Elmore John Leonard Jr. (October 11, 1925 – August 20, 2013) was a popular American novelist and screenwriter.
A number of Leonard’s novels have been adapted as films, perhaps most notably Out of Sight, Get Shorty in 1995, and Rum Punch as the 1997 film Jackie Brown. The film Bandits was originally meant to be an adaptation of Elmore Leonard‘s novel Bandits, to which Bruce Willis owns the film rights, but the producers felt it was too weak and brought in writer Harley Peyton to write a new script from scratch. At one point, Quentin Tarantino had planned to turn his western novel 40 Lashes Less One into a film. The project has so far not materialized, but Quentin owns the rights. There is another connection between Tarantino and Leonard: Q in his teenage years got caught shoplifting a Leonard book.
