All Quiet on the Western Front was a big influence on the young Elmore Leonard.  In 1935, he read a serialized version in The Detroit Times, and saw the 1930 film version.  He staged a play in fifth grade based on the story, using the desks in the classroom as no-mans-land.  He wishes he still had a copy of that play.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

photo by: Dean Evangelista

Heroes or villains?
By Crawford Kilian

TheTyee.ca

I ran across a copy of Up in Honey’s Room the other day, and enjoyed the pleasure of holding an unread Elmore Leonard novel in my hand.

It didn’t stay unread for long. Adding to the general fun of a crime/spy story set in 1945 Detroit, Leonard makes it the third novel in a family saga. The hero is U.S. marshal Carl Webster, a bit older than he was in The Hot Kid (1930s Oklahoma), with cameo appearances by his father Virgil, a major character in Cuba Libre (the Spanish-American War in 1898).

The Websters and their womenfolk are typical Leonard characters, which means the men are bloody-minded individualists and the women are twice as tough and smart as the men.

Still writing in his mid-80s, Leonard has maintained a consistent style and vision for decades. You might call it hardboiled, but you’d be wrong.

Counting on the smart reader

Ernest Hemingway copied the unemotional narrative of the Icelandic sagas, where we know only what the characters say and do—not what they think and feel. We have to deduce their thoughts. It was a very successful style, though it now sounds dated.

Dashiell Hammett and other 1930s writers used Hemingway’s style to create hardboiled crime fiction, which was really contemptuous of its characters’ thoughts and feelings. That in turn changed into the sadism of Mickey Spillaine and the self-conscious similes of Raymond Chandler—similes that piled up like glittering poker chips in some crooked game where Death himself was the dealer.

Elmore Leonard went back to the Icelandic source and to the speech rhythms of working-class America. He assumes we have the intelligence to understand what his characters are going through, so he doesn’t waste our time telling us.

An odd sense of personal justice

But while his characters speak as naturally as Huck Finn, they are a little larger than life. They have a strong sense of personal justice. In Cuba Libre, one character robs a bank—of exactly the amount he believes it owes him. Carl Webster, as a teenager in The Hot Kid, kills a man who’s stealing the Webster family cattle. He goes on to kill a lot of other people, without suffering noticeable psychological harm.

This kind of violent stoicism clearly appeals to many of us who feel nervous just walking past the kids in front of the convenience store. Leonard’s heroes keep cool even when crooks have them tied up at gunpoint.

And what crooks! Critics praised Hammett for giving murder back to people who had good reasons to commit it. Leonard gives murder to people who have stupid reasons to commit it. His villains are clever morons, ambitious beyond their abilities. They’re optimists, even idealists, believing in the American dream of endless ascent to wealth, over as many bodies as it takes.

As tough as the heroes are, and as vicious as the villains may be, Leonard’s women usually decide matters. They shelter and heal the heroes, and sometimes they beat the bad guys to the draw. The heroes are respectful of the women’s brains and sexiness, and sometimes baffled as well. The villains ensure their own downfall by underestimating the women.

Leonard is a political writer in more than male-female relations. In Bandits (1987), his semi-crooked heroes go after some money the CIA plans to give the Nicaraguan Contras. Freaky Deaky (1988) includes relics of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. Pagan Babies (2000) deals with the genocide in Rwanda. He is not particularly preachy; politics is just part of his characters’ lives, and they respond accordingly.

The thriller as satire

Much of the authenticity of Leonard’s settings is thanks to his own long life in places like Detroit and Florida. Up in Honey’s Room portrays 1945 Detroit with details surely drawn from Leonard’s own youth.

But he also relies on research, sometimes too much. Cuba Libre turns into a kind of coal-burning techno-thriller as his characters rattle off the specs of the U.S. warships attacking Cuba. The characters in Up in Honey’s Room spend too much time needlessly talking about details of the war—informing us, not each other.

Homer nodded, and so does Elmore. But we do learn a lot from him about forgotten aspects of American history, about the way bail bondsmen do business, and about the way a lot of American men wish they were. His deadpan style conceals a lot of deadpan humour, at the expense of both heroes and villains.

