Elmore Leonard: On Writing and Movies

Jackie Brown (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

The late, great American crime writer Elmore Leonard penned over 40 books and numerous short stories in a career spanning sixty years. As one of America’s most distinctive and influential genre novelists his work inspired television shows and several fine films. The following abridged excerpts are from an interview by Patrick McGilligan for Film Comment on Leonard’s experience of working in Hollywood and his reaction to film adaptations of his work. It was published to coincide with the release of Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Leonard’s Rum Punch (as Jackie Brown).

To what extent do you think your writing was influenced by movies, even before you began selling stories to Hollywood?

Probably more than I thought. When I started writing, I wanted to make money right away and I chose Westerns because of the market. You could aim for Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Esquire, Argosy, Adventure, and a number of pulp magazines, like Dime Western, that were still in business. I liked Western movies and they were big in the Fifties.

So when you were writing a story, you were thinking of it, from the outset, as a possible movie?

That was my hope.

Was it just accidental that the stories you were writing, with so much dialogue, almost resembled scripts?

It happened that my style did lend itself – the way I learned to write in scenes, with a lot of dialogue. I think initially I learned as much as I could from Hemingway, and then the style I developed seemed to apply itself to movies: scenes leading to scenes, character development, but always enough action, too.

On the first story he sold to the movies: ‘3:10 toYuma’:

How did that get sold? What was the process whereby you were ‘discovered’?

The story was in Dime Western, 4500 words; I got ninety dollars for it. The editor insisted I rewrite one of the scenes and do two revisions on my description of the train. He said, ‘You can do it better. You’re not using all your senses. It’s not just a walk by the locomotive. What’s the train doing? How does it smell? Is there steam?’ He made me work for my ninety bucks, which was good. It was in the magazine, and then within a year a producer saw it and bought it.

The Tall T (Directed by Budd Boetticher)

How about ‘The Tall T’ (57)?

That was a novella in Argosy, which sold to Hollywood fairly quickly. I found out later that Batjac, John Wayne’s company, had bought it originally, and then something happened and he passed it on to Randolph Scott and [producer] Harry Joe Brown. They also added about twenty minutes onto the front end, which I thought gave it an awfully slow opening.

And you had nothing to do with the people in Hollywood who made the movie?

No. I saw that one in a screening room with Detroit newspaper critics. I remember the film coming to the part where Randolph Scott has Maureen O’Sullivan lure Skip Homeier into the cave. Randolph Scott comes in and faces Skip Homeier, who has a sawed-off shot-gun in his hand. One of the critics said, ‘Here comes the obligatory fistfight.’ But Randolph Scott grabs the shotgun, sticks it under Skip Homeier’s chin, pulls the trigger, and the screen goes red. They didn’t say anything after that.

You might say that was a ‘defining Elmore Leonard moment.’ You have become known for surprising, brutal violence in your stories. How did you come by that penchant?

I wasn’t writing for Range Romance, I was writing action stories, six-guns going off, violence a natural part of it, the reason for reading a Western. But never, in 30 short stories and eight novels, did I stage a fast-draw shootout in the street, the way practically every Western movie ends. Later I developed ways of having the violence happen more unexpectedly and low-key. ‘And he shot him.’

The Moonshine War (Directed by Richard Quine)

When is the first time you actually went to Hollywood to work on a screenplay?

In ‘68 or ‘69, with The Moonshine War. [...] I’d go out to Hollywood, stay all week, and go home weekends. I spent at least three weeks out there before [the producer] Ransohoff fired me from the picture. He said, ‘You’re too close to the forest to see the trees.’

Was he right?

No, not then. Now, when I think of adapting my own stuff, I think there’s truth in that. Definitely. But it’s not so much that you’re too close to it. It’s just that all of your enthusiasm went into the original, so how do you get it back up to write the screenplay? To me, if the writing process isn’t enormously satisfying, it isn’t worth doing. I love writing books. I wrote movies for money.

What did you do for those three weeks?

Met with [director] Dick Quine. I’d go to his house every day and we would sit around and talk about what we were going to do; and then Chris Mankiewicz would come over – he was the liaison between Ransohoff and us – and talk in broad, general terms, never specific, about what should be in the picture. I thought we just wasted an awful lot of time, until finally I wrote the script and then I was fired.

