'L.A. Takedown' and the Rough Draft of a Masterpiece
I can't believe I missed this one last time around.
Before we plunge in, a few new items:
My horror short “The Mind of the Unbound Prometheus” is now available in the latest issue of House of Gamut (paywalled). As Stephen King once wrote, hell is repetition—especially when it comes to the human mind.
The paperback version of the re-issue of “Boise Longpig Hunting Club” is (finally!) up on Amazon and other fine retailers, if you’re looking for a summer thriller about bad billionaires and the people they pursue. (And if you’ve already read it, I’d deeply appreciate it if you left a review somewhere.)
Onwards!
Earlier this week, someone who’d read my most recent Substack offered up another example of directors who’d remade their own films. “I don't know if we talked about it, but did you see LA Takedown?” they asked me on Bluesky, the microblogging site that’s attempting to carve off an audience from Elon Musk’s Twitter.
For those who don’t know, “L.A. Takedown” is a television movie written and directed by Michael Mann that aired in 1989. It also served as a rough draft of sorts for “Heat,” Mann’s 1995 masterpiece about a sophisticated heister pursued by an ultra-driven L.A. cop. As I wrote about in CrimeReads a few years ago:
Throughout the 1980s, as Mann refined his craft through three movies (between “Heist” and “Manhunter,” he also directed “The Keep,” a horror film with a troubled production), he was also working on a lengthy script about an L.A. detective’s intense pursuit of a professional thief. Mann based the story off the real-life pursuit of Neil McCauley, a sophisticated robber who was gunned down during an armored-car robbery outside a Chicago grocery store in 1964. McCauley’s primary pursuer, detective Chuck Adamson, later became a television producer, screenwriter, and close collaborator with Mann.
The script bore similarities to the actual case, right down to the coffee and conversation that Adamson and McCauley shared at one point. The real McCauley, who’d spent decades of his life in jail, was smart enough to walk away from a big score and months of preparation if everything didn’t seem right; that detail finds its way into the screenplay, when the fictional McCauley decides to abandon a hit on a precious metals depository when he senses the police nearby.
Then came a moment that might have proven disastrous in retrospect, had it shut down Mann’s later attempt to secure a full budget for “Heat”:
Pressed to come up with yet another success for television after Miami Vice, which he’d produced, [Mann] took his script and hacked it into a 90-minute pilot, which he also directed. The operation was not a success, and the series never went forward, although the pilot was repurposed into a television movie titled “L.A. Takedown,” airing in 1989.
I don’t recommend watching “L.A. Takedown” in its entirety (I did it so you don’t have to); despite Mann’s crisp filming, the budget is relatively paltry and the acting is wooden. It suffers greatly in comparison to the remake. However, it’s fun to watch the two “L.A. Takedown” actors, Scott Plank and Alex McArthur, run through the script’s iconic diner scene:
Now compare it to the same scene in “Heat,” which is far superior, from the nuances of the background sound to the almost subliminal flickering of the two actors’ faces as they slowly reveal more about themselves:
Acting! It’s one of those professions where you get what you pay for. Pacino and De Niro were at the top of their game; you’re torn between rooting for them both. If you haven’t watched “Heat” in a few years (or ever), it’s well worth a revisit, especially since Mann is reportedly gearing up to film “Heat 2.”