The Valve - A Literary Organ | Miami Vice As Literature, Er, Literary Phenomenon

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

Miami Vice As Literature, Er, Literary Phenomenon

Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 05/14/06 at 05:14 PM

Reading a lovely, Morrissey-evoking post on Hollywood’s decision to strip-mine the ‘70s and ‘80s for film ideas, it struck me that Michael Mann’s remake of Miami Vice could be quite the unusual beast, textually-speaking. (Whatever would a remake of Airwolf totally be?) When Heat was released in 1995, a number of critics noticed some familiar dialogue: Mann had recycled some scenes from his script for the Miami Vice (1984) pilot. (Would Roger Ebert have called that “an uncommonly literate screenplay“?) As the IMDB Heat Trivia attests, Mann frequently borrows from his own work. (It doesn’t note this particular connection.) In a televised interview Sunday, Mann claimed that he based the screenplay for the new Miami Vice (2006) on the pilot. Which means, hypothetically, that the same scene could be in the ‘84 pilot, Heat, and the ‘06 remake.

What, then, would be the status of the text and the characters’ relation to it? Would Vincent Hanna (Pacino) or Neil McCauley (De Niro) be slyly alluding to an episode of Miami Vice? Would they be presciently anticipating a scene from ‘06 remake? Or would Crockett (Farrell) or Tubbs (Foxx) be alluding to Heat, a film which one can reasonably expect a detective in the Crockett or Tubbs mold to favor? And what about Jimmy Smits?

I know you don’t come to Valve with the expectation of it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, but as someone who works on authors who are serial self-plagiarists—I see you back there, Mr. London—I’ve a keen interest in the interplay of borrowed to original text when the same person is responsible for both. This isn’t an interest I’m particularly articulate about, nor one that I’ve thought through rigorously, so I’d be interested to hear what you would make of the situation described above, or of any similar ones with which I may be unfamiliar.

[Note: Because of the current internet pervasiveness of “Miami Vice” and “Michael Mann,” I can’t track down any links for this, nor do I own the first season of Miami Vice, so I can’t check up on it myself. But I don’t think my memory’s that bad. Yet.]

Comments

It’s the reuse of names that gets me—the Michael Mann of interest to me does sociohistory (of which Fascism is the latest). But I see via imdb that this one is singin’ “Arms and de Mann“ ... no, wait, is that a remake? ... and Don Johnson recently relinquished his editorship of the Nabokov listserv ...

By nnyhav on 05/15/06 at 08:04 AM | Permanent link to this comment

(... who also, I forgot to mention, authored Worlds in Regression ...)

By nnyhav on 05/15/06 at 08:26 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Michael Mann didn’t just borrow from his own scripts for the movie of Miami Vice. I was a staff writer on the show during the second season. Michael has borrowed the “L-shaped ambush” of which one side is a steamship from my script “Tale of the Goat.” Of course, he is quite welcome to it.

The villain of that episode, by the way, was reprised in all but name in the movie “Unbreakable.”

By on 01/20/07 at 07:14 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Scott, Michael Mann couldn’t have “recycled some scenes from his script for the Miami Vice (1984) pilot,” for Heat, since the pilot script wasn’t his to begin with. It was authored by Anthony Yerkovich. If you believe otherwise (perhaps because you are referring to an unproduced script for the Miami Vice pilot), I’d be most grateful to have that information.

By on 09/29/07 at 01:50 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

Miami Vice As Literature, Er, Literary Phenomenon

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