When the gunshots stop ringing in your ears, you realize you’re reading not just a thriller-writer, but a satirist comparable to Twain and Vonnegut. We will not see his like again.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Elmore receives the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award from John Moser, Chairman of the conference.

On Saturday, Elmore received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award at the 13th Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland.

Elmore started off his day with an interview with Michael Brown of Montgomery College Television.  We’ll post that interview soon. 

After opening remarks by John Moser, Chairman of F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference Committee and Carolyn Terry, Dean of Humanities, Montgomery College, Rockville Campus, there was a panel discussion, “Crime and Mystery – A New and Yet Familiar Genre.” moderated by Pulitzer prize winning critic and Washington Post Book World Columnist, Michael Dirda, with novelists Laura Lippman and George Pelecanos.  Elmore was asked to join this exceptional panel.

Elmore and George Pelecanos.

After lunch, novelist Susan Cheever, daughter of the late John Cheever, gave a fascinating keynote address: The Mystery of Great Writing From 1850 to the Present, followed a little later by the presentation of the Thirteenth Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award to Elmore.  He was introduced by George Pelaconaos, and then talked about Fitzgerald who was represented by his agent, the late H. N. Swanson.  Elmore then read the opening scene of Killshot.

Special thanks to John Moser, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference Committee, Montgomery College and all the partiipants for making this a very memorable event.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

As we were saying…

Harvey Weinstein explains it all for you
by Patrick Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

It’s gotten to the point where if you have a movie with the Weinstein Co., you need to have your agent phoning Exhibitor Relations every morning to see if your film’s still coming out. Even worse, you can’t be sure who’ll be handling the company’s acquisition, marketing or production either. As the Hollywood Reporter revealed yesterday, a host of top Weinstein execs are jumping ship. The company’s co-heads of acquisitions and production left recently. They will now be joined by the company’s production president , a senior VP of production and a top marketing executive, who are either heading out the door or leaving shortly.

Luckily, I managed to get Harvey Weinstein on the phone late today, and he had an answer for everything. He contends that all the late-breaking moves are simply ways for the company to take advantage of various marketing, promotion and scheduling opportunities. Here’s his take [on Killshot]:
.
“Killshot”: “Everyone has said that Mickey Rourke is amazing in ‘The Wrestler’ and will be up for all sorts of awards, so we decided to move ‘Killshot’ to a date a few weeks before the Oscars. That way we can capitalize on all the heat that’s going to be around Mickey.”

Read the rest of Patrick Goldstein’s article

The 81st Academy Awards will again take place at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on February 22, 2009.

The 13th annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference will run from 8:30 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. Saturday, honoring writer Elmore “Dutch” Leonard and offering lectures, discussions and workshops for aspiring authors.

There will also be speeches and book signings by published writers.

Leonard will receive the F. Scott Fitzgerald award for outstanding achievement in American literature. The author and screenwriter has written more than 40 novels, including “Freaky Deaky,” “Killshot,” “Maximum Bob,” “Get Shorty” and the short story “3:10 to Yuma.”

The conference will include a variety of workshops, including new ones in screen adaptation, nonfiction writing style, editor-author relationships and straight talk from publishers.

An awards ceremony at 2:15 p.m. will feature a keynote speech by author Susan Cheever on “The Mystery of Great Writing From 1850 to the Present.”

Participating writing professionals include publisher Paul Dry of Paul Dry Books, poets Robert Giron, Michael Gushue and Katherine Smith, Disney writer Stacy Barton, Maryland Library Association Author of the Year Laura Lippman, novelist George Pelecanos and others.

The conference will take place in the Theatre Arts Building at Montgomery College’s Rockville campus, 51 Mannakee St.

For registration information and a full schedule, call 301-309-9461 or click here.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the Weinstein Company no longer claims that Killshot will be released on November 7 but is now “Coming Soon”.  Actually, we’ve known the November date was bogus all along, but TWC has finally fessed up; changing their website to reflect the film’s nebulous status. As we’ve heard from every quarter, the fate of Killshot hinges on how well Mickey Rourke’s new film, The Wrestler does at the box office.

