Critical Essay | Critical Review by Linda Stewart

SOURCE: "Hollywood's Left Twisting in the Plot," in Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1990, section 14, p. 6.

In the following review, Stewart praises Get Shorty.

If writing well is the best revenge, Elmore Leonard just merrily evened a lot of scores. Get Shorty gets Hollywood right where it lives and the joke is so funny, so infinitely tricky, so perfectly synchronized on so many levels that it's apt to make you spin.

Leonard, who has written more than 15 screenplays (8 of them produced) and has had most of his 28 novels "under option," has an eminently reasonable cause to want revenge. Hollywood doesn't simply shoot Leonard's novels, it slowly, very painfully tortures them to death.

Of course, the only authentic Hollywood novel is a comedy of manners—atrocious manners, where people are likely to eat their own hearts out with the wrong fork, or backstab each other with the wrong...
(read more)