What was so terrible about Be Cool?  Or perhaps the question should be: by what criteria is that movie being judged to classify it as a terrible movie?

That movie served its purpose for me.  Hollywood’s been turning out formulaic movies for a long time now.  This one was no different.  It did seem to have a bit of the ‘Elmore touch’ to it, though, and if it strayed from the book some… well, that’s Hollywood too.  I found it quite entertaining as a light comedy.  Didn’t really expect anything else.

I don’t have time to chime in on this right now.  Somebody else get it started.

It could take quite a while. A long time ago Elmore Leonard said when his characters make a joke the director shouldn’t cut to someone else for a reaction. What he meant was the character isn’t looking for a reaction, we shouldn’t be either. It throws the timing off, it’s not the character’s way. Stuff like that, and hundreds more.

The whole movie was worthless except for the opening scene.

The music was wrong.  The cameo type cast was such a distraction.  The directing. . .

I HATED IT!

I can’t believe I am even responding to this piece of shit.

Right before Be Cool started shooting, Elmore, his agent and I were sitting in Gary Gray’s office.  As we were ready to leave, Gary asked Elmore if he had any advice.  Elmore said what John noted above, the same advice he gave Barry Sonnenfeld for Get Shorty.  “When somebody says something funny, don’t cut away to a reaction shot.”  Barry got it, Gary didn’t.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn if a movie and a book are similar at all, but making a hip-hip gangsta comedy out of Be Cool so idiots will watch it went a bridge too far.  A good movie will stand the test of time, but BeeKuh the Movie didn’t stand the test of time for the first reel (if it had a reel).  The band from the book, based on the Stone Coyotes, is far from the hip-hop world, and if you want to get the flavor of the band from the book go on ebay and look at this item number, 180037265528, and get the CD of EL reading from Be Cool and the Stone Coyotes playing.  Maybe Gregg still has some copies.  I did help him produce it by recording the band and editing EL’s readings.

The best part of Be Cool was clearly the book, and the fact that we had this little tour and released the CD, “Music from the Book” that F1Reverb refers to.  I will put some of that up on the site one of these days.  The Stone Coyotes wrote a song for the book called Odessa which has become one of their most popular songs in their set.

The problem with Be Cool the movie is that Be Cool the book was the movie.  The night of the Get Shorty premiere, MGM president Frank Mancuso asked Elmore if he had another Chili Palmer.  He said no but that he would write one…eventually.  He knocked out Out of Sight and was considering a Chili set in the fashion district of New York.  I was never so happy as when he switched the plan to Cuba Libre.

Be Cool was next and it was logical to put Chili in the music business.  Jersey Films, had a short lived music division and they set us up with some Hollywood bigshots like Irving Azoff, Guy Oseary, and Rick Rubens.  We sat in on a Red Hot Chili Pepers practice for a private gig in Japan.  Fun times.  Aerosmith had a pool party at Elmore’s house.  I missed that one unfortunately.

The book was a continuation of Get Shorty and featured a relationship between Chili and Elaine, the woman from the studio, which buds into romance at the end.  Chili is looking for an idea for a movie since his last film tanked.

The movie, which I won’t get into now, made so many unnecessary alterations, especially hip hopping up the central idea, that the result was an abysmal failure.  Elmore and I were down in Florida and MGM flew us up to New York to see it.  I remember the look on his face when he got into the limo afterwards.

Sometimes it’s better to not make a movie out of your book at all, but as Samuel Johnson said: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

Hi everyone, Greg is so right when he describes the deviation of the film from the book, the biggest blunder, transforming Chili into a record producer, it is film that he loves and the story is about the next film in the 3 film deal, the central joke being the failed sequel to “Get Leo"that predicts the likelihood of failure given Hollywood’s tendency of screwing with genius under the guise of authority. The book is also about being cool in a variety of situations, everyone is cool in their own way in this very hot town, yet there is a cool that works, strange Elliot Wilhelm, Samoan homosexual bodyguard from Torrance, in spite of having killed before plays it smooth and becomes one of those amazing Dutch heroes integral to the story development, which is what Chili is all about. The film trying so hard to be cool it shows Chili to be a dork in some of the places we know he is cool, too busy being cool to really care about anything but the thing he is doing, here all the characters are jammed together to suit the stars in the film, finally Travolta gets to sleep with Uma Thurmond playing Edie Athens widowed by the death of James Wood playing at Tommy Athens and its no big deal, unlike Chili bedding the executive producer Elaine, a real person with real passion that means something. Which brings us to Linda Moon, this is not the first time we have seen this girl singer from Texas, this person who could be related to Janice Joplin, the woman in Puerto Rico and New Jersey, Glitz, before returning to her western rock roots, I missed seeing her on screen instead of the puff pastry from nowhere, sorry, I am hoping someone will shed some light on the connection between Miss October 1966 and this tortured artist. Anyone