Elmore Leonard in Hollywood
Q: Let's talk about what's going on now with some of your books. How about 1978's The Switch?
A: That's the one Diane Keaton was going to be in at Fox. But then Ruthless People came out and they shelved it because they thought it was the same story. I didn't think it was, but that was the end of it. That's the book that Quentin stole from a store when he was a teenager and got caught. The way I tell the story, he subsequently went back to the store and bought the book. Quentin said, "I went back, but I didn't buy the book--I stole it [again]." The three characters who appeared in that book are also in Rum Punch [made into 1997's Jackie Brown], which is why Quentin wanted to buy Rum Punch.
Q: Who's writing the script for Freaky Deaky?
A: Monte Hellman. I think my writing in that one is as good as I can get in a novel.
Q: In Freaky Deaky you have a character say about the '60s, "That whole show back then was a put-on. You gonna tell me we were trying to change the world? We were kicking ass and having fun." Is that how you feel?
A: A lot of it was, no question. The '60s were great, but what amazes me is that now that period doesn't seem to have made any difference. We've kind of come back to what we were before. I didn't think there would ever be any conservative people in the world after the '60s.
Q: Sam Peckinpah wanted to make a movie from your 1980 book City Primeval. You and Peckinpah seemed to many to be a dream team. What happened?
A: I wasn't that happy about Peckinpah as a director. He was abstract, almost philosophical about how he saw the film, which was being called Hang Tough. I was never sure what he was talking about. We didn't share the same sense of humor--his was quite broad, mine is subtle. His idea of humor is: James Caan spends a night with a girl and Robert Duvall doesn't tell him until the next morning in the car driving off somewhere that she's got gonorrhea. He thinks that's the funniest thing in the world and he's howling, got tears in his eyes. I don't think that's so funny.
Q: You've been pretty hard on blacks and on Detroit in some of your books. In City Primeval a character describes Detroit as "one big niggerville with a few whites sprinkled in." Ever get any flak from blacks about what you write?
A: Yeah, I heard from one of the black groups who accused me of being a racist. But I'm sure they hadn't read the book.
Q: Do you consider Detroit basically a lawless frontier?
A: Just in the neighborhoods with the drug dealers shooting each other. No more so than L.A.
Q: You've also been criticized for your sexual attitudes, haven't you?
A: A Detroit Free Press reviewer who's a friend of mine said that my attitude about women was on a par with Mickey Spillane. I started to concentrate a little bit after that on developing the female characters. But you have to remember that the reviewers are writers. Who think they can write. [Laughs]
Q: Whatever happened to the book Hitchcock was once interested in, Unknown Man No. 89?
A: Everyone likes that one, but it still hasn't been made. According to Truffaut, Hitchcock gave up on it, didn't think he could make it work. I was surprised that Universal bought it for him to begin with. It's still at Universal, but they don't own the TV rights. Last year we were making a deal with Peter Guber for TV. I think he has it now.
Q: Your newest book, Cuba Libre, has attracted some hot writers, hasn't it?
A: The Coen brothers just wrote the script for this one. It works. They haven't committed to direct, because they haven't done something like this before. We'll see.
Q: I don't want to get to the end of this interview without asking you something about your battle with the bottle. There were a lot of years where you were pretty heavy into the sauce, weren't there?
A: Yeah. Once after I returned from California I started throwing up blood and went into the emergency hospital. They thought it was some kind of an ulcer condition. They tried to stop the bleeding and they couldn't. The doctor said, "The only other thing it could be is gastritis, but we usually only see that in skid row bums." After the surgery he said, "It's acute gastritis."-I was in the hospital a few days and when I came out I eased back into drinking again.
Q: Didn't that scare you?
A: It scared everybody else, but it didn't scare me, no. Because I didn't feel near death.
Q: Eventually you did quit, though, through Alcoholics Anonymous. How did AA work for you?
A: A change took place after I got in AA. I realized that you have to take this problem and hand it over to a higher power and forget about it. That really changed my outlook. You're not simply abstaining, you're taking on a completely different attitude about yourself. You quit taking yourself so seriously.
____________________________________
Lawrence Grobel interviewed Jim Carrey for the May '98 issue of Movieline.
Subscribe to the new Movieline on YouTube
