I will never doubt you: How the Miami Vice movie rewrote the things the series got wrong

I think Miami Vice is history's greatest show. I also think Miami Vice is history's greatest movie. The Venn diagram overlap of people who share both those opinions is pretty small.

Fewer people would argue with me if I asserted the show and the film were both somehow important. In fact, I don't think anyone who actually thought about it would argue at all. From recording in stereo to shooting on digital, Miami Vice rewrote the rules over and over again*.

Michael Mann was the show's executive producer, but he never directed an episode. And the more I watch his movie, the more I wonder if he used it as an opportunity to reshoot the scenes he felt the show got wrong.

Originally, I started writing this post thinking I'd make a laundry list of ways the movie referenced the show. But three specific beats stood out as examples of how Mann's 2006 film modernized and deepened the themes he has been exploring his whole career.

"So we can close each other's eyes right now."
In the episode "Smuggler's Blues"
In the movie at 0:37:00

The movie's plot was mostly lifted from "Smuggler's Blues." Ditto this line of dialogue. But in the show, it's a bad guy who cautions our heroes, no one will make money if everyone ends up dead.

In the movie, it's Tubbs doing the cautioning. The roles are reversed, a not-so-subtle nod to the idea that in this new world, the cops are in just as deep as the dealers.

"Your finger won't be able to twitch."
In the episode "Glades"
In the movie at 1:44:06

A bad guy is holding a hostage. He warns Crockett, "If I twitch, she's gone." Ice in his veins, Crockett replies, "Maybe you won't even twitch," and shoots him dead.

In the film, the dialogue is similar, but it's not Crockett staring down the barrel. It's Gina.

In the show, the female officers spent a lot of time typing reports and posing as a prostitutes. In the film, they're running their guns.

"There's undercover and there's which way is up."
In the episode "The Great McCarthy"
In the movie at 1:14:06

In the show, Tubbs falls hard for Vanessa, the bad guy's girl and possibly a criminal in her own right. Crockett warns him not to get involved and Tubbs asks, "Are you forgetting I'm a cop? I'm not gonna cross over the line."

Crockett replies, "I have my doubts."

In the movie, the roles are reversed. It's Crockett who starts a doomed romance and Tubbs who challenges him. In the scene, the two are walking through a shipyard. They've just had a clandestine confrontation with an FBI bureaucrat. It's night. Tempers worn thin. Crockett stops walking and turns on his partner, "You think I'm in so deep I forgot?" The two men stare each other down for a long time before Tubbs answers.

"I will never doubt you."

Crockett and Tubbs live their lives lying. The series was frequently depressing, but the movie is soaked straight through with absence. No walls, no laws, no home. Unmoored, Crockett and Tubbs trusted no one except each other.

Changing this one line changed everything.

* See articles like, "30 Years Ago: Miami Vice Ends After Changing TV Forever," "Take it to the Limit One More Time," and "Why It Took Ten Years For Michael Mann's Miami Vice To Get Its Due."

No damn character arcs: The story behind the missing Owl and Raccoon novella

In January 2015, I sent a breathless get-stoked message to my email list. "The third Owl and Raccoon novella is coming! A kindergartner disappears from a moving school bus! Here's the gripping opening chapter!"

Cut to July 2016. I finally published the third Owl and Raccoon novella. Except it was called Not With A Bang. And the missing kid was a teenager. And the bus was a city bus. And, yeah, obviously not the same book.

So what happened to the novella I'd titled Last Child Missing?

One of my goals when I sat down to write the very first Owl and Raccoon novella, The Single Staircase, was to avoid anything that looked like a character arc. Owl and Raccoon were adults uniquely suited, in different ways, to hunt for missing children. The decision they make in that book's final pages was based on decades of dedicated police work and frustrated personal lives. They weren't meant to evolve, they were meant to find Sophia Grey.

But after the second Owl and Raccoon novella, WDYG, I started to get a clear vision of where Owl and Raccoon were going in their lives. I knew them as humans. And I wanted to let them follow their different paths.

So when I wrote Last Child Missing, I ended it with a moment that would irrevocably alter the course of their lives. And here it is:

Raccoon executes a pedophile and Owl covers it up.

I came so close to publishing that book. But I couldn't do it. Because I hated my ending. It was like the serial killer from The Wire. Or the episode where you learned Buffy was hallucinating. Or that whole arc where Crockett got amnesia. It was a moment so stunning it eradicated the grinding, quiet, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other universe I had worked so hard to create.

