Even though he’s been dead for 10 years, author Elmore Leonard is still intriguing audiences. His character, Raylan Givens, is due back July 18 when FX premieres “Justified: City Primeval.”
The eight-part series features Givens, the stalwart U.S. Marshal that Leonard first created in his book, “Pronto.” The character endured through three more stories with “Fire in the Hole” transmogrified into TV’s popular “Justified” which reigned for six seasons.
This time, the Stetson-clad hero finds himself in a new kind of badlands, Detroit.
"We were excited to embrace Detroit as a character in this piece,” said one of the show’s producers, Dave Andron. “Putting Raylan as a stranger in a strange land. And also, it's the land of Elmore. ‘City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit’ is his first crime novel, and he really embraced Detroit.”
Leonard, who wrote such hits as “Get Shorty,” “Rum Punch” and “Out of Sight,” worked at an ad agency for 10 years while he was struggling to be a novelist.
His first successes were all Westerns like “Hombre,” “3:10 to Yuma” and “Last Stand at Saber River.”
But he grew up in Detroit. Shortly before he died he told me, “All my friends were blue collar. I was a street kid. I played sports all through high school — football and basketball. I loved sports and loved to read. And I listened to people talk, but was never aware of it, though, till — all of a sudden — reviewers are talking about my dialogue.
“I love books that have a lot of dialogue in them. Also they’re easier to write. I like the idea of a lot of white space. It’s a page turner; people are talking.”
People continued to talk about Leonard’s insightful pen. His characters, like Raylan Givens, jumped off the page full-fledged and always unique. He explained the method to his memorable portraits: “I feel more comfortable using the character’s point of view rather than my own,” he said.
“The character looks out and he’s going to have an attitude about that smog or that sunset, and you're gonna hear it. You're gonna hear that attitude. If I describe it, you’re going to hear a mediocre description. I always write from a point of view,” he said.
Timothy Olyphant, who plays Givens, says he had no compunctions about returning to his latter-day hero. “Elmore Leonard and (writerexecutive producer) Graham Yost gave us so much material to launch what I've always thought was potentially numerous stories,” says Olyphant.
“I thought as long as we were still in the Elmore Leonard world and the Graham Yost world that the two of them created, I just thought I'd love to be there for it.”
That Elmore Leonard world is both lethal and hilarious, often tickling the underbelly of society. “I learned how to write by studying writers that I liked a lot,” Leonard told me.
“Hemingway, I studied him so closely until I realized that the structure, the flow of it, the prose itself, that when I'm parodied I see Hemingway. But I didn’t share Hemingway's attitude about life, about himself. I didn’t take everything that seriously. I saw a little more humor in life than he did. So I saw other others — John O'Hara, Steinbeck, Richard Bissell. His ‘7 1/2 Cents’ became ‘Pajama Game.’ I read a couple of his books (and thought) ‘That's the sound I want.’
“All the time, from the very beginning, I was very conscious of style,” Leonard said, “developing my own styles. The way you write most naturally, most effectively, THAT’S your style.”
Calling FX’s “Justified: City Primeval” a sequel or a spinoff is not exactly accurate. “We weren't trying to recapture the show that we did,” says executive producer and director Michael Dinner.
“We were trying to recapture the tone, Elmore's tone. And this is a book — ‘City Primeval’ is a book that we really loved the characters in the book. And we thought it would be interesting to pick up with Raylan and catapult him into this story and see him some years down the road where his road is lot shorter in front of him than the road behind.
“So, we felt we could take this story that we really liked a lot, and we could inject Raylan into it and tonally do a show that's similar, but also let the show that we did grow up a little bit,” says Dinner.
“We felt really good about that. We felt that what we've done is something that is true to the show, but not the same show. And we think it's pretty entertaining.”
Leonard revealed what he thought was the secret to being a successful writer: “You have to have the desire,” he said. “You can have the desire without the talent and maybe you can get by; maybe you can learn enough. But if you have the talent, you have to have the desire to do it. To me, that’s where the satisfaction is, in doing it. A lot of writers don’t like it. I don’t call it work.”
Grylls is running wild
Adventurer Bear Grylls is grilling the rich and famous again on his new show for National Geographic, “Running Wild with Bear Grylls: The Challenge.” For this series, Grylls has really rounded up the celebs starting with actor Bradley Cooper (“A Star is Born”) on Sunday, where he’ll spend the night hanging on the side of a cliff in the steep canyons of Wyoming. The following week it’ll be Marvel superstar Benedict Cumberbatch taking his life into his hands as he braves freezing waterfalls and gives cliff dwelling a new name. Grylls continues every Monday with stars like Cynthia Erivo, Russell Brand, Daveed Diggs and Tatiana Maslany. Maslany, the “Orphan Black” star, will be rappelling across the jagged promontories and challenging frostbite in the icy weather.
In contrast to this star-studded reality show, Fox is pretending to be on Mars with its “survival” series, “Stars on Mars.” Here contestants battle conditions that would simulate those on Mars and they must use their wit and physicality to cope with the difficulties and to outdo their fellow travelers.
Except for bicyclist Lance Armstrong, most of the “celebrities” are little niche-known on Earth. Two have already been eliminated from the scene. The force evidently was NOT with them. Next Monday four new “celebronaut” contestants will land on the Red Planet in what they call a “resupply” mission. Fox is not saying who they are, but the contingent includes a late-night personality, an NBA star, a chef and a reality so-called star.
Kathy Bates goes to court
Come fall Kathy Bates will be filling the shoes of Andy Griffith when she stars in “Matlock,” a new trick for an old dog. The series “Matlock,” about a folksy criminal defense attorney, ended in 1995 but will be resurrected by CBS.
In the meantime, Bates is co-starring with Maggie Smith and Laura Linney in the film, “The Miracle Club,” which opens in theaters July 14.
The Academy Award-winning actress tells me she was not encouraged to follow her dream. “I went to SMU in Dallas and the professors said, ‘It's going to take you 15-20 years to do this,’” she recalled. “But my mother told a very corny story: when I was born the doctor smacked me on my behind, and I thought it was applause, and have been looking for it ever since.”
'The Afterparty' celebrates Season 2
It’s difficult enough writing a 10-episode TV series, but crafting one that depicts different movie genres and illustrates opposing points of view — that can be a killer.
Chris Miller, creator and executive producer of “The Afterparty,” is faced with that task for Season 2 which arrives on Apple TV+ July 12.
“In the writers room for this season we were outside because of COVID and such,” he says.
“We had six different whiteboards that were double-sided, and it looked like ‘A Beautiful Mind’ with yarn and magnets and tables of timetables — who is where, when, whose story? Every aspect of it is like a complicated Jenga tower that if you pull one little thing out, the whole thing crumbles. And it is a real, real mind eraser. With this type of show, the whole season has to be fully formed and crafted before you can start shooting a single thing, because you’re seeing the same moments multiple points of view, and the whole thing has to work together like a little jewel box.
“So when the actors came aboard we gave them all 10 scripts for the season so they could understand what was real and true, and then they could craft their performance based on that,” he says.
Some of the original players are back, but among the newcomers this season are John Cho, Paul Walter Hauser, Vivian Wu and Ken Jeong.
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