As reported on Screenhead

The surprise winner of this year’s Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler has squeezed into the remaining 2008 release schedule, due out on December 19th in the US. The film, focusing on a washed-up wrestler’s attempts to redeem his career and his estranged family, exceeded expectations, with the director’s usually frenzied style being pared back to allow the cast to work their magic. Indeed, Micky Rourke is already being predicted to nab an Oscar nomination at the least, hence the film’s release date.

If The Wrestler is a hit and Mickey Rourke gets his Oscar nod, Harvey Weinstein might “rush” Killshot into theaters.  If the film does so-so business and there’s no Oscar buzz, it’ll go straight to DVD.

So go see The Wrestler if you want to see Killshot on the big screen.  Go, Mickey!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

From Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

So far we’ve been talking about what might legitimately be done to you for nonpayment of debts that were contracted legally. But what if the debt itself has been arranged in some shady nook outside the borders of the law? What, for instance, if the debtor has borrowed the money from a Mafia loan shark Then the pressures brought to bear may he of quite a different order.

My chief source of information on such matters is the inimitable Elmore Leonard. In his crime novel Get Shorty his anti-hero, Chili Palmer, is employed as a skip tracer for the Mafia, and he’s chasing around after a compulsive small-time gambler who’s playing a hard but stupid game of Try and Collect, Chili has this to say about the techniques of loan sharks:

Read More>

Monday, October 20, 2008

The Tall T is based on Elmore’s western story, “The Captives”.

Budd Boetticher Box Set
DVD Release Date: November 4, 2008

From Amazon:

Few hauteur directors are more revered and beloved than Oscar “Budd” Boetticher, Jr., who lived a life more amazing than any movie. And few films have been more eagerly-awaited on DVD than the spare, adult westerns he made at Columbia in the late 1950s, all starring Randolph Scott, most written by future director Burt Kennedy, and co-starring such outstanding actors as James Coburn (in his film debut), Richard Boone, Maureen O’Sullivan, Pernell Roberts, Lee Van Cleef, and Craig Stevens. Now, at last, you hold them in your hand: The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station. Rounding out the set is Bruce Ricker’s acclaimed feature-length documentary, A Man Can do That, executive produced Budd’s friend Clint Eastwood. Sony Pictures and The Film Foundation are honored to present one of the absolutely essential collections of this or any year.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Swag will be back in print in America next April.

From Crime Scraps.

Swag is defined in the dictionary as ‘money or goods taken by a thief or burglar.’
I thought it appropriate to go back and read this 1976 Elmore Leonard novel during this time of financial turmoil and bank bonuses.

Two small time crooks Frank J. Ryan and Ernest Stickley, Jr [Stick] meet during Stick’s attempted theft of a maroon ‘73 Camaro from Red Bowers Chevrolet where Frank works as a salesman. Frank subsequently ‘fails’ to identify Stick in court and the two men embark on a string of armed robberies. They follow Frank’s ten rules for success, which he had written on ten different table napkins, and ‘after three months in the business......... they had moved into an apartment building where nearly half the occupants were single young ladies’.

‘There were several Jewish career ladies. Frank was glad to see that.’

Of course Frank and Stick are tempted to break the ‘golden rules’ and they run into problems.

‘Never tell a junkie even your name,’ Stick said. ‘The place is a dope store, full of heads. Rule Number Ten-you want another one?

Swag is set in 1970’s Detroit and is full of sharp dialogue and fine descriptive writing that makes it easy to picture the action in your mind. The characters, even the supporting cast are sharply drawn, and the plot is realistic and down to earth. There are no extreme murderous devices or ancient manuscripts to decipher just good solid honest crime writing. 

One thing did strike me was that in both Elmore Leonard’s Swag and Arnaldur Indridason’s Arctic Chill reviewed here the crimes are mundane, almost every day occurrences, yet the author is able to create a superb crime fiction novel out of very little.
I suppose that is talent and there is no substitute for that. Swag was a pleasure to read and confirmed for me why Elmore Leonard has won so many awards and also why so many of his books have been made into movies.