So I sat on Last Child Missing. For sixteen months.

This was harder than it sounds. While Sin Walks Into the Desert is my most successful book, it's had tons of advertising, awards and reviews supporting it. Meanwhile, the Owl and Raccoon novellas just kept plowing forward, earning readers through giveaways, word-of-mouth, and the support of blogs like The Locked Room Mystery and The Invisible Event. I needed to keep the momentum going with a third installment, but I couldn't make myself publish Last Child Missing.

Unfortunately coming up with a third mystery was hard. Wait, that's inaccurate. I came up with dozens of great mysteries. It was coming up with one great solution that took forever.

But eventually, I figured it out. And I'm glad I waited. Not With A Bang moves Owl and Raccoon forward in a way that's true to the characters and the series as a whole. The title is an allusion not only to the book's end, but to the struggle I faced writing it. In the real world, there's no big catharsis and there's no dramatic closure. There's just people making the best decisions they can with flawed and incomplete information.

Or as Owl himself says, "We're all good men. Things just go sideways on us."

[Ed. - If you've never read any Owl and Raccoon books, I recently published The Single Staircase, WDYG and Not With A Bang in one collected box set entitled Owl And Raccoon: Locked. You can get it on Amazon now.]

Allusions and easter eggs in Regret Things

1. Regret Things (and my upcoming novella To Guns) feature a low-level mobster named Lars McKendrick. The name is an homage to Lar MacKendrick, one of the recurring characters in the fabulous crime fiction of Gene Kerrigan.

2. Nicki Kenfax-McJacob and her lover Catherine are based on characters from a short story I wrote in the late 90's. Those characters' physical attributes were modeled after Nikki Cox and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

3. While the character of El Viejo is a mash-up of three real-life acquaintances, his nickname is a reference to the retired Texas Ranger from Miami Vice season three, episode seven.

4. There are musical references scattered throughout Regret Things, most notably lyric lifts from Peace Frog and This Charming Man.

Michael Mann's biggest fan reviews Blackhat

I have the words "time is luck" tattooed on my arm.

Only obsessive Michael Mann fans will get the reference. But the fact that I'd ink those words on my body goes to show just how much I connect with the director's movies. The release of Blackhat, Mann's first film in half a decade, was the equivalent of a national holiday for me.

It's a gorgeous film. No one shoots urban environments like Michael Mann. The Far East streets and Hong Kong cityscapes are quite literally the most breathtaking visuals ever put on screen. And when Mann retires, no one should be allowed to film a firefight ever again. (Except Christopher McQuarrie and the guys who did John Wick.)

I will doubtlessly watch it again. But something felt off about it. Lots of things, in fact.

First (and most obviously) there was Thor. Mann usually forces his stars to run away from any leading man egotism that'll prevent them from inhabiting their role. He had Russell Crowe put on 35 pounds of blubber. Got Tom Cruise to dye his hair silver. And convinced Colin Ferrell to grow a mustache, throw greaseball hair in a ponytail, and develop a series of OCD ticks that show just how out-of-control his undercover cop character really is. But Blackhat's Chris Hemsworth looks a whole lot like Chris Fucking Hemsworth. He's the only man alive who could play the Norse God of Thunder in The Avengers, and he's the least believable hacker nerd in the world. Hemsworth's Nick Hathaway is a man perpetually in control, a tall and blond hero who happens to be naturally perfect at everything - guns, girls and geekery. There's never a doubt he'll own the real world with the same ease he rips through the virtual one.

I'm far from the only person who believes Hemsworth was miscast. But there are other issues I have that only longtime Mann fans will pick up on.

In Mann's movies, men are planets and violence is the sun they orbit around. Women are something like the moon. They're specters strong enough to alter the tides, but without enough gravity to change the nature of the universe. They represent the promise of a different life that these mid-level cops and crooks will never really be able to live. Blackhat is more cliched. Dreamy guy meets dreamy girl. They go ga-ga.

And what happened to Mann's legendary obsession with minutia? What tactical team on the face of the planet would allow a convict computer nerd to lead their raids? Why does a bad guy who can pilfer $74 million on a lazy afternoon need to create a global catastrophe to steal the next $74 million? Where the hell did Hemsworth lay his hands on fitted slacks in the middle of Southeast Asia?

The whole thing just feels hacked together, like one of those Octopussy-era Bond flicks.

