters. The story moves forward, and so do Chili and Leo, to Los Angeles where after many amusing and amazing turns of plot later, Chili ends up getting into the movie business. That brought the movie star all the way back with questions in his eyes, sitting up, interested in the real stuff.

The first great English detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone is presented in a Folio Society limited edition of 750 numbered copies. And yet, underneath all that cool was a moral vision all the more powerful for its refusal to overwhelm the narrative. The attempt to reference pop culture as it was in the 1990s seemed forced and a caricature of all things considered “hip” at the end of the 20th century.

When someone asks Chili who the protagonist is, Chili is shocked that it’s not apparent that the loan shark is the good guy because to him it’s obvious that he’s the hero of this story. The difference was, in the movie business, you didn't worry about somebody getting turned to save their ass and pointing at you in court. Elmore Leonard wrote more than 40 books during his long career, including the bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty and Rum Punch, as well as the acclaimed collection When the Women Come Out to Dance, which was a New York Times Notable Book. It’s great to see how meta this book can get at times particularly with its focus on Hollywood and it’s interesting to learn that Leonard wrote this book based on his own experiences, managing to incorporate good jokes about the people that work in the industry. The first ever illustrated edition, with an introduction by Patti Smith, is a must-have for fans of the genre.