Never Made Movies - No. 13 Don Cheadle's Tishomingo Blues

Elmore Leonard, Don Cheadle, the Mafia - what's not to like?!

It’s the rare actor who successfully makes the transition from performer to filmmaker. As for those who might have made a decent fist of it, it’s easy to imagine Don Cheadle taking up residence in the director’s chair. And back in May 2002, this set of circumstances nearly came into being.

For, after treating us to cinema’s second most challenging cockney accent in Ocean’s Eleven, Don Cheadle went behind the camera.

Based on the novel by Elmore Leonard, Tishomingo Blues centred on a conman bent on taking over the Mafia’s Gulf Coast narcotics operation.

As a veteran of Steven Soderbergh’s ace Leonard adaptation Out Of Sight and one of the most gifted actors around (the Oceans trilogy not withstanding), Cheadle had the qualifications if not the experience to direct a full-length feature.

Alas, by the time 2002 had become 2003, Cheadle was telling anyone who’d listen that Tishomingo Blues was “dead”. It wouldn’t be until 2015 that Don donned the director’s mantle for - the really rather good - jazz biopic Miles Ahead.