|
Runaway
jury
|
Movie
| Book
| Author
| Director
& cast
|
Book: Runaway Jury (1996)
Movie: Runaway Jury (2003)
Premise
movie:
"Hoffman plays Wendell Rohr, a principled New Orleans
lawyer retained by the widow of a man shot dead in an office
massacre by a fellow employee. Seeking a verdict that could cost big
gun corporations millions of dollars in precedent, Rohr is suing the
manufacturer of the murder weapon on behalf of the dead man's widow.
For the purposes of plot, the murderer has already had the decency
to turn the trigger on himself, so the audience's ire can be fully
directed towards the corporation heads – archetypal aging, fat cat,
cigar-chompers to an evil scumbag. Their lawyer is Durwood Cable
(Bruce Davison, in a similarly spineless turn to his senator role in
X-Men), but their ace in the pack is Rankin Fitch
(Hackman), Dickensian villain by name and dastardly bastard by profession. With
his crack team of minions, Fitch has assembled a command centre to
match Jack Bauer's in 24, an underground lair where he can access
the past and secrets of every possible juror in the world and use
them to his advantage. His goons and gals use surveillance,
intimidation and flirtation to get what they want, even `buying'
promotion for one juror to swing his views. "
from:
http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/review.asp?ID=151
back
to top
Premise
book:
"Every jury has a leader and the verdict belongs to
him. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a landmark trial with hundreds of
millions of dollars at stake begins routinely, then swerves
mysteriously off course. The jury is behaving strangely, and at
least one juror is convinced he's being watched. Soon they have to
be sequestered. Then a tip from an anonymous young woman suggests
she is able to predict the juror's increasingly odd
behavior. Is the jury somehow being manipulated, or even controlled? And, more
importantly, why?"
from:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/
ASIN/0099457881/qid=1087021145/sr=2-1/
ref=sr_2_3_1/202-4861854-4574201
back
to top
Author:
"Born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a
construction worker and a homemaker, John Grisham as a child dreamed
of being a professional baseball player. Realizing he didn't have
the right stuff for a pro career, he shifted gears and majored in
accounting at Mississippi State University. After graduating from
law school at Ole Miss in 1981, he went on to practice law for
nearly a decade in Southaven, specializing in criminal defense and
personal injury litigation. In 1983, he was elected to the state
House of Representatives and served until 1990.
One day at the Dessoto County courthouse, Grisham overheard the
harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim and was
inspired to start a novel exploring what would have happened if the
girl's father had murdered her assailants. Getting up at 5 a.m.
every day to get in several hours of writing time before heading off
to work, Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it
in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, it was eventually
bought by Wynwood press, who gave it a modest 5,000 copy printing
and published it in June 1988. That might have put an end to Grisham's hobby. However, he had
already begun his next book, and it would quickly turn that hobby
into a new full-time career -- and spark one of publishing's
greatest success stories. The day after Grisham completed A Time to
Kill, he began work on another novel, the story of a hotshot young
attorney lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what
it appeared. When he sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount
Pictures for $600,000, Grisham suddenly became a hot property among
publishers, and book rights were bought by Doubleday. Spending 47
weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, The Firm became the
bestselling novel of 1991."...."Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, Grisham has written
one novel a year (his other books are The Firm, The Pelican Brief,
The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The
Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, A Painted
House, Skipping Christmas, The Summons, and The King of Torts) and
all of them have become bestsellers, leading Publishers Weekly to
declare him "the bestselling novelist of the 90s" in a January 1998
profile. There are currently over 60 million John Grisham books in
print worldwide, which have been translated into 29 languages. Seven
of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican
Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, and A
Painted House), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man."
from:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/grisham/
author.html
back
to top
Director:
Gary Fleder (Don't Say a Word, Kiss the Girls, Things to
Do in Denver When You're Dead, Impostor)
Cast:
John Cusack (Nicholas "Nick" Easter), Gene Hackman (Rankin
Fitch), Dustin Hoffman (Wendell Rohr), Rachel Weisz
(Marlee), Jennifer Beals (Vanessa Lembeck), Cliff Curtis (Frank Herrera),
Bruce Davison (Durwood Cable), Nora Dunn (Stella Hulic), Luis Guzman
(Jerry Fernandez), Orlando Jones (Jerome), and others.
back
to top
|
