From 'Pulp Fiction' to 'Justified': Hollywood's Love Affair with Elmore Leonard

Justified opens its fourth season this month with Elmore Leonard's name in the credits and his DNA in every line reading — the latest chapter in Hollywood's longest-running crime-fiction romance. The writers' room famously wears bracelets asking WWED: What Would Elmore Do?

The affair's greatest hits track the modern crime film: Tarantino's Jackie Brown (from Rum Punch) — the director's only adaptation and arguably his most humane film; Soderbergh's Out of Sight, still the best argument for Clooney; Get Shorty, which weaponized Leonard's thesis that Hollywood and the mob are the same business with different catering; and both versions of 3:10 to Yuma, from a 1953 story he wrote for pulp rates.

Leonard's famous ten rules of writing ('leave out the part that readers tend to skip') double as adaptation advice, which may explain why he adapts so well: the books arrive pre-cut, all dialogue and velocity. His verdict on Justified, built from his novella Fire in the Hole: Timothy Olyphant's Raylan is so right that Leonard started writing the character with Olyphant's voice in his head — the adaptation adapting the author.

Start with the novella, then the series, then the whole shelf. He makes it look easy; the ten thousand imitators prove it isn't.