CHEAT READ
Get Shorty
by Elmore Leonard Written 1989, in Detroit, US Crime/Comic noir
THE RUNDOWN Miami loan shark Chili Palmer gets into a row with local mob boss Ray Bones after the latter accidentally steals his leather jacket. Chili grazes Bones with gunfire but, between the jigs and the reels, ends up working for him. He is sent to Las Vegas to retrieve money from Leo Devoe who has scammed a big insurance claim out of an airline by faking his death. While there, Chili is asked to collect a debt from a small-time filmmaker in LA called Harry Zimm who runs ZigZag Productions. Chili goes to Harry to collect the debt but also to talk to him about a possible entrance into the film business which so fascinates him. He pitches an idea based on Leo’s scam and Harry sees its potential. In the meantime, however, he’ll need Chili to help him with some financial problems he is currently having.
NEED TO KNOW With Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard (who would have turned 91 this week) was unloading into prose form some 20 years of working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. In his experience, Tinseltown was full of a very different kind of conman, and egos that required careful negotiation. Burt Reynolds had made a mess of Leonard’s
Stick while Dustin Hoffman (on whom the character of Martin “Shorty” Weir is based) was notoriously demanding during Leonard’s quest to get LaBrava adapted to celluloid. What better way to assault them than to throw a cat amongst these cigar-smoking pigeons. Ernesto “Chili” Palmer was that cat.
Palmer, a real-life gangster and shylock who worked for a private detective agency when Leonard met him, was transplanted into Get Shorty effortlessly.
THE END Ray Bones is en route to LA to see what Chili is doing with the money he retrieved from Leo. In the meantime, Chili, Harry and Harry’s wife Karen are plotting how to secure the finances to produce Chili’s Mr Lovejoy while also wooing self-important leading man Martin Weir. Harry gambled away a cool $200k investment from Bo, a small-time drug dealer who is unimpressed with the situation. Bo is in with some Columbians and owes them money, money he feels Chili should be able to get his hands on to make up any investment shortfall. Chili sees a way to get Bones off his back at the same time as securing Bo’s drug loot.
THE VERDICT “Leonardheads” argue over whether Get Shorty is among the comic-noir titan’s finest works but it is certainly one of his best known, partly thanks to Barry Sonnenfeld’s peppy 1995 adaptation starring John Travolta and Danny DeVito. What is not up for discussion is the Grade-A rat-tat-tat of Leonard’s dialogue in Get Shorty which is as smoky and hilarious as anything he had done up to that point.
DID YOU KNOW? Leonard was adamant that Sonnenfeld’s film not be shot in the style of an outright comedy. He felt that the honesty and lack of cynicism in the gangsters was important to communicate in the delivery. He subsequently found it the best movie adaptation that any of his works had been given, and noted that it revealed to him lots of comedic values in the dialogue that he hadn’t necessarily appreciated beforehand.