Lawrence Block opens 8 Million Ways to Die <\/em>with the kind of clipped dive-bar poetry that crime novelists fictionally kill for: \u201cI saw her entrance. It would have been hard to miss.\u201d So says Matthew Scudder, Block\u2019s most enduring creation, in his fifth whiskey-spiked mystery as a disgraced former cop and disgraced current private investigator. On the page, he\u2019s as much an archetype of noir as his surroundings, a New York City that\u2019s 80% shadows and 20% fire escapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the process of adapting 8 Million Ways to Die <\/em>for the big screen, between Oliver Stone\u2019s original script and Robert Towne\u2019s uncredited rewrites, the setting moved west to sunny Los Angeles. The opening credits fly across the city, smog blushing by dawn\u2019s early light, overcooked synth struggling to sound like anything else but Jan Hammer\u2019s Vice <\/em>score, as Jeff Bridges tries to make the title sound like casual human conversation. The most interesting scene (and one of the few with director Hal Ashby\u2019s human touch) comes shortly thereafter, when Scudder\u2019s daughter finds him passed out shirtless on the median that separates their house from the highway. After that, it\u2019s all stretch marks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ashby only took the project because of the Alcoholics Anonymous subplot. When the producers fired Ashby for making an Ashby movie, that was the first material to hit the cutting room floor. Scudder\u2019s entire descent into addiction is dealt with in voice-over and out-of-focus headlights. A relapse is headed off by a jumpcut to Scudder waking up in rehab looking ghoulish but no functionally worse for wear. What\u2019s left is a collection of agonizing two-shots in which Jeff Bridges and a pubescent Andy Garcia yell at each other until one of them can figure out how to improvise their way out of the scene. The peak of entertainment here is when Garcia threatens, \u201cWhy don\u2019t I fuck you from here?\u201d and Bridges asks, \u201cWhat are you, Rubberman?\u201d, all while menacingly crunching on snowcones produced from Garcia\u2019s trunk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hal, <\/em>a documentary on the late legend\u2019s career, <\/em>leaves 8 Million Ways to Die <\/em>out of its montages the way portraits leave out pimples. It made under a million dollars across 215 theaters for its opening weekend. Tragically, it would be Ashby\u2019s last movie, despite hopes of directing the wildly popular work of another criminal mastermind, Elmore Leonard\u2019s LaBrava<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time 8 Million Ways <\/em>opened and closed in 1986, Michael Mann had pulled back from active Vice <\/em>detail. He stuck around to executive produce the rest of the series, but after setting the tone and establishing the only rule – no earth tones – he had other ideas. One, capitalizing on his small-screen heat, was Crime Story<\/em>, a series that would premiere later that year. Another was his third theatrical feature, a hopeful rebound from 1983\u2019s The Keep<\/em>, based on a promising paperback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Red Dragon<\/em>, Thomas Harris\u2019s second novel, was received well enough at the time, but most of its acclaim only showed up in the rear-view mirror. The \u201cforensic procedural\u201d genre wouldn\u2019t find a captive audience until the premiere of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation <\/em>(which shared a star) almost 20 years later. Likewise, Manhunter<\/em>, eventually sold as the first appearance of Hannibal Lecter after Silence of the Lambs <\/em>made him a household name, wouldn\u2019t get any credit until the decade that bleeds through every frame was long dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Manhunter <\/em>abides by most of Michael Mann\u2019s rules for Miami Vice<\/em>, though he does allow for some browns among his neon greens and chlorinated blues. The difference is in the effect. Michel Rubini\u2019s score sounds, at times, like Jan Hammer played backwards. The pop songs are too dissonant, too moody to make the Top 40. Dante Spinotti\u2019s cinematography, the stuff that movie subreddits are made of, turns every scene into a hyper-saturated Hopper painting. The powers that be wanted Jeff Bridges for the lead, but Mann dug in his heels over up-and-comer William Petersen, star of the Vice<\/em>-transcendent To Live and Die in L.A.<\/em>. If Crockett is a breathing extension of his Art Deco environs, Petersen\u2019s Will Graham is well-dressed skeleton in a series of very chic closets. He\u2019s an open wound barely stitched together with cold, conditioned procedure. If Graham is ever mistaken for cool, it\u2019s only by defensive imitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the volume of digital ink spilled in its honor, Manhunter <\/em>landed with a thud only four months after 8 Million Ways to Die<\/em>. To quote the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, in the film\u2019s most common complaint, \u201cMaybe it\u2019s too much Miami Vice<\/em> for Mann.\u201d This critical refrain, that Manhunter <\/em>was too Miami <\/em>for its own good, strangely enough came alongside the show\u2019s highest ratings, peaking at number nine in the 1986 Nielsens. Stranger yet, that devoted home audience never made its way to the theaters, letting the purest Vice<\/em>-alike lose millions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mann\u2019s other series, Crime Story<\/em>, never hit that kind of high, but its feature-length premiere later that year was good enough to score theatrical distribution, thanks in no small part to the direction of proud indie provocateur Abel Ferrara. As part of the same Elmore Leonard renaissance that connected LaBrava <\/em>with Ashby, the author\u2019s 1982 novel Cat Chaser <\/em>found its way to Ferrara and star Peter Weller, both avowed Leonard admirers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time Cat Chaser <\/em>limped straight to video in 1991, three years after it was shot, Miami Vice <\/em>was already two years cancelled. The pastel-and-palm-tree shtick was dated d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, down to the 4:3 squeeze for projection TVs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matter of fact, the best way to enjoy Cat Chaser <\/em>is as a feature-length pilot for a Vice <\/em>spin-off starring Peter Weller as a Miami hotelier with a shadowy past. Only it seems more like a late season, when we\u2019re already supposed to know why Charles Durning is playing a homicidal heavy like the mythical Fourth Stooge. The only giveaway that this wasn\u2019t meant for small screens is the equal opportunity nudity. After producers lopped off half the movie, that nudity is about all that\u2019s left of note, save the narration provided by an actor who is not in the actual movie. It is, with little exaggeration, the worst ever recorded. Given Leonard\u2019s well-earned reputation for dialogue, it feels personal when the voice-over goes like this: \u201cHe had to believe he and Mary could make it, which was certainly <\/em>a lot of make-believe.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fabled three-hour cut has screened a few times at New York City arthouses in recent years. Word is it\u2019s an improvement. But as it imperfectly exists, Cat Chaser <\/em>is an 80-minute endurance test in just how much entertainment you can squeeze out of Peter Weller brooding in billowing slacks against watercolor sunsets and Kelly McGillis being lit exclusively across the eyes like a supermodel Dracula. The only winner in the bunch was Elmore Leonard, who made $1,000 a page for rewrites and never bothered to learn the producers\u2019 names. Like the other novelists, he didn\u2019t have much to say about the finished product. To them, they were compromised causes lost.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite its legacy as the fashionable ambassador of an entire decade, Miami Vice<\/em> went out of style almost as fast as it came in, too fast for even the copycats to stick their landing. But that\u2019s alright. The books are better anyways. On the night of September 16th, 1984, Crockett and Tubbs cruised a jet-black Ferrari Daytona convertible into pop culture immortality […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":14346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1422,162],"class_list":["post-14342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22795,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14342\/revisions\/22795"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/8million-1024x576.jpg\")
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