They had another writer for maybe a week and then I was hired back on. Quine liked me and got me back. Ransohoff also had a phonetically written script done by a professor at the University of Kentucky, I think, indicating what the dialogue would sound like with that kind of a rural Southern accent. I kept thinking, Why in the hell don’t they just get good actors who can fake it, or actors born in the South?

Joe Kidd (Directed by John Sturges)

Then they ended up shooting the picture in California, not far from Stockton, in the only clump of trees in a rather barren landscape of dun-colored hills. The picture was also miscast. Let’s face it, Dick Quine was not the guy to direct a picture about people who live in ‘hollers’ and talk funny. He had done mainly comedies that were hip at that time: How to Murder Your Wife, Paris When It Sizzles. The Moonshine War didn’t stand a chance.

Did anybody ask your advice about casting?

They always ask, but they don’t pay any attention to the writer. Richard Widmark I thought was all wrong for the part of the [bootlegger] – I had pictured someone like Burl Ives with a little 16-year-old girl sitting on his knee. I did visit the set for a couple of days. After a number of takes of one scene, Patrick McGoohan came off the set, walked up to me, and said, ‘What’s it like to stand there and hear your lines all fucked up?’

Do you feel that what went wrong there was not the script, but everything else – the casting, the locations, the director… ?

There were things about the story I had been obliged to change. In all of my screenplays, I’ve always gone against my better judgment in listening to the director or the producer, doing what they want so I can get the money and go home and write a book. Or thinking, Well, they know what they’re doing – even though something is telling me, Nah, that’s not gonna work.

Joe Kidd (Directed by John Sturges)

On working with Clint Eastwood and John Sturges on ‘Joe Kidd’ (72):

How much did Clint have to do with the script?

Eastwood and Sturges would come into my office at the end of the day and read the scenes I had written. Eastwood is the easiest guy in the world to get along with. I don’t recall him changing that much. He would just agree and pass the pages on to Sturges. The only time I can recall him saying anything was for the scene where Joe Kidd is confronted by an armed faction, near the end of the second act. Eastwood said, ‘Shouldn’t I have my gun out when I say that?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think you need to have your gun out.’ Eastwood said, ‘But my character has not been presented as a gunfighter.’ He turned to Sturges, ‘Don’t you think I need my gun out?’ Sturges said, ‘No, you don’t need your gun out.’ Eastwood said, ‘Why not?’ Sturges said, ‘Because the audience knows who you are – they’ve seen all your pictures.’ But when the picture was made, Eastwood did have his gun out.

Get Shorty (Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld)

Was ‘Get Shorty’ (95) a totally positive experience?

All the way. I must admit I was surprised to see the film had become a comedy. I told [director] Barry Sonnenfeld after I saw it, ‘I don’t write comedy.’ He said, ‘No, but it’s a funny book.’ Barry and [screenwriter] Scott Frank were conscientious about sticking to the plot and using as much of the dialogue as they could. The lines were delivered the way they were written, seriously, the way I’d heard the characters when I was writing their lines. Gene Hackman was delivering his lines one day in rehearsal, and Barry said, ‘Gene, that was really funny,’ and Hackman said, ‘Well, I wasn’t trying to be.’ Barry said, ‘That’s the whole idea.’

I do think my books were getting a little funnier as I loosened up, toward the mid-Seventies. I had become a little freer and easier in the way I was writing – not trying so hard to write – and funny things began to happen to the characters.

Going back to The Big Bounce in ‘68, however, I've been working pretty much with the same characters: ordinary people who seem a bit quirky, non-heroes, spending as much time with the bad guys – who usually aren’t too bright – as I do with the more sympathetic characters. I have an affection for all of them, so I treat them as human beings with much the same desires and hangups we all have. Plot is secondary, not that important to me. Once I know my characters I’m confident a plot will come out of them. I make it up as I go along, not knowing what’s going to happen, never knowing how the book will end.

Get Shorty (Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld)

‘Not knowing what is going to happen’ is part of the comedy, it seems to me. Part of the Elmore Leonard experience. There are always amazing plot twists in your stories.

What’s amazing to me, when I think about it, is that while Hollywood in general prefers plot driven stories – they ask, ‘What’s it about?’ – 33 of my 35 books, all character-driven and talky, have either been optioned or bought outright for film. I write a book not knowing what’s going to happen, so I won’t be bored, so I can entertain myself making it up as I go along, establishing characters in the first act I hope to be able to use later on, for a set-piece or two if not turns in the plot. If a plot twist is amazing, as you suggest, it must be at the same time believable. So I write each scene from a character’s point of view, with the character’s ‘sound’ providing the rhythm of the prose and the believability of what’s taking place in the scene. The reader accepts it because the character is there. It might not be acceptable from my point of view, were I an omniscient author who thinks he knows everything. Their ‘sound’ is much more entertaining than mine, so I try to keep my nose out of it. I don’t want the reader ever to be aware of me writing. And if the prose sounds like it was written, I rewrite it.