And the dialogue? Mann's characters typically don't talk much. When they do, it means something. But Blackhat spews tough-guy cliches. "What are you after, you son of a bitch?"

I'm not sure what happened to Mann. Since the glory days of Collateral and Heat, he's seemed a little lost. And that makes me sad. Mann is 71. At a pace of one movie every six years, we might get one more film. Maybe none. I can get over a mediocre movie. But I hate to think we might never get another great one.

"All our misery is better than the abyss"

[Ed. - This post mentions scenes from The Midnight Promise, The Papers Of Tony Veitch, and Eight Million Ways to Die. No spoilers per se, but enough info that if you really want to be surprised, you ought to skip it.]

Even the best lives are stupid. You're born into a situation you have no way to choose and no power to change. You spend your weekdays getting ready for a job you'll probably hate, and your weekends chasing girls who'll probably hate you. You grow up and work yourself rotten, only to come home to a mess of bills informing you the money you thought you made was never really yours. And at the end, you die.

And that's if you're lucky. You're not, you get born in the middle of a genocide. You have to wield a machete by the time you're six.

What makes crime fiction so important is the value it places on existence. Life must matter if a detective is willing to plow through disgusting scraps of evidence purely to ascertain the circumstances of its end.

Every mystery has its eureka, when the puzzle becomes a portrait. But the best also include an affirmation that all the misery of the preceding pages was merely water and every life is worth living.

That's how you get the genre's enduring images. Jack Laidlaw pulling a small, old woman from a cab queue to dance to the random notes made by a homeless man's harmonica. Matthew Scudder standing up at his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and bursting into tears, admitting the nature of his soul. Isabella telling Crockett, "Leave now. Life is short. Time is luck."

Time is luck. Never is that clearer than when you wade among the dead.

Nowhere, in any book, is the affirmation so unforgettable and moving as in The Midnight Promise, the first and only book by Zane Lovitt. The book is compiled from ten loosely related cases solved by Australian private inquiry agent John Dorn. The first couple are mild and slow and devoid of much in the way of actual crime. The mysteries get grittier, the violence more sickening, and Dorn more desperate as he searches to satisfy his self-centered death wish.

But oh, those final pages! Dorn gasping, body burning, soaked by blood and denial, paused in the throes of a futile gesture that has meaning only to the extent that it reminds us to hold on to our hopes and fight against all death, even in the face of certain defeat.

I gave The Midnight Promise four stars on Goodreads and then, after a couple weeks of dreams and thought, went back and re-rated it up to five. And then I sat down to write this post. It's a book I won't forget. One that screams loud, all our misery is better than the abyss.

More about Miami Vice

In 2010, I wrote a post that tried to explain my obsession with the 2006 movie version of Miami Vice. I recently found this post in AV Club which explains it even better:

The movie opens and ends seemingly mid-scene; there is no set-up and no sense of resolution. The tone is doomy; writer-director Michael Mann—who executive-produced the TV series—refashions leads Tubbs and Crockett (Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell) into weary professionals. The world they inhabit is murky and fatalistic; everything matters only insofar as it continues the flow of information (for the police) or the flow of cash (for the criminals). It’s a movie about drug dealers that features no drugs and a movie about cops that features no arrests. Its characters exist within an endless cycle of informants and moles, takedowns and retributions, seizures and countermeasures.

The whole thing is worth a read. Although I have to take issue with the word "refashions." The TV version of Miami Vice may be remembered for white pants and celebrity guest stars, but Crockett was a cynical SOB even then.

Literature vs. genre

Recently a friend asked me to name 15 fictional characters that had influenced my life. I could only name 10 off the top of my head. In no particular order, here's what I wrote down:

"Matt Murdock, Ogami Itto, Duncan MacLeod, Philip Marlowe, Sonny Crockett, Patrick Bateman, Stephen Dedalus, Howard Roark, J. Alfred Prufrock and Hamlet."

What's interesting to me is that I listed exactly five characters from genre fiction and five from literature.

The awards the Academy would have given if it didn't hate genre movies

Best Film: The Dark Knight. Duh. Too easy. The exclusion of Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel led the Academy to reconsider the nominating process and expand the field of Best Picture contenders from five to 10. Let's move on.

Best Screenplay: Scream. It's hard to find a great mystery. It's hard to find a great horror movie. It's hard to find a great comedy. It's hard to find a cultural critique that's self-referential without being self-indulgent. Scream is all four, and a fabulous popcorn movie with smart dialogue, engaging characters and creative plotting, too.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Fight Club the book is a mess of childish angst that reads like the fantasies of an 24-year-old eunuch. Fight Club the movie is a work of genius that describes the mind of man without being preachy or precious.

