Runaway Jury

Runaway Jury
File:Runaway Jury.jpg Runaway Jury DVD cover
Directed by	Gary Fleder
Written by	John Grisham (novel) Brian Koppleman David Levien Rick Cleveland Matthew Chapman
Produced by	Steven Brown Jeffrey Downer Gary Fleder Christopher Mankiewicz Arnon Milchan
Starring	John Cusack Gene Hackman Dustin Hoffman Rachel Weisz
Cinematography	Robert Elswit
Edited by	William Steinkamp Jeff Williams
Music by	Christopher Young
Distributed by	Twentieth Century Fox
Release dates	October 17, 2003
Running time	127 min.
Country	USA
Language	English

Runaway Jury (2003) is an American drama/thriller film.

The film adaptation of The Runaway Jury, which drops the "The" and is simply titled Runaway Jury, makes one big departure from the book. Grisham's novel pits the plaintiff, Celeste Wood, against a large, fictional tobacco company on the grounds that her husband's premature death was because of the company's cigarettes. The scriptwriters substitute a major firearms manufacturer for the tobacco company and firearms for the cigarettes because the recent film The Insider had been about tobacco companies.

Other significant changes from the book include the circumstances surrounding the husband's death, an increased role for the plaintiff's attorney (and thus for Dustin Hoffman), and more angelic motives on the part of the protagonists.

Roger Ebert's critique of this movie stated that the plot to sell the jury to the highest-bidding party was the most ingenious device in the story because it avoided to pit the "evil" and the "good" protagonists directly against each other in a stereotypical manner, but it plunged both of them into a moral abyss. Why not buy the jury to win the case? And how can Nicholas Easter compel the jury to deliver the favoured verdict when the payment would arrive?

• Tagline: Trials are too important to be decided by juries.

Trivia

• Hoffman when told that the movie producers wanted him asked for the part of Rankin Fitch however he was already told that Gene Hackman was cast for the part so he then accepted the part of Wendel Rohr HBO First Look.
• This is the first movie to feature both Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman (who were classmates at the Pasadena Playhouse) and this is the 10th movie starring both John Cusack and Jeremy Piven.
• In the movie's various stages of development, Edward Norton was originally slated to play Nick Easter alongside Gwyneth Paltrow as Marlee and Sean Connery as Rankin Fitch. Philip Kaufman and Joel Schumacher considered directing the film.
• Other notable actresses auditioning for the role of Marlee included Bridget Moynahan and Amanda Peet.
• One of the replacement jurors is a young, "alternative"-looking woman named Lydia Deetz. This is possible in homage to the character of Lydia Deetz from the movie (and tv show) Beetlejuice.
• John Cusack's character uses the pseudonym "Nicholas Easter"--a reference to St. Nicholas. At one point, the character buys a St. Nicholas candle. When he finds out he has been accepted into the jury pool, the character muses to himself, "Christmas is coming early this year."
• Marlee suggests purchasing a St. Catherine candle and claims St. Catherine is the patron saint of unmarried women and juries. Indeed, St. Catherine of Alexandria is the patron saint of these groups (as well as many others).
• TheGameTrader is an actual store in the Espalanade Mall right outside of New Orleans.
• The voice on the radio at the very beginning is Morning show host Rod Ryan. He was at one time based in New Orleans on his own show on The End. At the time the film was released on DVD, he had moved to Houston were he still broadcasts in the morning.
• Nick and Marlee meet in a voodoo shop where the Creole shopkeeper only speaks French. The movie conveys the image of the city still being mostly French-speaking, but the French-only speaking Creole population in New Orleans is practically extinct.
• The much anticipated washroom scene between Fitch and Rohr was not in the original script. It was written while the rest of the movie was being filmed, and was finally shot on a single day at the very end, weeks after both Hackman and Hoffman had finished their other work. It was the first time that Hackman and Hoffman had ever interacted on screen even though they had been friends since 1956. During this argument with Dustin Hoffman in the men's room, Gene Hackman disparagingly mentions "Truth, Justice, and the American way". This is part of Superman's slogan. Hackman played Superman's nemesis, Lex Luthor, in several Superman movies.

Goofs

• The female bailiff says she "baked these muffins myself", but she is clearly holding a tray of brownies.
• Louisiana does not have counties, it has parishes (courtroom scene); although the letter Nick initially gets correctly states "Parish of Orleans".
• When Fitch's associate is searching Nick's apartment the first time, he is shown copying the contents of Nick's computer to an external hard drive. When the hard drive is examined back at their base of operations, the tech says that "it's been erased several times, but I'll see what I can recover" (or words to that effect.) This type of data recovery is only possible using the actual physical hard drive of interest, not a copy of the data from the drive.
• When Fitch is viewing a video of Nick, we see it paused with embedded timecode paused along with the video. the last two numbers (:39) indicate the frames, not seconds (you can tell this by the speed at which the numbers run and the fact the "tens" number never passes 3) when in play mode. Frame rates for NTSC (north American video) is 30 frames per second, anywhere else in the world it varies, mostly at 25 frames/sec in most of Europe, but no video is more than 30 frames/sec.
• When Marlee supposedly jots down her e-mail address for Fitch on the street car, she uses about 2 or 3 pen strokes, which is barely enough for her to write "@" much less an actual e-mail address.
• Rohr initially describes the shooter in the office rampage as a day trader, then as a broker, then as a day trader again.
• When Marlee calls Fitch at home and increases her demand to $15 million, he slams the phone's receiver down. The receiver's cord can be seen not to be connected to the phone.
• When Nick is riding the streetcar home, he gets off and walks by the streetcar barn. He supposedly lives in the French Quarter, but the streetcar barn shown is in Uptown New Orleans, miles from the French Quarter.
• Nick is seen leaving the jury room to secure lunch for the jury from the judge. He finds the judge dining at a restauran in the French Quarter. This scene makes the federal courthouse where the trial is taking place look like it is in or near the Quarter; it is actually about a mile uptown in the Central Business District.

List of characters

• Nicholas Easter (John Cusack) - protagonist; juror and manager of an electronics store in the mall. Easter is also the man on the inside, working with girlfriend Marlee to get the verdict for the case.
• Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman) - jury consultant for the defense; a hard nosed man who will never lose a verdict, often through ruthless tactics like blackmail and bullying.
• Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman) - plaintiff's attorney and a crusader for gun control.
• Durwood Cable (Bruce Davison) - defense attorney
• Celeste Wood (Joanna Going) - widower; plaintiff
• Marlee (Rachel Weisz) - protagonist's partner working on the outside as a direct contact to both Fitch and Rohr. Like Easter, she has ulterior motives that have yet to be revealed.
• Herman Grimes (Gerry Bamman) - jury foreman
• Judge Harkin (Bruce McGill) - judge

External links

• Runaway Jury at IMDb
• Review by Roger Ebert