Jackie Brown (Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

On ‘Jackie Brown’, did you read Quentin Tarantino’s script?

Yeah. It’s pretty much the book, with a lot of Tarantino, of course, a lot of additional dialogue.

Did you give Tarantino any input?

I questioned a couple of things, asked why scenes we both liked were left out. But I only spoke to him twice on the phone. The first time was a couple of years ago, when he was just beginning and told me he was going to do Rum Punch instead of Killshot. That was all I heard from him for about a year and a half, until just before he started shooting, in early June [‘96], when he called again. He said, ‘I've been afraid to call you for the last year.’ I said, ‘Why? Because you’ve changed the title and you’re starring a black woman in the lead?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do what you want. You’re the filmmaker, you’re going to do what you want anyway.’

I was on the set twice, and both times it looked like he was enjoying himself. I met Sam Jackson and Pam Grier, who looked terrific, and I could see why Quentin wanted her. Bridget Fonda I’d met before, doing publicity for Touch, and I was happy to see her in the picture. I trusted Quentin and felt certain the film would work; though I suppose there will be a few smartass critics waiting to take a shot at him.

So, all of a sudden, you’re ‘hot.’

It doesn’t seem that long ago I had hopes of being the hot kid, selling my first story in ‘51 when I was 25. I got on the cover of Newsweek in April 1985, and was seen as an overnight success after little more than thirty years. Now I’m 72 and still at it, writing a sequel to Get Shorty that puts Chili Palmer in the music business, where, with his mob-connected background, he should feel right at home. In doing the research, learning about the record industry, the success of Get Shorty has opened all the doors. We’ve even had Aerosmith over to the house to drink non-alcoholic beer and play tennis. MGM, Jersey Films, and John Travolta all seem optimistic that it will happen. I am, too, but I have to finish writing the book before we’ll know if is any good. Or even what it’s about.

– ‘On Writing and Movies. Elmore Leonard interviewed by Patrick McGilligan’. Film Comment Magazine. 

Terry Southern on Stanley Kubrick

Dr. Strangelove (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Writer Terry Southern was hired by Stanley Kubrick to make a satire out of a screenplay originally based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. Released as Dr. Strangelove (1964), the movie takes us into the war room of a certain President Merkin Muffley, to reveal a military culture gone berserk, as its leaders cheerfully prepare for the imminent end of the world.

Kubrick's examination of Cold War unease is one of the most biting satires ever produced in Hollywood. The movie is set at the height of Cold War hostilities and centres on a deranged US general (played by Sterling Hayden) who, frustrated by his sexual impotence, plots to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a disparate coalition of political leaders makes a last-ditch effort to avert apocalypse. Peter Sellers plays three separate parts, including Dr. Strangelove, a weapons specialist with Nazi sympathies, while George C. Scott stands out as a hawkish general. The film was initially intended to be a dramatic examination of the Cold War (based on Peter George's book Red Alert), but Kubrick determined that it would be more successful as a parody. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a subversive masterpiece that established Kubrick as an unmatched stylist and bitter ironist. 

The moment in which an air force major (played by Slim Pickens) rides atop a falling nuclear weapon is one of the film’s most lasting images. Originally, the film concluded with a lavish pie fight within the War Room. The section was omitted, and the rewritten conclusion depicts a sequence of nuclear explosions set to Vera Lynn's iconic World War II song "We'll Meet Again." 

Dr. Strangelove's development was hampered by a plagiarism action involving the 1964 picture Fail Safe, which was based on a book similar to Red Alert, and the fact that the picture's premiere was initially scheduled for Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was killed.