‘Stick considered a P-38 Walther. It looked pretty good, but chose a Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special with a two-inch barrel. After Frank finished fooling around, he picked a big Colt Python 357 with a ventilated rib over its six-inch barrel.’

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The 13th Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference will be held on Saturday, October 25, 2008 at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. See Full Schedule (pdf)

This year’s conference will culminate with the presentation of the Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature to Elmore Leonard.

The day-long conference is an opportunity for area writers and lovers of literature to meet and work with some of the best instructors and professionals in the writing world today. This year features panels and all new workshops that offer advice on screen adaptation, nonfiction style, the editor/author relationship and straight talk from publishers.  Workshops on Short Fiction, Memoir, the Novel, and Poetry, will be led by authors new to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference, including Nani Power, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Dave Housley, and A.M. Juster.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Pronton and Riding the Rap.

German bibliography below.  (Thanks to P. Benjamin.)

Read More>

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Friday, October 10, 2008

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Posted by Jesse Willis

A Coyote In The House
By Elmore Leonard; Read by Neil Patrick Harris
3 CDs - 3 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Harper Children’s Audio
Published: 2004
ISBN: 0060728825

This dog was cool for a homeboy, an older male who had peed all over this big yard, marking it to let everybody know this was his turf and nobody else’s. Keep it, homes. Live here and get food handed to you. Believe you’re somebody in your pitiful kept world, no better than a slave.”
Buddy’s the aging movie star, Antwan’s the streetwise hipster and Miss Betty is the showgirl. Buddy also happens to be a German Shepherd, Antwan is a wild and wily Coyote and Miss Betty is a bouffant Poodle. A Coyote In The House is a kid’s book in the tradition of Jack London’s The Call of The Wild. In essence this it is the same story, simply with a sub-urban as opposed to an arctic setting - that and Elmore Leonard’s patented prose. It’s not just Leonard’s dialogue that’s distinctive; it’s his story structure, characters, and cadence that all scream Elmore Leonard. And that’s very disconcerting. Leonard hasn’t written anything but adult crime novels and westerns so to hear this audiobook was truly odd. I think kids and adults who listen with together will both be pleased. It’s a fun story but it’s a strange experience for fans of Elmore Leonard’s other novels.
I couldn’t get over how Leonard completely ignores the impossibility of the situation he’s created. I know it’s a kid’s story, and kids won’t likely see it the way I do, but this story is utterly impossible. It basically ignores everything we do know about animal intelligence and replaces it with hipster lingo and human motivations and then marches on, oblivious to all the impossibilities those things entail. As an example, Buddy, the aging German Shepherd movie star, watches his old movies all day long - every animal in A Coyote In The House is intimately familiar with movies and movie stars - this despite the story logic that these canines, felines and avians can’t understand most of what humans say (and vice versa). Further, the animals can’t manipulate objects with their paws like in a Disney movie say, and yet somehow Buddy is able to - off screen - grab a VHS tape of one of his movies put it in the VCR and watch it, rewind it and put it back before his owners get home and see him. “Oh come on,” you say. “It’s a kids story, it doesn’t have to make sense.” Maybe. It didn’t ruin the experience for me but it didn’t let me fully enjoy it either. I just think that it’d have been a far better story to tackle, realistically, the animal’s perspective head on.
One other curious thing of note. The use of the word “bitch.” In any other Leonard novel it wouldn’t be a novelty - here it refers doubly as a slang term (for adult listeners) and as a female canine for children. Some adults may have a problem letting their kids hear such words, when the usage is not clear cut but I think that’d be the wrong attitude to take - the word is legitimately used here and I’d be far more concerned about kids thinking that animals are just like people - when they aren’t - than learning a “bad” word. Performed by Neil Patrick Harris, A Coyote In The House has a goodly number characters with distinctive voices. Harris is quite impressive as a reader! His audiography seems to consist mostly of children’s novels, perhaps a legacy from his child stardom. In any case he’d be a good reader of adult novels too.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Here’s a Be Cool oddity and collector’s item that some of you might remember from 1999.

