When the director of any original project is so unhappy with it that he decides to remake the thing a few short years later, it's almost a guarantee that the new version is going to be better. That's the case with Michael Mann's crime drama Heat, which is based on the real life story of Neil McCauley, a former Alcatraz inmate with an unstoppable urge to commit heists. But before Mann brought in big stars to act out his dauntingly lengthy script, he made the story into a pilot for a weekly series for NBC. Only, the network cut out about two-thirds of Mann's script to make it a reasonable episode of television, and wanted to institute some casting changes, so Mann walked away from the project and the pilot episode was turned into the TV movie L.A. Takedown. Turns out the network was partially right, as the cast was amateurish and wooden, leaving the 90-minute L.A. Takedown to somehow feel longer than the movie starring Pacino and De Niro that was actually twice the runtime. And let's just say that the epic shootout from Heat looks more like a bullet-conscious therapy session in L.A. Takedown.