Kubrick deftly weaves social critique onto an otherwise straightforward Cold War narrative. Kubrick clearly underlines a sense of dramatic irony in practically every scene via staging and language, most notably in the Strategic Air Command's slogan, "Peace is Our Profession,"

Kubrick deftly incorporates this lethal irony to demonstrate what occurs when communication is disrupted. Fundamentally, the tragedy is the loss of discourse during translation, which invites the question: Who is responsible? What is both funny and distressing about the film’s escalation into nuclear annihilation is that many of the film's ill-advised scenarios (such as the mishandled hotline between President Muffley and Premier Kissov) might have been prevented with appropriate planning and technology. Kubrick, however, does not underplay its baleful repercussions. By portraying caricatures of powerful characters, Kubrick skillfully suggests to the audience his own cynical views of society’s leaders: powerful men who are tragically out of touch with reality and whose paranoia will eventually destroy the world. Gens. Ripper and Turgidson exemplify this craziness. Ripper believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans, while Turgidson asserts that a coordinated preemptive attack would restrict reprisal to a "modest" 20 million American deaths. As the adult men quarrel in the War Room, Kubrick wrestles with a world gone mad, warning cogently against naive reliance on a system that may result in destruction and chaos. 

While the Cold War’s immediate terrors have mostly subsided since the debut of "Dr. Strangelove," Kubrick's disturbing images implying the inevitability of nuclear war can nevertheless strike fear and dread – even today. Kubrick consistently infuses "Dr. Strangelove" with contradictory feelings of exhilaration and terror, patriotic enthusiasm and troubling hate, until the film's terrifying conclusion. As the soothing verses of Vera Lynn's optimistic World War II anthem "We'll Meet Again" plays on the soundtrack, coordinated scenes of nuclear explosions fill the screen, a disturbing vision of darkness unleashed. 

The following extract is taken from an interview with Terry Southern by Lee Hill in which Southern discusses his experience of working with Stanley Kubrick.

What was the status of the ‘Dr. Strangelove’ script before Stanley Kubrick decided to hire you in the fall of 1962?

When Kubrick and Peter George first began to do the script, they were trying to stick to the melodrama in George’s book, Red Alert [published under the pseudonym ‘Peter Bryant’... There was an outline. They didn’t go into a treatment but went straight into a script. They had a few pages and in fact had started shooting, but in a very tentative way. Kubrick realized that it was not going to work. You can’t do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or boy–meets–girl way. You have to do it in some way that reflects your awareness that it is important and serious. It has to be a totally different treatment, and black humor is the way to go. That was Kubrick’s decision.

When you first got together with Kubrick, did you start changing the tone of the script right away?

Yeah, after the first day, at our first meeting, he told me what the situation was. All those things that I’ve told you were his very words. ‘It’s too important to be treated in the conventional way. It’s unique! The end of the world is surely a unique thing, so forget about the ordinary treatment of subject and go for something like a horror film.’ He decided to use humor. The flavor that attracted him in my novel The Magic Christian could be effective in this new approach. He would talk about the mechanics of making it totally credible and convincing in terms of the fail-safe aspect and then how to make that funny. And the way you make it funny, because the situation is absurd, is by dealing with it in terms of the dialogue and characters.

I’m curious about the day-to-day working relationship with Kubrick as you wrote the film from the preproduction period through the actual shooting.

Well, after my first day in London when he told me what he had in mind, I got settled into a hotel room not far from where he lived in Kensington. That night, I wrote the first scene, and then he picked me up at four-thirty the next morning in a limo. The limo was a big Rolls or Bentley. We rode in the backseat with the light on. There was this desk that folded down. It was very much like a train compartment. It was totally dark outside. If it got light, we would pull the shades down. He would read the script pages; then we would rewrite them and prepare them for shooting when we got to the studio, which was about an hour to an hour–and–a–half drive depending on the fog.

Kubrick is notorious for his organizational mania.

Yes, he loved nothing so much than to go into stationery stores and buy gadgets and organizational aids.

You hear all these fantastic stories about how Kubrick lives. Did you visit his home much when you were in London?

Yes, several times. He has a castlelike structure, a grand old mansion, which has this two–projector screening room. It has electric fences and security devices. It has everything except a moat. He’s super private because he lives for his children. He lives in comfort and luxury in almost total isolation.

Peter Sellers was going to play all four parts originally, including the Texan bombardier. I understand you coached Sellers on his accent.

