Boxoffice-September.1997

Obviously. Ellroy is a man of strong
opinions. A writer who knows his own
mind, and hasn't a qualm about expressing
it. He has an extremely high opinion
of his output: he once referred to himself as
"the greatest crime novelist who ever lived,"
then said he regretted the self-description only
because it was too limited to the genre that
made him a star.
To the growing readership that follows his
work, the cocksure attitude is completely justified.
EUroy's intricate, complex policiers are
like nothing anyone else in contemporary fiction
is trying to do: as plot-driven as an airport
paperback, but as complicated as a cubist
painting, as dense and lyrical as a fugue.
"L.A. Confidential"—the first of his major
works to make it to the bigscreen and the
nominal subject under consideration on this
hot July afternoon—is a perfect case in point.
Set in '50s L.A. against a backdrop involving
multiple
murders, scandal sheet journalism,
highjacked heroin, extra-legal poUce intrigue,
and a Hollywood prostitution racket that
makes Heidi Fleiss look like a boulevard pavement
pounder, the screen version of "L.A.
Confidential" has more plotlines than mostTV
mini-series. There are not one but three "hero
cop" protagonists, and in true Etiioy fashion,
each is deeply, almost desperately flawed. Bud
White (played by Russell Crowe in the film)
is a part-time vigilante who likes to find and
punish wife abusers because ofa horrific secret
in his own past: as a child, he watched his father
beat his mother to death with a tire iron, then
spent four days handcuffed to a bed while the
body decomposed before his eyes. Ed Exley
(Guy Pearce) is both a brilliant investigator and
an ambitious martinet willing to rat out other
officers to advance his career. For supershck
detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey),
money-grubbing pubUcity stunts are his real
profession: adviser to the "Dragnet"-like TV
series "Badge of Honor," he keeps his name in
the papers by accepting payola from a Confidential
Magazine-like tabloid called Hush
Hush in exchange for providing photo-op
busts of celebrity dopers.
At two hours and 16 minutes, "L.A. Confidential"
is already long by Hollywood release
standards. Even at that length, halfEllroy 's plot
was left out. A child-murdering serial killer is
missing in action—one "Dr. Frankenstein,"
known for his attempt to assemble a perfect
playmate out of body parts butchered fixDm his
prepubescent victims. The bastard offspring of
the Walt Disney-esque animation king Raymond
Dieterling and the sordid creation of
Dieterling's movie-driven '50s theme park
Dream-a-Dreamland have also been excised.
EUroy-authored love interests for Vincennes
and Exley are absent—a singularly significant
omission, given that Elkoy describes the moral
ai^ument of his work in terms of the fact diat
"all my guys are capable of love and dying to
give it up for some woman... All my guys are
chumps for love."
"My dialogue is there in force," says Ellroy
of the screen adaptation, "but it's been reworked.
My characters have been pushed to
the background, moved to the forefront.
plotUnes
have been
cut, jiggled, reworked
extensively...
None of the guys
have the extensive
character arc that
they do in the book.
And they can't possibly.
Unless you were
to have made a movie
that's two or three
times as long, and
that would cover the
entire [event structure
of the novel]."
The bottom line is
that Ellroy's novels
are just too damn big
for the movies—or so
their author once
thought. "My agent
and I laughed like
hell when we sold the
movie option to [producer]
David Wolper.
'How's anybody ever
going to adapt this
thing for the movies?'"
Enter Curtis Hanson,
director of "The
Hand That Rocks the
Cradle"
and "The River Wild." A self-described
EUroy freak who has said of the author
that "his is the quintessential voice of L.A.,"
Hanson impressed Elkoy right fixjm the start
as somebody who just might be able to do the
impossible by successfully translating his
work to the screen.
"Curtis Hanson came to me only when he
was reasonably sure that the film would be
made," says Ellroy, whose works (most notably
"The Black DaMia") have been optioned
in the past only to languish for years in that
bottomless Hollywood maw known as "development
hell." "I liked the guy immediately... I
read two drafts of the script, [and] at the time
I thought, 'I wouldn't do it this way.' But at the
same time I knew ftiU well I'm not a filmmaker.
I don't want to be a filmmaker. I don't aspire
to be a filmmaker in any way, shape, manner
or form."
Visiting the set of "L.A. Confidential" and
seeing characters which he had lived with for
so long made flesh was a revelation to Elbxjy.
"I went to the set and I saw Paul Guilfoyle play
[real-Ufe gangster] Mickey Cohen. Here's a
man who looks rather as Mickey Cohen did in
the early
1950s, coming down the City Hall
steps—in period garb, surrounded by period
automobiles. It was a wonderfully dense little
piece of footage.
"Then Curtis had me out to the editing room
and showed me about seven minutes of the
film, and I had my first startiing minute with
it, which was seeing James Cromwell as [corrupt
poUce captain] Dudley Smith. Here's a
character who appears in more books than any
other one of my characters— 'Clandestine,'
'The Big Nowhere,' 'L.A. Confidential' and
'White Jazz.' Here's this [actor] who's im-
This picture of me 10-year-old James Ellroy was taken by a news
photographer just moments after he learned of his mother's death.
periously tall—about six-foot-six or seven,
cocky, intelligent, sandy-haired, great looking
in his way, with the same brogue that I gave
[the character] in four of my books. 'Whoa!
What's that?'"
Ellroy might have been expected to object
to the necessary changes that had been made
to make "L.A. Confidential" work onscreen.
He is, after all, a writer who prides himself on
the sheer construction of his work, and who
has said repeatedly that, in his fiction, "every
word means something." But Hanson's devotion
to the spirit ifnot the letter of Ellroy's story
paid off. "I love the movie," Ellroy says. "WTiat
you've got is an amazingly dense, mysterious,
complex ensemble piece... It's a work of art
that exists on its own level, [but at the same
time] it's recognizably me."
Asked if potential readers unfamiliar with
his more compUcated and far more violent
novels will find the movie version of "L.A.
Confidential" a fair introduction to his work,
Ellroy doesn't miss a beat.
"I've long contended
that hard-boiled crime fiction is the
story of bad white men doing bad things in the
name of authority," he says. "I think people get
that point... People that say, 'Boy, that was
really good, I want more' will be able to walk
out of the theatre and into the Barnes & Noble
there in the mall and buy not only the movie
tie-in edition of 'L.A. Confidential,' but Curtis
Hanson and Brian Helgeland's screenplay,
which is being published, and 'My Dark
Places' in trade paperback as well."
M!
-y Dark Places" is a subject unto itself.
Ellroy's most recent book-length
.work and also his bestselling volume
ever, it departs from the overall pattern of his