'Justified' Creator Aims To Stay True To The Late Writer Elmore Leonard

Terry Gross at NPR's Fresh Air interviewed Graham Yost, the producer of TV's Justified, the crime show based on the late great crime writer Elmore Leonard's novella, Fire in the Hole.

The FX series Justified, which is in its sixth and final season, is based on the novella Fire in the Hole by Elmore Leonard. Leonard was an executive producer of the series until his death in 2013. The show's creator and showrunner, Graham Yost, says he has made it his mission to stay as true as he can to Leonard's vision and storytelling style.

"Ultimately I look at this show as Elmore Leonard's show, and we're all in service of him and his view and his way of writing and creating these characters," Yost tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "So whatever feels like it works within that world is something we're open to."

Set in Harlan County, Ky., which is coal mining country, the story revolves around two men who have known each other since they were in the mines together as teens: Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, and Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins. Raylan is now a deputy U.S. marshal and Boyd is an outlaw whose criminal activities include robbing banks. Raylan wants to move to Florida to reconnect with his ex-wife and their 5-month-old child, but first he wants to bring Boyd down, which means catching him when he pulls off his next heist.

The show is violent, but Yost says he and the writers have to walk a line to keep the network happy.

"Elmore's world is a violent world," he says. "In the best Elmore scenes, you think that something is either going to take a hard turn into romance and some kind of liaison, or it's going to take it the other way and go into violence. There's often something oddly humorous about the violence in Elmore's movies and in his books."

You can read the rest of the piece and listen to NPR's audio clip via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/26/395534419/justified-creator-aims-to-stay-true-to-the-late-writer-elmore-leonard

Note: You can also read my Crime Beat column on Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite writers, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/05/return-to-elmoreland-elmore-leonards.html

Rayland's Last Stand: After The Sixth Season Of 'Justified' Debuts This January, It’s A Wrap For One Of Our Favorite TV Lawmen.

Joe Leydon at Cowboys & Indians magazine offers a piece on the late great crime writer Elmore Leonard's popular character Deputy U.S. Marshal Rayland Givens.

From the very start — to be precise, the first scene of the first episode — Justified promised to be a different sort of prime time crime drama.  

Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens — smooth as silk, bold as brass — strolls onto the swimming pool deck of a swanky Miami hotel, takes his seat opposite a cocky mobster, and reminds the miscreant of a warning he issued the previous day: “You don’t get out of town in 24 hours, I’m gonna shoot you on sight.” The mobster proceeds to make two serious mistakes. First, he brushes aside Raylan’s threat. Then he tries to pull a gun. Raylan responds by shooting — once, twice, three times — leaving the mobster very seriously dead.

Even if Raylan hadn’t been wearing a cowboy hat and Lucchese boots — and even if audiences hadn’t already seen Timothy Olyphant, the actor perfectly cast as the deputy marshal, play a similarly lethal character in HBO’s Deadwood — the scene would have crackled with the potent intensity of a Wild West showdown. And that’s exactly what the series producers intended, to alert viewers right from the get-go that Justified was going to be a contemporary spin on the classic western, with a straight-shooting, wisecracking lawman as the steely-eyed hero of the FX network series. 

Raylan Givens first appeared in two novels and a short story by the late Elmore Leonard, the celebrated crime fiction author who started out as a writer of westerns. While reconstituting the character for a weekly TV series, producer Graham Yost and his writing staff drew heavily on Leonard’s literature, and then added some embellishments of their own. In the world according to Justified, Raylan is a self-assured maverick who grew up in the hill country of eastern Kentucky. He turned his back on his roots and his criminally inclined father to pursue a career with the U.S. Marshals Service. But when his chronic use of deadly force — and his occasional issuing of death threats — displeased his superiors once too often, Raylan was reassigned to Lexington, Kentucky, in a district that includes his hometown of Harlan. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.cowboysindians.com/Cowboys-Indians/January-2015/Raylands-Last-Stand/