Michael Mann's Heat turns 25, but few know that it's a remake of his 1989 NBC TV movie L.A. Takedown

The New York Times

"Early in Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama Heat, his protagonist destroys a television set," says Jason Bailey of the film that pits Robert De Niro vs. Al Pacino. "It makes sense in the context of the film (well, sort of), but it also can be read as a wink: Mann, a writer, director and producer who made his name with the TV smash Miami Vice (not to mention Crime Story), taking a moment from his star-studded, big-screen epic to bite the hand that fed him. But that moment also plays as a swipe at the picture’s obscure origins; even as Heat turned 25 on Tuesday, it has remained relatively unknown that it was, in fact, a remake. Mann had already told this story — using many of the same scenes, and even some of the same dialogue — in a 1989 NBC TV movie called L.A. Takedown. That project was a mere rest stop on the long, winding journey that Heat took to the big screen. Mann first penned the screenplay in the late 1970s, inspired by the real-life relationship between a Chicago cop, Chuck Adamson, and a master thief, Neil McCauley. The script was long, 180 pages, and so ambitious that Mann wasn’t sure he could handle it; he offered it to the director Walter Hill (48 Hrs.), who declined. Mann kept revising the script through the 1980s as he found success on television, and when NBC asked if he had any other series ideas when Miami Vice was winding down, he determined he would adapt his mammoth screenplay into a series pilot."