Keys to Tulsa is a 1997 American crime film directed by Leslie Greif in his directorial debut, written by Harley Peyton, and starring Eric Stoltz and James Spader.

Richter is from a privileged background in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and works as a movie reviewer at a local newspaper only because his sour widowed mother Cynthia pulled strings for him to land the job.

He is dissatisfied with the direction that his life has taken; he is about to be fired any day from his job because he can't meet deadlines, he lives in a dilapidated farmhouse, he uses and sells drugs behind the scenes for some extra cash, and he is so irresponsible with life and finances in which he has gotten so far behind on his bills that his electricity has just been cut off which ruins a blind date he has in the opening scene with a neurotic gold-digger named Trudy.

Spader remembered that, "Eric just returned the favor with a movie we shot six months after 2 Days called Keys to Tulsa.

The scene where Joanna Going's character Cherry performs a strip routine includes the 1994 song "Little Suicides" by singer Lori Carson and her band The Golden Palominos, even though the original novel was set in the late 1980s Reagan era.

"[9] Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle remarked in 1997, "When a film with a cast this stellar falls flat on its face like this one does, well, it makes you wanna holler.

He wrote, "Writer-director Leslie Greif (Heaven's Prisoners, Meet Wally Sparks) has allowed some racist underpinnings to creep in as his characters refer with some frequency to black people by using a particularly unpleasant epithet.

But this distinctively tasty dish adroitly mixes its genre ingredients with fresh takes on class grudges, Great Plains lifestyles, generational and family strains and life stasis in a way that makes it a satisfying meal unto itself [...] Peyton’s beautifully constructed script nails the shifting motivations and subtext of every scene and provides spiky dialogue to boot.

"[13] In his 1999 book Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film, Emanuel Levy wrote that, "The Tarantino effect seems to be in decline, judging by the failure of such offshoots as Keys to Tulsa (1997) and Very Bad Things (1998).

Harley Peyton's script from Brian Fair Berkey's novel is deft and witty, but Leslie Grief's awkward direction in Keys to Tulsa lacks modulation and visual style.

"[14] Keys to Tulsa was included in Magill's Cinema Annual 1998: A Survey of the Films of 1997, with the book characterizing it as being "long on bizarre, colorful characters, but short on any kind of cohesive, interesting plot.