Best Actor: Christian Bale for American Psycho. I thought Patrick Bateman was an unfilmable character. Not because of his sadism, but because of his cartoonishness. Bale, in his best performance ever, brought the monster to the screen, and found a way to communicate the horror of his preening and the meaning of his butchery.

Best Actress: Naomi Watts for Mullholland Drive. Watts' twin performances are so stunning that some people miss that the jaded Diane and her idealized projection betty are played by the same actress. It's perhaps the deepest, bravest performance in the history of American film.

Best Direction and Cinematography: Miami Vice. For all the reasons I already gushed.

I still have heroes: Miami Vice

I got jaded early. By the time I was 10 or 11, I was bored with James Bond and enthralled by Miami Vice, a TV series that probably wasn't at all appropriate for my 11-year-old brain.

While the show is remembered for stylish pastels and trendy music, the "underlying theme of the series is the 'whack-a-mole' reality of drug cartels, as the detectives bring down one cartel there are several new ones to replace them." While I couldn't have articulated it at the time, this overwhelming hopelessness resonated with something I felt instinctually, almost genetically. Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs knew they were foot soldiers fighting meaningless skirmishes in a war that could not be won.

But they never quit.

In 2006 director Michael Mann, who had been the executive producer of the TV series, released a Miami Vice movie, creating a world in which words were weapons and weapons were tools. His heroes were men and women defined completely by their missions as they moved through threatening and vast spaces. Watching it, I felt like the walls had been knocked off the world. Only last year did I learn that Mann had purposefully created this sensation with a special camera. From the New York Times review, which named Miami Vice one of the best movies of 2006:

Partly shot using a Viper FilmStream camera, the film shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.

The film isn't only popular with the New York Times and me. Independent Weekly named it the best film of 2006. Rolling Stone gave it three and a half stars and wrote, "what raises this ball of fire above the herd is the haunting sense of loss and loneliness Mann brings to material that feels lived in and achingly real."

The film does less well with the general public. Rolling Stone readers gave it only two and a half stars. And while the Top Critics on Rotten Tomatoes give Miami Vice a 68%, it's community score is only 47%.

One of the movie's stars, Colin Farrell, recently admitted that he "didn't like it so much." That's a shame. He was a great Sonny Crockett, his eyes constantly darting back and forth, his arms held away from his body as if he was trying to make himself appear bigger and more dangerous than he felt inside. He's a cobra vainly hoping that an open hood might scare off a tidal wave.

The movie also features Michael Mann's trademark attention to detail. The guns, cars and airplanes were meticulously chosen and learning about them adds insight into the characters' motivations. (Go Google "SVI Tiki" for a taste of what I am talking about.) The actors underwent extensive training for their roles. Advisors on the film even tricked Ferrell into believing he had gotten himself in the middle of an actual drug buy, just to see if he was able to keep calm. The event was captured on hidden camera and included in the DVD extras. (I wouldn't say Ferrell stayed ice cold, but he didn't break down in tears either.)

In Miami Vice and at least two other Mann films, the main characters remind each other that time is luck. Crockett and Tubbs know life is transient and perhaps futile. They are surrounded by money, women and gorgeous oceans that all might lead to the possibility of a more peaceful existence. And yet over and over they choose to turn away from the horizon and throw themselves into the fire.

I am 36. I still have heroes.

The importance of supporting characters

When you think of Miami Vice, you think of Crockett and Tubbs. Fast cars. Guns. Phil Collins. And maybe the show that launched the career of my favorite film director. But what you should really remember is Edward James Olmos. The first few episodes of the series were silly, with too many scenes of Don Johnson standing resolutely as the cigar chomping Lieutenant Rodriguez screamed cliches like, "You're over the line, Crockett!" The show verged on parody. In the fourth episode, Rodriguez gets shot and shortly thereafter he's replaced by the quiet shadow of Lieutenant Castillo. Olmos changed the texture of Miami Vice. The series became darker. More stylized. More mysterious. It set the tone for a decade and captured the imagination of boys across America, who dreamed of following in the footsteps of the show's cynical, stylish heroes. To this day, episodes like "Smugglers Blues" and "Evan" are burned into my memory. Only now do I realize just how big a role a supporting character can play.