The financing of the film was based almost 100 percent on the notion that Sellers would play multiple roles. About a week before shooting, he sent us a telegram saying he could not play a Texan, because he said it was one accent he was never able to do. Kubrick asked me to make a tape of a typical Texan accent. When Sellers arrived on the set, he plugged into this Swiss tape recorder with huge, monster earphones, and listened to the tape I made. He looked ridiculous, but he mastered the accent in about ten minutes. Then Sellers sprained his ankle and couldn’t make the moves going up and down the ladder in the bomb bay. So he was out of that part. The doctor told him he couldn’t do it. Then it was a question of replacing him. Stanley had set such store by Sellers’s acting that he felt he couldn’t replace him with just another actor. He wanted an authentic John Wayne. The part had been written with Wayne as the model.

       

Did Kubrick ever try to get Wayne to play the role?

Wayne was approached, and dismissed it immediately. Stanley hadn’t been in the States for some time, so he didn’t know anything about television programs. He wanted to know if I knew of any suitable actors on TV. I said there was this very authentic, big guy who played on Bonanza, named Dan Blocker. Big Hoss. Without seeing him, Kubrick sent off a script to his agent. Kubrick got an immediate reply: ‘It is too pinko for Mr. Blocker.’ Stanley then remembered Slim Pickens from One-Eyed Jacks [1961], which he [had] almost directed for Marlon Brando, until Brando acted in such a weird way that he forced Stanley out.

When Pickens was hired and came to London, wasn’t that the first time he had ever been out of the States?

Yes, in fact it was the first time he had ever been anywhere outside the rodeo circuit as a clown or the backlots of Hollywood. Stanley was very concerned about Slim being in London for the first time and asked me to greet him. I got some Wild Turkey from the production office and went down to the soundstage. It was only ten in the morning, so I asked Slim if it was too early for a drink. He said, ‘It’s never too early for a drink.’ So I poured out some Wild Turkey in a glass and asked him if he had gotten settled in his room. ‘Hell, it doesn’t take much to make me happy. Just a pair of loose shoes, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit.’ One of Kubrick’s assistants, a very public-school type, couldn’t believe his ears, but went ‘Ho, ho, ho’ anyway.

Finally, I took Slim over to the actual set where we were shooting. I left him alone for a few minutes to talk to Stanley. While we were standing there talking, Stanley went, ‘Look there’s James Earl Jones on a collision course with Slim. Better go over and introduce them.’ James Earl Jones knew that Pickens had just worked with Brando. Jones was impressed and asked Pickens about the experience of working with Brando. ‘Well, I worked with Marlon Brando for six months, and in that time, I never saw him do one thing that wasn’t all man and all white.’ Slim didn’t even realize what he was saying. I glanced at James Earl Jones, and he didn’t crack [a smile]. Slim replacing Sellers worked out well because, unbeknownst to me at the time, the actor that was playing the co-pilot [Jack Creley] was taller and stockier than Sellers. Whereas Slim was about the same size [as the co-pilot] and more convincingly fulfilled the intention of this larger-than-life Texan.

To what extent did Peter Sellers’ improvisation depart from the shooting script?

It was minimal. It wasn’t like Lolita, where he improvised a great deal. His improvisational bits in Strangelove were very specific. One scene that comes to mind is when [Sterling] Hayden goes into the bathroom to kill himself, Peter’s lines are: ‘Oh, go into the bathroom and have a brushup . . . good idea.’ Sellers changed that to: ‘Splash a bit of cold water on the back of the neck . . .,’ which is more of a British thing. That was good.

What was Columbia’s reaction to this subversive black comedy that the studio had helped to finance?

Columbia was embarrassed by the picture and tried to get people to see Carl Foreman’s The Victors instead. At the time we thought we were going to be totally wiped out. People would call up the box office and be told there were no seats for Strangelove and asked if they would like to see The Victors instead. Gradually, the buzz along the rialto built word of mouth in our favor.

Wasn’t there some falling-out between Kubrick and yourself over screen credit following the film’s release?

Stanley’s obsession with the auteur syndrome – that his films are by Stanley Kubrick – overrides any other credit at all. Not just writing but anything. He’s like Chaplin in that regard. That’s the reason why he rarely uses original music in his films. [Since I had] written this great best-seller, Candy, which was number one on the New York Times best-seller list for something like twenty-one weeks, my reputation eclipsed Stanley’s; so I got total credit for all the Strangelove success in Life, the New York Times, and other publications. The credit I was getting was just so overwhelming and one sided that naturally Stanley was freaking out. He took out an ad in Variety saying I was only one of the three writers on the film, the other two being Peter George, and himself. He just lashed out. But it was like an overnight thing. I wrote a letter to the New York Times explaining that there was no mystery involved, and that I was brought in to just help with the screenplay.