Diet Coke promotion reaches out to book readers

June Preston
Atlanta, Mar 17: Diet Coke may never replace coffee as the drink of choice for constant readers. But Coca-Cola Co’s campaign to lure consumers with book extracts is proving far more successful than expected, a Coke spokeswoman stated on Tuesday.
``We anticipated in November that we would have 35 million orders (for novel excerpts) from our individual bottling partners, and in the first two weeks we had received 45 million orders, which really indicates the level of success this promotion is going to have,’’ spokeswoman Diana Garza said.

Beginning on February 1, the beverage giant began packaging 32-page selections from novels with all 12- and 24-packs of Diet Coke.

Read More>

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Previews and dispatches from the New Yorker Festival

POSTED BY ADAM ROSE

ELMORE LEONARD ON PSYCHOPATHS

At the “Devil Within” fiction panel, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Matthew Klam primarily addressed the problem of how to write about evil, but the evening was also an opportunity to learn a bit about Leonard’s writing philosophy. The veteran novelist told the audience that he didn’t own a computer and still wrote in longhand. For twenty-five years he’s used a researcher, whom he sent to Cuba when he was writing “Cuba Libre.” He also said that he had a new novel coming out next June and that the manuscript surprised everybody that read it.

A few Leonard quotes from the night:

“I don’t want to know my characters too thoroughly—just enough to get them to talk.”
“Psychopaths…people who know the difference between right and wrong, but don’t give a shit. That’s what most of my characters are like.”
“I don’t write New Yorker stories. I mean, my stories are easy to understand. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Marten Schneider reports for Emdashes:

A little bit to my surprise, the “Discussion Among Writers” dedicated to “The Devil Within,” featuring Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Matthew Klam and moderated by Daniel Zalewski, was a light, lively, and amusing affair, quite in contrast to the stated subject. The taciturn Leonard, who would have looked entirely at home whittling a garter snake out of a twig, was flanked by the admiring Oates and Klam--yes, the admiration flowed freely on this night.

Without ever dwelling on it or even stating it explicitly, all three panelists acknowledged to the desirability of complexity as well as the enduring power of the thriller genre. All three either disavowed the reality of “evil” or described it as yet another mundane by-product of human existence. Of his famous baddies, Leonard mused that he’ll think of one he’s creating “as a kid. He’s a bully, he’s a cheater. He doesn’t get along with very many people. And then I let him grow up.”

Happiest when his readers squirm, Klam offered, by way of Shalom Auslander, that “Light and Dark are buddies, and they hang out after work.” For her part, Oates, astonished at Klam’s glowing words about her book Do With Me What You Will, insisted that she is more accustomed to the critical reception of her cat, who has shown little interest in her works.

Leonard showed the same kind of word-stingy pith he does in his books, observing that he doesn’t like to know too much about his characters, “just enough to make them talk.” I don’t remember if this was before or after Klam demanded that Zalewski fess up to drop-kicking puppies.

It was a session so loose, you’d have thought alcohol had helped it along.

Friday, October 03, 2008

Elmore will appear tonight at the New Yorker Festival in the following panel:

The Devil Within
With Matthew Klam, Elmore Leonard, and Joyce Carol Oates. Moderated by Daniel Zalewski.
7 p.m. Ailey Citigroup Theater
Joan Weill Center for Dance ($25)

Thursday, October 02, 2008

From Devouring Vulture, New York Magazine

by: Rachel Syme

To Ms. Syme:  The movie is not “an unsalvageable shitshow.” It’s Harvey’s big-hands-on that put the movie in the crapper. 

Will We Ever Get to See ‘Killshot’? Maybe Not!

The non-hits just keep on comin’ for Harvey Weinstein, who is clearly having the Best Month Ever (see: lost $1 million bet with Nikki Finke, Project Runway litigation, Scott Rudin hit jobs, the Tarantino tapes). The news surfaced yesterday that while Harvey was busy bullying Sydney Pollack on his deathbed to push up the release of The Reader, he was quietly pushing back the theater date of Killshot, a.k.a. the Most-Hyped Movie You Will Probably Never See. This is the fifth time that the Weinstein Co. has delayed the John Madden–Quentin Tarantino crime drama since 2005, and it seems no amount of reshoots or stalling can hide the fact that, despite floating around Hollywood for more than a decade, this movie is probably an unsalvageable shitshow. And if anyone doesn’t need a shitshow on his hands right now, it’s Harv.

