1995 was the year I was first introduced to Elmore Leonard through the movie based on his book, Get Shorty. It looked like the sequel of the recently released Pulp Fiction which also starred John Travolta as a tough guy in a criminal underworld. While like Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty had plenty of violence and snappy pop-culture infused dialogue, it also had something a bit different, that was emblematic throughout films based on Leonard’s works the strongest sense of place.
The movie Get Shorty starts out in Miami Beach on the coldest day of the year. Only in South Florida would cold bother someone as much as it does Chili Palmer (the loan shark played by Travolta). He’s so desperate to get back his leather jacket stolen by another gangster that he punches him right in the nose. This other gangster Ray Barbini played by Dennis Farina is the kind of mustached, obnoxious guy who laughs at his own jokes that I could very much imagine at The Rascal House harassing the waitress that there wasn’t enough complimentary cole slaw on his table.
Get Shorty is filled with snappy, character revealing dialogue with plenty of pop culture references. It’s littered with characters who don’t blink at violence. Archetypes who might seem out of place in other cities but fit right in with the flashy machismo that was ever present in the South Florida of 1995.
In 2013 I interviewed a performance artist who was also influenced by Leonard, who had at the time recently passed away. This artist, Tim Youd, had a schtick where he would go to a location where a famous novel took place and retype that novel page by page, word for word on his trusty typewriter. For the week of 2013 Art Basel he holed himself up at the Aqua Hotel on Collins Avenue, the same street where the book Get Shorty starts, and retyped every word from that published book.
Elmore Leonard Movie Adaptations
Leonard had other disciples who made great films based on his work with a strong sense of place. The afore mentioned Quentin Tarantino followed up Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown, which was based on the Leonard book, Rum Punch. Headlines were made that Tarantino cast the African-American Pam Grier to play a character written as Caucasian. Just as big a deal was that the story was relocated from the Miami and Palm Beach of the book all the way to Los Angeles. Tarantino said in interviews he didn’t know Miami and thus the movie would ring false. Los Angeles was his city and he felt a relocation would allow him to do the story justice. In my mind it is the most sentimental and human of Tarantino’s works, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt as comfortable telling such a story in a city he didn’t know.
Just as great was the 1998 movie Out of Sight based on the Leonard novel with the same name. Out of Sight starts out with a prison break in the Everglades when a career bank robber played by George Clooney is busted by federal marshal Karen Sisco played by Jennifer Lopez. Unlike many Miami based movies of the 1990’s, many actors are portrayed by Hispanic and African-American actors, showing a truer representation of our multi-cultural city. Before the movie moves up to Detroit mid-way through, the cinematography also depicts the stifling and blistering heat of our city, that many Miami based productions ignore.
More recently there was an entertaining television show Justified and its even more recent sequel Justified: City Primeval, both featuring the Leonard creation U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens. Like Get Shorty and Out of Sight, Justified starts out in South Florida before moving on to Kentucky and Detroit. While its time in South Florida is limited, it is treated as an entirely different world, than Appalachia or the Rust Belt. The lighting is more washed out and unforgiving in the South Florida scenes, dark clouds hinting at a storm on the horizon.
