Conversations with James Ellroy

“Confidential” Commentary

99 “Confidential” Commentary Rob Blackwelder/1997 From SPLICEDwire (September 3, 1997). Reprinted by permission. “I think that if a writer options a novel to a studio or to film makers in general , then he has an obligation to keep his mouth shut if the movie gets made and it’s all f----- up.” So opines James Ellroy, the gruff and sardonic author of the 1950s crime and corruption bestseller L.A. Confidential. So why is he making press appearances to promote the film adaptation? Quite simply, he’s taken with the movie. “I am in the wonderful position of actually wanting to open my mouth and extol L.A. Confidential the film.” In San Francisco for a day with the film’s director Curtis Hanson, Ellroy could be straight out of the 1950s himself, with his wire-rim glasses, a policeman ’s mustache, and very short hair that wouldn’t be mussed by a handsome fedora. He speaks dryly, often with the tips of his fingers tapped together in front of his face, and at first seems a little abrasive. Like your favorite aloof college professor with a little Sam Spade thrown in. The author sold the film rights to Confidential, the third in a quartet of novels about 1950s Los Angeles cops, just before the book was published in 1990 and thought nothing of it. “(Selling) the option is to a finished movie what the first kiss is to the fiftieth wedding anniversary,” he shrugged. “I figured, thanks for the money, now go away and write when you get work.” But director Hanson (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) was driven in adapting the confoundingly layered, 500-page novel. A daunting task, to be sure. The story is told from three points of view, those of a trio of rival LAPD 100 CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES ELLROY detectives. Two of them, the politically savvy Boy Scout Ed Exley and the temperamental vigilante Bud White, are played in the film by relative newcomers Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe. Detective Jack Vincennes, a very Hollywood narcotics cop whose life revolves around his perk job advising a TV police drama, is played by Kevin Spacey. The cast also includes Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito and James Cromwell. Half a dozen plots orbit around centerpiece investigation of a seemingly random coffee shop massacre and eventually weave together into a complex conspiracy (which is even more complex in the book). Because of Ellroy’s detailed but staccato stream of consciousness narrative style, one can become submerged in his labyrinthine layers without getting lost. But he had to be worried about how that would translate to film. Interviewer: Did you ever imagine that somebody could whittle down that 500-page book into a 140-minute movie, what with all the interweaving plots and all the characters? Ellroy: I didn’t think they’d succeed. I didn’t think it would be made into a movie . . . (but) lo and behold several years later Curtis Hanson, a man whose films I had seen and admired, called me, and I read the seventh draft of the script. I saw that they had done a good job of compressing my story while maintaining the overall dramatic thrust of it, and I saw that they had contained the narrative structure of the three men. Of course when I saw the film I was very, very taken with it. Interviewer: Did you have any input after you read the script? Ellroy: Yes. Curtis Hanson, Brian Helgeland (co-screen writer) and I talked. I pointed out anachronisms in the script, deviations from 1950s vernacular. I gave them advice. Some they took, some they didn’t. Curtis Hanson and I became friends, and we would meet periodically when I happened to be in L.A., and discuss points of police procedure, points of LAPD lore from back in the ’50s. We discussed the ’50s in general. Curtis is three years older than me, and he remembers the actual year 1953, in which the film is set, much better than me because I was only five and he was eight, and that’s a big difference. Then New Regency flew my wife and I out to Tacoma, Washington to see a focus group screening of the film in February. I saw it, and I was blown away. ROB BLACKWELDER / 1997 101 The most startling thing about it is...