Elmore Leonard insists he doesn't get offended when Hollywood screws up the adaptation of one of his books.

"I don’t take ‘em too seriously," says the legendary author of crime novels and Westerns like "Out of Sight," "Get Shorty" and "3:10 to Yuma." "I think you get too many people working on a movie. They all throw in their ideas, and then if you’re important enough, they’re going to use your idea. There’s nothing you can do about that."

But if you start asking the 84-year-old Leonard, whose U.S. Marshal character Raylan Givens is at the center of FX's exciting new crime series "Justified," what he thought of specific adaptations (more than two dozen of his novels and short stories have been made into movies or TV shows), you can see that his memory is very long, as are the durations of his grudges.

Take, for instance, the 1997 TV-movie adaptation of "Pronto," one of several Leonard books to feature Givens, played there by James LeGros.

"Oh," he says, responding to the sound of LeGros' name as if he just ate a bad melon. "Ohhhh. James LeGros, is he still acting?"

He is, I tell him (on NBC’s "Mercy"). Leonard does not look pleased to hear this, though the only specific complaint he’ll make about "Pronto" and LeGros is, "They got the wrong hat for him."

We talk about director Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 version of "Get Shorty," the first truly successful (in both creative and commercial terms) Leonard adaptation after a long fallow period. The conversation quickly turns to how the creative team on the sequel, "Be Cool," got wrong so much of what Sonnenfeld and writer Scott Frank got right.

"I told Barry Sonnenfeld, ‘When somebody delivers a funny line, don’t cut to someone else laughing or nudging or grinning, because they’re all serious,’" he recalls. "And he knew that. But then when they shot the sequel, they forgot all about that, and everybody’s laughing all the way through. There’s a guy named Cedric the Entertainer (in the cast). Well, I can’t have a guy named Cedric the Entertainer in one of my stories!"

"Justified," adapted by Graham Yost ("Boomtown") and starring Timothy Olyphant ("Deadwood"), so far has the Leonard seal of approval.

"I think it’s great," Leonard says, in the same succinct manner of speaking that he gives to most of his characters.

Though even with this version, he’s not entirely in love with the hat — a large, crisp Stetson that sets Givens apart from the modern-day Marshals he works alongside.

"I think he ought to just chuck it," Leonard says. "What’s he need it for? He’s not in the West; he’s from Kentucky. I think it’s got out of hand. It’s not the hat that he wears in the book — which is the small, little businessman’s Stetson, but well-worn, and crushed and disfigured."

Yost acknowledges that he and Leonard had a difference of opinion on the hat — "We got very specific photographs, about, ‘This is the hat,’" he says, "but you have to find a hat that fits Tim." — but overall found that the wisest way to do an Elmore Leonard adaptation is to follow a mantra that he eventually had made into a bracelet he gave to all of his writers: "WWED," or "What Would Elmore Do?"

"In terms of adapting (him), I’d always felt that the best jobs had been done by Scott Frank in ‘Get Shorty’ and ‘Out of Sight,’" he says, "and I always felt that one reason his work was so strong in adapting Elmore was that it seemed to me he used a lot of Elmore’s dialogue in the scripts. And there were points when I was writing the pilot where, literally, I would be thinking, ‘What’s Raylan going to say next?’ And I would go, ‘Well, what does Elmore have him saying next? And let’s try that, because that will be good.’"

The pilot episode is adapted from Leonard’s short story "Fire in the Hole" (from the collection "When the Women Come Out to Dance"). Later episodes didn’t have specific Leonard dialogue to borrow, so Yost has tried to capture the lean, tense and funny spirit of Leonard’s books even without the specific language — an approach he feels too many of the previous Leonard adapters ignored.

"The problem with anything is when people think they can improve upon it," he says. "I think that’s pretty dangerous with Elmore. He’s pretty great as it is. You get Peter Jackson to do ‘Lord of the Rings’ because he loves ‘Lord of the Rings.’ You get someone to do Elmore Leonard because they love Elmore Leonard, not because they want to make a cop movie."

Though Leonard was pleased with the earliest movie adaptations of his Western stories, like 1957’s "The Tall T" and the original "3:10 to Yuma" (he calls the recent Russell Crowe remake "overdone"), there was a long period from the late ‘60s through "Get Shorty" where one director after another struggled to get it right — even when Leonard wrote the screenplays himself.

"I never got the opportunity, when I was writing screenplays, to work with a good director, so he and I could steer it to exactly where we wanted it," he says. "So I decided in 1993 that ‘I’m not writing anymore screenplays.’ That was just a lot of work."

One of those directors was Burt Reynolds, who was coming to the end of his run as the world’s biggest movie star when he directed and acted in a 1985 version of Leonard’s "Stick," where Leonard feels Reynolds’ vanity got in the way of the movie.

"Burt said, ‘Do you think I should leave my rug off for this picture?’" he remembers. "I said, ‘Yeah, you don’t need your rug.’ But he was talking about his little rug - that he would leave on his little one."

Then came the mid-late ‘90s trifecta of "Get Shorty," Quentin Tarantino’s "Jackie Brown" (based on Leonard’s "Rum Punch") and Steven Soderbergh’s "Out of Sight." "Get Shorty" was the only one to be a big hit at the time, but all three proved that it was possible to capture the spirit of the books even if certain big changes were made. "Jackie Brown" — which Leonard cited as the movie that most closely evokes his writing — changed the main character’s race, while "Out of Sight" bank robber Jack Foley went from looking like Harry Dean Stanton in the book to George Clooney in the movie. (Leonard liked the casting choice so much that Foley became much younger and handsomer in the sequel "Road Dogs," as part of Leonard’s so-far-unsuccessful attempt to get Clooney to play the character again.)

Not every adaptation in the years since has worked. Sonnenfeld himself produced a short-lived TV version of "Maximum Bob" that Leonard hated ("I asked, ‘What are you gonna call it? Hee-Haw: The Movie?’"), and Leonard felt "Karen Sisco" (a TV spin-off of "Out of Sight" with Carla Gugino in the Jennifer Lopez role) failed because the writers couldn’t settle on one take on the character.

And, as always, some adaptations just never got made. In the ‘80s, Dustin Hoffman wanted to do "LaBrava," but the experience infamously became such a headache that Leonard turned it into fodder for "Get Shorty." More recently, he says the Coen brothers wrote a few drafts of a screenplay based on "Cuba Libre," "but they didn’t quite get it. They weren’t with it as far as Westerns were concerned."

So far, Leonard is on board with "Justified," but if it ultimately doesn’t work, he’ll shrug and move on.

"I’ve always felt that it’s up in the air," he says. "What they do to it might be good or bad. They might make it better, they might not. So it’s up to them. It becomes something else."

"Justified" (Tomorrow at 10 p.m. on FX) A U.S. Marshal (Timothy Olyphant) is reassigned to an office near his hometown in a new drama series.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J., 07102-1200. Include your full name and hometown.