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I've enjoyed his prose for exactly these reasons, though he's not a favorite author or anything. If you're a film buff, you can thank him for Quentin Tarantino
by and0 9y ago
I've enjoyed his prose for exactly these reasons, though he's not a favorite author or anything.
If you're a film buff, you can thank him for Quentin Tarantino + Joel & Ethan Coen.
If his story-telling philosophy sounds appealing, check out Justified. It's a TV show loosely based on some of his characters, but it's written like a love letter to his work. It finished just after his death, and was refreshing to watch right around when the concept of "prestige" TV started to collapse into itself / constant navel gazing trying to be the next Breaking Bad. There's a lot to take in about modern Appalachia (it takes place in rural Kentucky), but there's no heavy-handed metaphors. It's not trying to be a Greek tragedy or a Dickens novel, just razor-sharp dialog and fun action that somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
- kolanos 9y agoI enjoy Leonard's work, but Cormac McCarthy is probably the anti-Leonard in terms of writing style and he's been easily as influential to the Cohens.
- tptacek 9y agoIs there another McCarthy story the Coens have done besides "No Country", very late in their career? I would also call McCarthy "the anti-Coen".
- Buldak 9y agoOut of curiosity, what makes McCarthy the anti-Leonard? I've only read McCarthy and not Leonard, but reading this article immediately reminded me of McCarthy in that it recommends a spare prose style.
- kolanos 9y agoGuess I'm thinking of Blood Meridian when it comes to Leonard's rule about not using extended vocabulary. Also McCarthy tends not to use punctuation, including quotations, so speech tends to be implicit in the prose. But it's hard to pin McCarthy down stylistically, so there may be a better example.
- tptacek 9y agoWhat Leonard story did the Coens ever adopt? They were signed for one in the 90s, but never did it.
- and0 9y agoThey never did an straight adoption like Tarantino did, but almost every Coen bros movie uses the same tropes as many Leonard novels: - Incompetent criminals (organized crime and / or desperate ordinary people) drive story - Kidnapping or ransom - Things go south, bad guys ruin themselves when things get too complicated - Attention to natural dialog and story progression over grand metaphor or symbolism In terms of the Coen bros / Cormac McCarthy comparison also mentioned, I'd say they were drawn to that one McCarthy novel because it fits all the same tropes. McCarthy can be super metaphorical and poetic, but there's an extreme simplicity to his work at the same time, especially in No Country for Old Men.
- tptacek 9y agoIsn't "attention to natural dialog" one of the things Leonard says in this piece people should avoid? "Avoiding regional patois" is hardly something you can say about Coen films, some of which seem to exist entirely to showcase one particular patois or the other.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> "Avoiding regional patois" is hardly something you can say about Coen films, His advice to "use regional dialect, patois, sparingly" seems very specifically not to be about avoiding characters who speak in such a dialect, but instead to be about the mechanism in which the use of regional patois is conveyed in writing ("Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop"), which, as the end product isn't the written word, is pretty much indistinguishable in the output of a movie, so the advice is probably not all that relevant to the medium (whether it would apply to writing screenplays is an interesting question, but again not really something that manifests on screen.)
- dexterdog 9y agoBig second for Justified. It was a great show with few low points and a solid finish. And, oh the dialogue... It's like what Sorkin would have written if he wanted his characters to sound like human beings.
- davidw 9y agoI watch very little TV, but that was a really solid show with a lot of great lines and a fun feel. Even though it was sort of a drama, it always felt a little bit cartoony somehow, not quite real in a larger than life way. That kept it more fun even when it was a bit grim. Opening scene for the whole series (in Florida, rather than Kentucky): https://vimeo.com/205769578 https://vimeo.com/205769578
- sizzzzlerz 9y agoTim Olyphant as Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder absolutely nailed their parts. Leonard expressed his appreciation for the actors and for the writers on numerous occasions. An amazing but underappreciated show.