Be Cool
Elmore Leonard
Viking hbk, 288 pgs, £16.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Establishing shot. In 1990, US crime King Elmore Leonard published his best - the sharp, witty, satirical Get Shorty. In it, Florida shylock Chili Palmer peruses a debt owed him by a dead man into the heart of Hollywood, gradually remodelling his own story - and thus that of the book - as movie script. A little later, Addams Family-man Barry Sonnenfeld reimagined it as the most successful (if not the best) of big screen Leonard. With us so far? Good, because here's where it gets complicated.
Be Cool is Leonard's long threatened sequel. Between Shorty and now, Chili has turned producer on acclaimed 'Get Leo' - his own Get Shorty, do you see? - and 'Get Lost,' the sequel no one saw and even less liked. So now here's Chili, known and ostensibly successful but unable to get more than backroom at The Ivy where before it was centre-table. He's been ripped-off by a real estate agent who sold him $30,000 of retro-furniture and now everyone assumes it's his grandmother who died. And worst, girlfriend and B-movie screamer Karen Flores has run off to marry down the food chain: to a screenwriter. It's hard to fall when you're bumping bottom.
And then he meets Linda Moon, who works the phones for a dating agency when what she wants - what she really really wants - is to be a rock star. She has a band she calls Odessa - "AC/DC meets Patsy Cline" - seeing as how that's where they were brung up, but night-time it's Spice Girls' covers for the sleazy, scheming Raji's cheesy, sleazy girly group, Chicks International. That's until Chili happens along, mentioning as how he's managing Linda, starting now.
And so Be Cool sets itself up for Chili to trawl the Los Angeles music scene as he did low-rent La-La Land in the first book, right? Well, no.
Be Cool is very knowing. Chili visualises music business machinations for how they'll look on film: he is manipulating lives as though they were already part of the movie playing in his head. Be Cool is, if you like, the ingenious mirror of its prequel. And better yet, Leonard turns this self-reference on itself and has major scenes - like the rather silly set-piece shoot-out between gangsta rappers and the Russian Mafia - recounted later by Chili like pages from out of a screenplay. (Leonard flirting with the unreliable narrator?) All good post-modern stuff, and played out with Leonard's customary flip plotting and greased dialogue. Bang-up detail, from the Nothing To Loose record label through a meeting with cartoon rockers Aerosmith, would shame an author with far less on the clock (are you listening, Salman Rushdie?) than Leonard's seventy years. If it said Martin Amis on the cover, the lit-crits would wet themselves.
So, one final time: Be Cool is a sequel about making a film about people who made a sequel to the film that was made from that first book. Okay? God only knows what happens if Sonnenfeld has this one too. "There's no point doing a sequel if it's not better than the original," says the defeated Chili at one point. He knows a thing or two, that Chili Palmer.