The movie that inspired the Michael Mann thriller ‘Heat’
Heat, released in 1995 and written and directed by the great Michael Mann, is one of its decade’s greatest films. An enthralling, visually stunning and consummately performed masterpiece, Heat merges a rich, layered and characterful story with some of cinema’s most brilliant set pieces, creating undoubtedly one of the greatest crime stories of the 1990s, as well as one of the finest action movies of all time.
After all, the pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino is, indeed, compelling, with the pair often combining well to create some of the best films of all time, aside from the lesser-discussed 2008 film Righteous Kill. The fact that Heat wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar in a year with a famously weak ‘Best Picture’ field, no less, will never cease to astonish, being beaten to the fold by Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, which took home the night’s top prize.
But Mann’s Heat appeared to come out of nowhere, having not been based on a book or an existing TV series. It, indeed, seemed like a case of lightning in a bottle.
Yet, in actuality, Mann joined a club that included directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Haneke, Takashi Shimizu and Cecil B. DeMille, in that Heat was a remake of one of his own films. Specifically, it was a remake of an early work of Mann’s called L.A. Takedown.
Mann wrote the script that would one day become Heat back in the 1970s, but he was unable to get this ambitious 180-page script off the ground at this early stage of his career. He eventually shot an edited-down 90-minute version, which was initially written as a TV pilot but ultimately became a standalone TV film after NBC didn’t choose to move forward with a series.
Telling the story of an LA cop named Vincent Hanna who takes on a gang of professional bank robbers, L.A. Takedown is identical in almost every way to Heat. Starring the likes of Scott Plank and Michael Rooker, the most obvious connection to Mann’s 1995 masterpiece is the tagline for the movie that reads: “Hanna is the cop, and the heat is on”. The TV movie gained a small following, but it never reached the success Mann had hoped for.
Mann’s career became increasingly successful over the next few years, and after directing the hugely successful The Last of the Mohicans in 1992, he decided to return to this earlier work and do a bigger version that better realized his original vision. Heat was the result.
All these years later, Heat‘s stature has only grown with time while L.A. Takedown is mostly forgotten, and it is generally compared unfavourably to its remake by those who do see it. Still, Mann himself is grateful for having made L.A. Takedown and described the experience of making it as invaluable to crafting the later work, as it allowed him to see what worked and what didn’t.
