When Dustin Hoffman suspected a beloved ’90s crime movie was making fun of him: “Is that supposed to be me?”
In 1986, Dustin Hoffman became attached to star in a steamy noir about a retired Secret Service agent embroiled in a torrid affair with an ageing movie star being blackmailed by the Mob. The movie was called La Brava, and it was based on a 1983 novel by crime writer extraordinaire Elmore Leonard, whose whip-smart books later became movies like Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma.
Unfortunately for Leonard, a hugely experienced scribe who had already been put through the Hollywood wringer for 30 years, Hoffman soon started playing silly beggars. Despite Cannon Films offering him $6million to officially sign up for the movie, and Hoffman attaching a host of different directors to the project, he never signed on the dotted line. Eventually, the project died on the vine, and Leonard, who had been burned by Hollywood before, had another horror story to add to his extensive back catalogue.
“We met off and on for six months,” Leonard told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “Dustin had a new director at almost every meeting. First, one guy, then another guy. Scorsese was even there for a few meetings. But we couldn’t get Dustin to commit.”
After a while, a frustrated Leonard realised he’d been writing treatment after treatment for the movie on the whims of a star who was hard to pin down, to say the least. Even worse, he hadn’t received a cent for any of his work. So, pushed to his breaking point, he finally told the A-list All the President’s Men star, “Look, I’m doing all the work. I’m writing all these treatments, and I’m not getting paid.” To his astonishment, he claimed Hoffman replied, “Don’t worry, you’ll get paid retroactively.”
This outlook on the almighty dollar probably made perfect sense to Hoffman, a multi-millionaire movie star. However, to a writer who spent his days cranking out novels and screenplays, few of which had been substantial moneymakers, it showed how out of touch with reality Hoffman had become. “When I told my agent that, he rolled on the floor, laughing,” Leonard said with a rueful shake of the head. “He kept going, ‘That’s what he told you? Retroactively!”
Naturally, after the project fell by the wayside, the decidedly miffed Leonard said some not-so-nice things about Hoffman in the press. To his credit, the star later called the scribe to apologise for how La Brava turned out, and then the issue was left in the past. Well, until Leonard published a new novel in 1990, which Barry Sonnenfeld turned into a 1995 crime comedy classic.
Get Shorty told the story of Chili Palmer (John Travolta), a Miami loan shark who becomes a Hollywood movie producer through a series of farcical events. He then tries to navigate Tinseltown and all its assorted weirdos, including degenerate gambler and B-movie director Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) and the pampered, diminutive movie star Martin Weir (Danny DeVito). Palmer’s tale ultimately reveals Hollywood to be just as crooked as the Mob world he was used to in Miami.
Naturally, Get Shorty gave Leonard license to exorcise some of his Hollywood demons in an entertaining and clever way. However, when the movie became a huge hit, a certain A-list star watched it and started to get the feeling he was being made fun of.
After all, in one of the film’s best scenes, Weir arrives for a lunch meeting at a restaurant with Palmer, and specifically orders something that isn’t on the menu: an omelette with shallots “only slightly browned.” This scene was straight out of the book, where Leonard wrote, “It was an unwritten rule in Hollywood: actors never ordered straight from the menu. They’d think of something they had to have that wasn’t on it, or they’d tell exactly how they wanted the entree prepared.”
The scene was a brilliantly funny example of the little things Hollywood stars do to exert their power in everyday life, but it struck a little close to home for Hoffman. He had a habit of ordering off the menu and, to add fuel to the fire, was one of Hollywood’s most vertically challenged stars. Had Leonard based the character of Weir on him as a kind of bizarre literary revenge?
Amazingly, Leonard soon received a call from an obviously upset Hoffman, who asked, “That guy in Shorty; is that supposed to be me?” Without missing a beat, Leonard put the exclamation point on his petty, yet undeniably hilarious, bid for vengeance. “Come on, Dustin,” he said with an ironic remove. “You think you’re the only short actor in Hollywood?”
