<< After reading my screenplay based on Glitz, the first novel of mine to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, a studio executive said to me, “All you’ve done is adapt the book, scene for scene.” I said, “Yes?”

Which is what Scott Frank did with Get Shorty (see his interview in the From Page To Screen show) to be the first and only one, IMO, to get it right. The right producer makes all the difference.

Elmore writes in dialogue-driven scenes yielding screenplays in novel form. Extract, shorten to 120 minutes, and start filming. You can’t improve on perfection; why try?

Every Elmore-based movie that’s failed—which is all of them but three (of the non-westerns)—did so because the writer fucked with the original words and structure.

The Elmore adaptation rule is this: the degree to which you fuck with the original dictates the degree to which your film will fail. The reverse is true as well: the degree to which you’re faithful to the original dictates the degree to which the film will work. Compare Be Cool with Get Shorty. Res ipsa loquitur.

That’s all true, but there’s more. The “writer” of a movie is often not the screenwriter, but the director (it’s why he gets the big bucks).

Elmore Leonard gets an awful lot of justified praise for his dialogue, but the narration is just as big a part of what makes the characters so good. Especially in the recent books in which each scene is written from a particular character’s pov. To get that attitude into a movie would require - in addition to not fucking with the dialogue - getting everything else just right, as it is in the books. In the movies that would mean every single camera move, every choice between close-up and two-shot and wide, cutting to reaction shots (or more likely, not cutting to reaction shots) would have to be right. And the music. And locations. And casting. If the director “sticks his nose in” the way Elmore doesn’t, I think that’s a problem (and happens a lot).

Scott Frank did a great job, but so did Stephen Soderbergh and Barry Sonnenfeld. Who knows, maybe the screenplay for Be Cool was good.

Of course it wasn’t. It says so in the book: Let Scooter do it… Yeah, let Scooter fuck it up.

Of course it wasn’t. It says so in the book: Let Scooter do it… Yeah, let Scooter fuck it up.

Unfortunately, they didn’t get Scooter for Be Cool.

Can you guess who he is?

Frank somebody? I’m getting confused. I didn’t know Elmore did Romans à clefs. I hope this doesn’t mean another thread & another long complicated literary argument. (It would be nice to know who Buddy’s agent’s shiny brown lowrider dachshund named Swifty’s based on, though.)