Still, it’s amazing that the movie turned out to be such a mess given the dream team that has been involved since the beginning. The script, based on an Elmore Leonard story, first started making the rounds in the nineties, when the brothers Weinstein (then doing the Miramax thing) tapped Tony Scott (Beat the Devil) to direct a cast including De Niro, Tarantino, Willis, and Thurman. It later traveled to the Weinstein Co., and the Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane led the new cast. Now-deceased directors Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack made changes to Hossein Amini’s script, and Tarantino came back on to executive-produce the thing. This was three years ago. Four push-backs and no distribution deals later, we’re still waiting. Poor Harvey — in better times, he could have released Killshot anyway, taking a bet on big names. But given his recent box-office record, he can’t actually afford to take any risks. And when Harvey Weinstein stops being able to afford things, well, we’re all in trouble.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Killshot will not be coming out on November 7.  A check of the Weinstein website still has the Nov. 7 date, but that means nothing.  The fate of the film now rests with another film, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke which comes out in December.  Mickey Rourke has received nearly unanimous praise for his performance in that film and Harvey Weinstein has got to figure that he can capitalize on Mickey’s popularity to follow up immediately with Killshot.  That makes sense, but I personally will have to be in the theatre watching it before I believe it.

Is ‘Killshot’ another Weinstein Co. misfire?
The film has a great pedigree, but repeated delays in its release point to big problems.
By John Horn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

THE “KILLSHOT” collaboration certainly looked intriguing on paper: John Madden, the director of best picture winner “Shakespeare in Love,” adapting a colorful crime novel by Elmore Leonard, the author of “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight,” with Quentin Tarantino serving as executive producer.

Add screenwriter Hossein Amini ("The Wings of the Dove") and uncredited revisions by Oscar winners Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and what does “Killshot” add up to?

The way the Weinstein Co. sees it, a mess it has tried—and failed—to unload.

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No Nobel lit prize for U.S. - we’re too…something…
Posted on October 1, 2008 by Jim Booth under Scholars & Rogues

In a move designed to offend those Americans who read literature (and, no, they would not all fit into one small room), Nobel Academy secretary Horace Engdahl says American literature doesn’t deserve consideration for the Nobel Prize in literature:

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

The response of American literary experts has been to say things like the following (this comes from Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation that offers American literature’s most prestigious prize, the National Book Award):

“Such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age,” he said.

So - who’s right? Engdahl? Augenbraum? And what constitutes American literature, anyway?

Maybe a look at the list of American Nobel Prize writers will help - or not. Here it is:

Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czeslaw Milosz, and Toni Morrison.

Both Singer and Milosz were born in Poland and their writing deals with their lives in Poland before they came to live in America.  Pearl Buck, born in America, lived nearly half of her life in China - and her major work is set in - China.

So far we may conclude that if you live in America but don’t write about America you’re Nobel worthy. But let’s look at the rest of our esteemed list.

Lewis wrote his important work about Midwestern American (really Minnesota) small town life; Steinbeck wrote about California; Faulkner wrote about Mississippi.

So from that we can conclude that the Nobel committee wants American literature that looks deeply at specific areas of our vast nation - the Midwest, the West, the South. Right?  Well, there’s more to consider….

Bellow, O’Neill, Hemingway, and Morrison explore family and/or self identity issues again and again in their work.

(One could argue that all these writers do that, yes, but the just mentioned group focuses on this beyond other important elements such as place, the element that most characterizes the work of the previously mentioned writers.)

So, the Nobel committee would seem to value exploration of human relationships given that these American writers were honored.

It seems nearly impossible that no American writers can meet these criteria - if indeed, these are the criteria the Nobel committee uses to choose honorees.

But there’s a line in the above linked Associated Press article on this controversy that casts aspersions on the Nobel committee’s selection process:

The academy often picks obscure writers and hardly ever selects best-selling authors. It regularly faces accusations of snobbery, political bias and even poor taste.

