Author Likes Film Version Of ‘L.A. Confidential’
James Ellroy’s epic crime novel “L.A. Confidential” was optioned by Hollywood shortly after it was published in 1990. So far as the writer was concerned, he deposited the check and that was that.
“I think if you take option money for one of your books,” he said the other day, “your obligation is to keep your mouth shut if they (mess) up the movie.”
Ellroy, who lives in Mission Hills, Kan., considers himself a novelist, a specialist in crime fiction, and he rejects most manifestations of popular culture. When he goes to the movies - which isn’t often - he watches only crime films. He says in his life he has seen only two dozen or so movies that didn’t involve crime.
And since he had no financial stake in the film version of “L.A. Confidential,” he had no interest in adapting his tightly knotted story of mass murder and corruption in the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 1950s.
“I figured they’d never make it,” he said by telephone from Toronto, where he was attending the North American premiere of “L.A. Confidential” at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“All of my fiction books have been optioned, and, so far, only two have been made into movies.” (The other was the forgettable “Cop,” from 1988, starring James Woods and based on Ellroy’s “Blood on the Moon.”)
“If they had screwed up ‘L.A. Confidential,’ I would have kept my mouth shut both for attribution and in private,” Ellroy continued. “So it’s a pleasure to go out and extol the virtues of this film, which I genuinely like.”
It was because he could enthusiastically support the film that Ellroy agreed to accompany the filmmakers at the movie’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and again in Toronto.
Those who have followed the shoot-from-the-hip Ellroy for any time know that he is not a man to keep his likes and dislikes to himself. He isn’t given to false enthusiasms. Nor does Ellroy - who seems to be simultaneously inhabited by a courtly Oxford don and a scurrilously profane adolescent - suffer fools gladly.
“I think my books are the greatest noir novels ever written,” Ellroy says matter-of-factly about his output, which includes such titles as “The Black Dahlia,” “American Tabloid” (Time magazine’s novel of the year in 1995), “The Big Nowhere” and his recent memoir, “My Dark Places,” an examination of the 1958 murder of his mother, which remains unsolved.
“I don’t like small books about small-time losers. I can’t stand to read a Jim Thompson book any more than I can flap my arms and fly to Milwaukee. I have to have characters who want things, men driven by lust and passion who interact with history. I see crime stories as the way to take all the disparate elements of history and turn them into a cohesive whole.
“I’m now into the area of politics as crime.”
That fascination with corruption was precisely what attracted director Curtis Hanson to Ellroy’s material.
“The darkness beneath the light - that’s what I’ve explored in other movies, and explored most intensely in ‘L.A. Confidential,’ ” Hanson said from Toronto. “What is the difference between how things appear and how they really are?
“I read Ellroy’s book for fun because he’s a unique voice in contemporary fiction. The characters just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I knew this was the project for which I would use whatever clout I’ve accumulated from my commercial successes” - films like “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” “Bad Influence” and “The River Wild.”
Hanson and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (“Conspiracy Theory”) worked for months to whittle down the novel’s sprawling narrative, radically cutting away subplots and characters that diverted attention from the central story: that of three L.A. police detectives trying to solve a mass murder at an all-night diner.
The principle characters have little in common. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is a brilliant desk cop, adept at departmental politics but despised by his fellows as a smug reformer who may be a physical coward. Bud White (Russell Crowe) is his polar opposite, a slow-thinking brute whose main talent is beating confessions out of suspects. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a high-profile glamour cop who has sold his soul for money, serving as technical adviser to a TV police show and arranging celebrity busts for a scandal magazine.
The common thread is that all three men, despite their individual shortcomings, desperately want to find the truth behind the “Nite Owl Massacre.”
As big a fan as Ellroy is of the finished film, his first reading of the screenplay left him frustrated.
“They weeded out all but the bloodiest and most immediate subplots. For example, there’s little casual racism in the movie, while it’s on practically every page of the book.
“But Curtis Hanson explained to me that films tend to magnify touchy subjects like that. He said they couldn’t have a character like Bud White saying (the N-word) in every speech because it would end up overwhelming every scene.”
Similarly, the novel’s subplots - about a cartoon mogul obviously based on Walt Disney, a rape victim who becomes Exley’s lover and a pornography ring - have been eliminated or reduced to walk-on status.
Ellroy says he’ll happily try his hand at screenplays if the money is right. He’s written a script based on his novel “White Jazz” for Nick Nolte. He’s got a deal with Scripps Howard Broadcasting to develop a television series about the homicide bureau of the Los Angles County Sheriff’s Department.