9 / 10
Official trailer
Look at Me
Chili Palmer collects debts for a Miami mobster. He’s calm, polite, stylish and completely unafraid, and when he wants you to pay attention, he says two words: look at me. You look. Then you pay.
Sent to Las Vegas to chase a dry cleaner who faked his own death, Chili ends up in Los Angeles chasing Harry Zimm, a B-movie producer who owes money to the wrong people. Harry makes cheap horror films with titles like Grotesqueries. Chili, it turns out, loves movies. Before long he’s pitching a film of his own, based on his own life, and Hollywood can’t get enough of him.
Barry Sonnenfeld directed it from Scott Frank’s script, and no Elmore Leonard adaptation beats it, because it gets the thing most adaptations miss: the dialogue.
I grin through this whole movie. It’s the rare comedy where nobody seems to be working hard for a laugh, and the laughs keep coming anyway, one quiet line at a time. Travolta slouches around Los Angeles like he owns the place, and I’d follow him anywhere.
For Writers
Chili’s catchphrase, look at me, tells the audience everything about him in three words: his calm, his authority and his total confidence.
A single, repeated line can define a character better than pages of description. The right catchphrase squeezes a character’s whole approach to the world into a few words. Each return reminds the reader who they’re dealing with, and raises the stakes of the scene, because the reader knows what usually follows.
Chili never overuses it, either. He saves it for the moments when it matters, and that restraint keeps it powerful. Use a catchphrase too often and it becomes a tic. Use it three or four times, at the right moments, and it becomes the line readers quote back to you.
Travolta
This was Travolta’s first big hit after Pulp Fiction brought him back from the dead, and he’s never been cooler. Chili doesn’t do anything fast. He walks slowly, talks slowly and watches everything, and every other character in the film is more nervous, more stupid or more desperate than he is.
The joke is that the loan shark is the most competent, most sensible person in Hollywood. He handles producers, actors and gangsters exactly the same way, and it works on all of them. Travolta plays it so relaxed that you’d swear he’s barely trying, and that’s the whole performance.
For Writers
The loan shark turns out to be the most competent and sensible person in Hollywood. The joke drives the whole comedy.
Putting a character from one world into another, and letting them be better at the new world’s game than its natives, is one of the oldest and most reliable comic setups. It works because it exposes the absurdities of the new world through fresh eyes.
Leonard’s twist is that Chili doesn’t change. He handles producers exactly the way he handled deadbeats in Miami, and the producers turn out to be easier. The comedy comes from his consistency. Everybody else keeps changing their story to suit the room, and he never changes his for anybody. I cover this in more depth in my piece on humor in writing.
The Hollywood Crowd
Gene Hackman plays Harry Zimm, a sweaty, cowardly schlock producer who’s in debt to everybody and has one good script he can’t get made. Hackman is hilarious, all bluster and panic, and his scenes with Travolta are a double act made in heaven.
Rene Russo plays Karen Flores, a scream queen who’s smarter than every man around her, and Danny DeVito plays Martin Weir, a short, vain movie star who wants to play Chili in the film of his life, without ever quite understanding who Chili is. DeVito’s Weir is a perfect little portrait of movie-star ego.
The Actual Gangsters
Dennis Farina plays Ray Bones, Chili’s furious rival from Miami, a hothead who can’t stand that Chili’s doing better than him, and he gets some of the biggest laughs in the film. Delroy Lindo plays Bo Catlett, a limo-company owner and drug dealer who wants to be a movie producer himself, and he’s cool, menacing and funny all at once.
James Gandolfini, a few years before The Sopranos, plays Bear, a gentle giant of a stuntman who works as Bo’s muscle.
His scene with Chili, where they sit down and Chili quietly talks him out of a fight, steals the second half, and I think it’s the best scene in the film. I could watch Gandolfini’s face working through that conversation on a loop. You can see exactly what he’d do with Tony Soprano.
The Scene at the Cinema
The best-loved moment is also the quietest. Chili takes Karen to see Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, and he watches the screen, mouthing the lines along with the actors. It’s the moment you realize this hard man is a real movie lover, and it makes him more likeable than any number of good deeds could.
It’s also a lovely little joke about the whole film. Everybody in Hollywood talks about movies. Chili’s the only one who loves them.
That Touch of Evil moment is the one that wins me over completely. It tells you who Chili is without a word of his own dialogue, and I think it’s the reason the film gets a 9 instead of an 8.
For Writers
Chili mouths the dialogue along with Touch of Evil in a dark cinema. One small, private moment of love for movies makes the character human.
Tough characters need one moment of unguarded pleasure. It doesn’t have to be sentimental. A shared joke, a favorite film, a private ritual: anything that shows what they love lets the reader warm to them without softening them, and it makes their harder moments land with more weight.
Every hard character has a secret enthusiasm: an old band, a sports team, a favorite writer. Find your character’s, and give them a scene where they forget themselves in it. It’ll do more for them than any backstory, and it costs you half a page.
A Satire With Its Feet Up
Get Shorty is a satire of Hollywood, and it’s a gentle one. Nobody gets destroyed. The movie people are vain, cowardly and ridiculous, and the gangsters are vain, cowardly and ridiculous in exactly the same ways. The film’s joke is that the two businesses run on the same rules: bluff, pressure, and never let the other guy see you sweat.
Sonnenfeld, who’d shot Blood Simple for the Coens before he started directing, keeps it light and quick, with a lazy, jazzy rhythm that suits Chili to the ground. He never pushes a joke or winks at the audience. He trusts the actors, the lines and the absurdity of the situation, and it pays off in almost every scene.
Leonard’s Dialogue
Elmore Leonard’s novels live or die on their dialogue, loose, funny, full of criminals who talk in circles and never quite get where they’re going. Scott Frank’s script keeps it almost intact, and the actors deliver it with perfect timing. There isn’t a single scene where somebody explains too much. The plot’s a tangle of debts, drugs, lockers at the airport and a film script everybody wants a piece of, and it doesn’t really matter. You’re here for the characters and the talk, and the talk is wonderful.
A Couple of Stumbles
The ending wraps up a little too neatly, and the last scene, a movie-within-a-movie gag, is fun but slight.
I’d have liked one more real sting before the credits. Some of the plot mechanics, especially the locker full of drug money, get confusing, and I lose the thread there. John Lurie’s jazzy score is great, but the film’s style can feel a little too pleased with itself.
The sequel, Be Cool, is terrible, so don’t bother.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Get Shorty is built almost entirely on dialogue, and most of its scenes are people talking, bluffing and failing to say what they mean. The plot barely matters. The voices carry everything.
Great dialogue can drive a story as powerfully as action, as long as every exchange involves somebody wanting something and somebody else getting in the way.
Read your dialogue aloud. If a line sounds like information, cut it. If it sounds like a person, keep it.
Get Shorty, Thirty Years On
It’s a 9, and it’s aged beautifully. Get Shorty is a cool, funny, perfectly cast crime comedy about Hollywood, with Travolta at his effortless best and a supporting cast without a weak link. It only misses a 10 because the ending goes soft and the plot gets tangled, and I forgive both the moment Gandolfini sits down across from Chili. Watch it for the dialogue.