And since America has a number of Nobel worthy authors - besides the mentioned Phillip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, John Ehle, Elmore Leonard, and William Gibson come to mind immediately - all of whom in their own ways epitomize the qualities the academy seems to have admired in their antecedents - there are no logical reasons for the claims Engdahl advances for the academy’s reluctance to honor American authors.

So I guess that leaves us to consider those accusations of snobbery, political bias, and poor taste.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Just posted on YouTube.

UP IN HONEY’S ROOM by Elmore Leonard, Phoenix £ 7.99

A spy thriller set in America, mostly during the second world war. Its heroine, Honey, is married to Walter, a boring German butcher who reveres Hitler. They divorce, but when Carl Webster, a US marshal, comes to Detroit to investigate a colourful German spy ring, she introduces him to Walter’s circle -not for patriotic reasons, but because she’s attracted to him. This novel is an oddity for Leonard, but it can also be seen as a homage to 1940s films, making clear that his trademark dialogue comes straight from screwball comedy

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Turner Classic Movies
Monday, September 29, 2008 8:00 PM ET & 11 PM ET
Hosted by Robert Osborne

For more than 60 years, Walter Mirisch has made an indelible mark on the movie industry. From his early days working for B-picture movie studios to establishing The Mirisch Corporation with two of his brothers, he has guided a number of major Hollywood productions to the Silver Screen. Now the Oscar®-winning producer and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will sit down with Turner Classic Movies (TCM) host Robert Osborne for an intimate discussion in PRIVATE SCREENINGS: WALTER MIRISCH, a one-hour special premiering Monday, Sept. 29, at 8 p.m. This TCM original will be accompanied by a night of Mirisch’s films, including the Best Picture Oscar® winners In the Heat of the Night (1967), West Side Story (1961) and The Apartment (1960).

More

Saturday, September 27, 2008

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Obituary

Paul Newman: A First-Class Actor, A Class Act

He really hit his stride as he matured and found his lasting personna in a series of “H” pictures most movie buffs remember and adore for their intensity, intelligence and power. These were “Hud,” in which he played the amoral son of a noble rancher in modern day Texas, a great performance not hurt as much as you’d think by the Ohio accent; “Hombre” from an Elmore Leonard novel, as a super shrewd outcast who finds himself in a stagecoach about to be robbed, and uses his wiles as much as his gun to defend civilization; “Harper,” where he was Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer, with the name changed to accommodate the lucky H, another shrewd guy solving a new crime and an old one; and finally the shrewdest of them all (I save the best for last and pass on strict chronology), Robert Rossent’s great “The Hustler,” about the world of pool sharking.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Yesterday we reported that MGM was not going to distribute Killshot.  More details have emerged.

Gregg Kilday in The Hollywood Reporter reports:

The Weinstein Co.’s distribution deal with MGM is ending not with a bang but a whimper.

Although the deal was set to expire Dec. 31, the Weinstein Co. is taking back seven titles that it will release itself before the end of the year and then send to cable through its new Showtime output deal. They include two wide releases: “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” (Oct. 31) and “The Road” (exclusive Nov. 14, going wide Nov. 26).

The other titles, which will get limited platform releases, are “Killshot,” “Fanboys,” “Crossing Over,” “Extreme Movie” and “Shanghai.”

Pamela McClintock in Variety adds:

From Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s perspective, releasing their own films gives them more control, particularly when it comes to specialty films. The company has its own distribution operation, headed by Steve Bunnell.
Most TWC titles came out of MGM as wide releases. TWC will have far more discretion to use platform releases.
After “Zack and Miri” and “Hurricane Season,” the TWC films that will now be distributed directly by the company include “Killshot” (Nov. 7), “Fanboys” (Nov. 26), “Crossing Over” (Dec. 3), “Extreme Movie” (Dec. 12) and “Shanghai.”
“Zack and Miri” is the only film scheduled to open wide; the other six are all set to begin in limited runs. That makes for a hectic schedule for the Weinsteins.

