Heat Is Actually A Remake Of Another Crime Movie From The Same Director
Michael Mann's 1995 masterpiece Heat is a remake of his earlier TV movie L.A. Takedown.
Heat is rightfully considered one of the greatest crime thrillers of all time, a dense, nearly three-hour epic of the underworld of Los Angeles starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, the late Tom Sizemore, a young Natalie Portman, Ashley Judd, Mykelti Williams, and many, many more. It is unquestionably writer/director Michael Mann’s masterpiece, fully engaging with all of his usual themes of moral ambiguity, the bleak consequences of violence, and emotionally-destroyed men staring blankly at things. There’s a reason why Heat is so good: it’s actually Mann’s second try at the same story, after 1989’s L.A. Takedown.
A little backstory: Heat is based on actual events involving a career criminal named Neil McCauley (played by Robert De Niro in the film) and Chicago Police Detective Chuck Adamson (renamed Vincent Hanna and played by Al Pacino). Michael Mann was fascinated by the story of Adamson tracking McCauley, particularly how they once met by chance and actually had a cup of coffee together, a moment recreated in one of the all-time best diner conversation scenes in all of cinema.
In fact, Michael Mann was so fascinated by Adamson’s story that he wrote a screenplay based on the idea of two very similar men on either side of the law coming into conflict, which he then rewrote after his directorial debut, 1981’s James Caan-led Thief (which also owes a heavy debt to the story). Mann would go on to be instrumental in the creation of two popular police procedurals, Miami Vice and Crime Story, and was given the opportunity to make a new show in the same vein for NBC. That became L.A. Takedown.
Michael Mann reportedly cut his original screenplay down to a third of its former size and shot a 90-minute pilot for L.A. Takedown, which starred Scott Plank as Adamson surrogate Vincent Hanna and Alex McArthur as Patrick McLaren, the fictionalized version of Neil McCauley. After viewing the pilot, NBC demanded that Plank be replaced, Mann refused, and the prospective show was dead on the vine.
However, unlike companies like Warner Bros. Discovery nowadays, which prefer to indefinitely shelve projects rather than let them see the light of day, NBC did not want a finished product to go to waste. L.A. Takedown was released as a television movie and largely criticized for the quality of its acting, which is likely why, when Mann had to chance to try again, he enlisted the most acclaimed actors of a generation for his remake.
Heat was produced after the success of the Daniel Day-Lewis 18th-century adventure film Last of the Mohicans, which was atypical of Mann’s preference for 20th-century urban crime stories but grossed $143 million. With that kind of juice behind him, Mann started work on Heat, viewing L.A. Takedown as a kind of sketch for him to work on, much as George Lucas remade his student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB into his feature debut THX-1138 or Sam Raimi took the bones of Within the Woods and created the unholy beast that is The Evil Dead.
This time around, it worked. Heat was a massive box office success, grossing $187 million dollars and becoming one of the highest-performing movies of 1995. It was also critically acclaimed, currently holding 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and gaining instantly iconic status for featuring the first-ever on-screen pairing of De Niro and Pacino. No, Godfather Part 2 doesn’t count.
While Heat has only grown in reputation over the years, influencing classics like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and all of Wes Anderson’s filmography, L.A. Takedown has largely. Maybe Michael Mann will figure out how to work some kind of reference into Heat 2.
