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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.

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?

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.

Alan Sepinwall/The Star-Ledger

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.”

Read More>

Forty Lashes Less One is one of the lesser known works of Elmore Leonard, published in 1972, his last western before Gunsights.  At one time, Quentin Tarantino proclaimed he was going to make the movie version.  On the Quentin Tartantino Archives in 2007 he was quoted saying:

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 well do it some time. It’s the only thing that I have just kind of held on to, that I can’t quite let go. I might do it some time.

Actually, he doesn’t own the rights.

Also from the QT Archives: (Ancient history department)

It was rumored to star Samuel L. Jackson and possibly Adam Sandler or Bruce Willis.

That would have been cool; at least the Sam Jackson part.

The story:

The hell called Yuma Prison can destroy the soul of any man. And it’s worse for those whose damning crime is the color of their skin. The law says Chiricahua Apache Raymond San Carlos and black-as-night former soldier Harold Jackson are murderers, and they’ll stay behind bars until they’re dead and rotting. But even in the worst place on Earth, there’s hope. And for two hard and hated inmates—first enemies, then allies by necessity—it waits at the end of a mad and violent contest ... on a bloody trail that winds toward Arizona’s five most dangerous men.

Jonathan Downs Ashley tells it like it is at Courier-Journal.com:

Dozens of his novels have been turned into films. He has written some of the best western fiction of the last century. In the mid-seventies, he redefined the crime genre. Yes, I am talking about Elmore Leonard, the man Martin Amis called “The Dickens of Detroit”. His dialogue is so crisp you could cut yourself on it and his characters so well defined they come off of the pages. For fellow writers, Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing is available for purchase on Amazon. Its main credo, “If it sounds like writing, REWRITE”, appropriate since our Detroit Dickens allows the dialogue to tell most of the story and spends minimal time on scene setting and or descriptive prose. I just finished one of his early seventies novels entitled Swag, the story of a Detroit used car salesman and an Okie felon who hook up for a string of robberies. As usual, nothing goes as planned. It’s hilarious and has as many twists as The Maltese Falcon. If you haven’t been introduced to Leonard yet, consider yourself served.

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