The big bounce

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The Big Bounce is a crime novel written by Elmore Leonard, who started offering the story to publishers and film producers in the fall of 1966. However, no one would take it. It went unpublished until 1969, when it was adapted into a film version in 1969, directed by Alex March and scripted by Robert Dozier, with actor Ryan O'Neal in the lead role.
However, the first film was a box office and critical disaster, and so the book, went unnoticed until the 1990s, when Leonard gained a new generation of fans thanks to praise from filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld and a successful film adaptation of Leonard's novel Get Shorty.
In 2004, a second film adaptation was released, which Leonard publicly criticised. The second film, despite a cast of big-name stars like Morgan Freeman, Owen Wilson, Charlie Sheen and Sara Foster, was also a flop, receiving negative reviews from both critics and audiences.
The main reason that neither film version was successful was that the film versions didn't truly capture the essence of Leonard's novel in a way that previously successful film adaptations had in the past.