Michael Mann's 'Public Enemies' Gave Author Chills

Usually, movie adaptations are based on books, magazine articles, comic books, or TV shows. This summer's Public Enemies was drawn from an almanac by Bryan Burrough, a journalist for Vanity Fair and other magazines who also wrote Barbarians at the Gate. I actually read Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 several years ago because it's one of the few topics I find interesting enough to read a lot about. But turning it into a movie is a big chore. Burrough's book is not just about John Dillinger, as Michael Mann's movie is, it's a giant account of Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, and Machine Gun Kelly, who despite his name, was one of the most incompetent criminals of the era. But Burrough has been blown away by what Mann has done with it to this point. He hasn't seen the completed film, but his is in it for a brief moment, albeit a pivotal one. "Johnny Depp goes down on the same exact piece of pavement that John Dillinger went down on," he says. "To see what Mann had done with the period costumes, the period automobiles, everything looking as everything must have looked...for someone who put five years into writing about that, it just kind of gave you chills." The film is not 100% historically accurate by Burrough's standard, but we all know when those things collide, a movie has to be a movie first and a historical record second. Still, the author believes, "it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted." It may not have the unstoppable sizzle of something like Star Trek or Transformers, but this could be the best movie of the summer when it's all said and done. Two terrific lead actors with Depp and Christian Bale and the most consistently underrated director in Hollywood in Michael Mann give it a leg up over most other movies we'll see.

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