Many great pieces have been published about writer Elmore Leonard this week, who sadly passed away aged 87. A best-selling novelist perhaps most familiar for having his work adapted in films such as Jackie Brown, Get Shorty and 3:10 to Yuma, and more recently the TV series Justified, Leonard was a well-loved figure in popular culture as you’ll be able to tell from the various forms of remembrance published this week. Showbiz bible Variety have a no-nonsense obituary; Film and literary critic Janet Maslin and fellow author Michael Connelly offer personal appreciative takes on Leonard in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times respectively; and the folks over at The Dissolve converse with one another about him.
Here are the no-nonsense Leonard’s ten rules of writing:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” … he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
QT’s best films ever
Last year numerous filmmakers and critics contributed to Sight & Sound’s poll of the greatest films of all time. Coming across Quentin Tarantino’s picks on www.openculture.com today we felt compelled to share ’em:
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976)
Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976)
Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1939)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
Pretty Maids All in a Row (Roger Vadim, 1971)
Rolling Thunder (John Flynn, 1977) [Pictured above, sorta]
Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
Iron Man 3 16-bit game
Another day on the internet, another film re-imagined as an old school video game… Sure, it’s not a novel idea any more, but we reckon this take on Iron Man 3 is still worth a look:
Rambo heads to your lounge
John Rambo’s been to Vietnam and back again, and then back to Vietnam again before relaxing holidays in Afghanistan and Myanmar, racking up plenty of frequent flyer miles and then returning home to his rural American farm. Now, The Hollywood Reporter reckons that Rambo is heading to TV with a series based on the iconic character, saying Sylvester Stallone is in talks to participate on a “creative level” and perhaps reprise his role as Rambo. This sounds like it could be awesome. Perhaps.
Paul Thomas Anderson shows off
That’s 470 feet of dolly track being used for a shot in Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s pot-soaked detective tale Inherent Vice. We’re psyched for this one, expecting one part Raymond Chandler to two parts The Big Lebowski…
Hey, here’s a still of Samuel L. Jackson from Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake. Either that, or this is what really happened to Major Lazer’s Skerrit Bwoy…