But Defamer cautions:

Harvey isn’t capitalized enough to market and distribute Porno, The Reader and any of the five films in between — The Road, Killshot (a recent shelf-rescue capitalizing on star Mickey Rourke’s Wrestler buzz), Fanboys, Crossing Over and Shanghai — without some outside help.

Maybe Harvey can get the government to bail him out.  What’s an extra 100 million for publicity and advertising?

As usual, Weinstein Company is not returning phone calls on this matter.  So we wait to see if there is a trailer or publicity for Killshot or the film is just drop shipped to select theaters on Nov. 7.  What are the odds of that happening?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Without MGM distribution who’s going to release Killshot?  Since the news of the breakup, The Weinstein Company has taken the MGM logo off their website.

Hilary Lewis | Sep 25, 2008 12:00 PM

For the past three years, The Weinstein Company has used MGM as the distributor for many of its films. The agreement, which has been described as “acrimonious” in the past and often involved Harvey Weinstein’s studio calling the shots, expires in January, and MGM has already begun taking its name and logo off of the remaining films covered by the deal.

On Monday, MGM said that they were no longer distributing the following films on TWC’s 2008 slate: Zack and Miri Make A Porno, Oscar contender The Road, Killshot, Fanboys, Crossing Over and Shanghai. As a result, MGM’s logo has disappeared from advertising materials for Zack and Miri and the front of the film itself. MGM will still distribute TWC’s Soul Men, slated for release in November.

It’s been expected that MGM would not renew its deal with TWC. The lion is currently trying to re-establish itself as king of the Hollywood jungle by producing and distributing its own films. In addition, that premium cable channel it’s working on with Lionsgate and Paramount as well as the three studios’ separation from Showtime may also have influenced MGM’s decision not to re-up with the Weinsteins, who signed their own deal with Showtime in July.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

There are certain actors who should never, ever, be asked to run on film, because their running style immediately undercuts any attempt to make them seem like a bad-ass. David Caruso immediately comes to mind (there’s about a five-minute sequence in “Elmore Leonard’s Gold Coast” that’s nothing but Caruso running, and it is among the unintentionally funniest things I’ve ever seen)

Times Online
Ben Macintyre

Elmore Leonard, the Dickens of Detroit, is one of America’s greatest novelists. But who knew he was also the head of a crime-writing dynasty? Our writer meets him and son Peter, whose first thriller is published next month

I have been granted an audience with Detroit’s most famous crime family. The father, at 82, remains the capo di tutti capi, the undisputed boss: he has wiped out so many people in the course of his career, he lost count long ago. But now his 56-year-old son is joining the family business, and has just completed his first job: five dead, including two by means of a bow and arrow, and a cop, blasted into hamburger meat with a pump-action shot gun.

The old man is pleased.

Elmore Leonard, the “Dickens of Detroit”, is America’s greatest living crime novelist. For more than half a century, he has turned out books at the rate of almost one a year: westerns, mystery fiction, but most importantly crime thrillers. He is the master of the genre, the inventor of a distinct fictional universe that is spare, violent, grittily humorous and set, for the most part, in Detroit.

Next month, however, Quiver, the first book written by his son, Peter, is published: it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a spare, violent and grittily humorous crime novel set, for the most part, in Detroit.

Father and son are sitting in Peter’s neat and comfortable living room in suburban Detroit. Elmore has walked here from his own home, just a few streets away. Both are smiling, yet tense, for it is an odd situation, this passing of the literary baton from one generation to the next.

Elmore has a thin, almost gaunt, face with wispy beard and sharp eyes behind round spectacles; Peter’s, by contrast, is genial and rounded with a small, fair moustache. There is little obvious family resemblance in the flesh, but plenty on the page: the older Leonard’s writing echoes throughout Quiver, in the almost complete absence of adjectives, plot told through dialogue, the slang and the contemporary cultural references.

“There is certainly a Leonard sound, started by Elmore,” says Peter, glancing sideways to where his father is lighting up a Virginia Slim cigarette. “We look at the world with a similar point of view. It’s sarcastic at times. It’s an attitude about life.”

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

I actually own the rights to that novel. It’s a terrific novel. I could never let go of it. I’ve written about, like 20 pages of the adaptation of it. But I might very we