The back of my book jacket says, “Soon a major motion picture from United Artists.” Whatever happened to it?

As I’m reading this, Benjamin Bratt keeps popping in my head as Raymond Cruz.

A quick internet search led me to countingdown.com, where this is listed as TBA. There’s only one comment posted, where the person states that Elmore is 78 years old now - so I’m suggesting this is quite an old snippet.
It also states that Gene Hackman will be starring; again which is strange, as he appears to have stopped acting. I seem to remember reading, a couple of years ago, an interview where he said that he had no scripts lined up and would be retiring. That said, someone please tell me if I’m wrong - you tend to get a little out of touch with things here - the news and reports being very insular.

At best, I think the content on the site was pure speculation.

Besides, Gene Hackman’s too old for the role.

City Primeval was on track for production in 1980.  Elmore wrote the screenplay, renamed Hang Tough, the original novel title before the publisher got ahold of it.  Sam Peckinpah was scheduled to direct and came to Detroit in the spring of 1981.  Unfortunately, there was a writer’s strike at that time which prevented Sam and Elmore from talking.  Then the whole project went into turnaround.  Today, despite periodic interest, City Primeval has yet to be produced.

oh
my
god

Man, a City Primeval movie would have been fantastic. And directed by Sam Peckinpah, no less? That would have been awesome…too bad it never solidified.

I read Hang Tough (a much better title) again over the past week. It might be in my top 5 now, and definitely one of my favorites of the Detroit novels. There are a couple touchstones that I’ll have to go back and verify that they haven’t been cited already (there’s a reference to Clement as a “hotshot kid”)....and hey, what’s with all the exclamation points in this novel?! There are a lot, at least by Elmore’s standards. 

They gotta make a movie of this someday.

My favorite line:

“But aside from all that, how was the fuck?”
“Let me put it this way. It was about what I expected it to be.”