COVER STORY : ON LOCATION : The ‘Devil’ Is in the Details : The movie of Walter Mosley’s mystery ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ explores a postwar world that’s rarely seen. The filmmakers are being faithful to the book and the working-class blacks who lived in that Los Angeles

When someone from a movie company says they’re going to show you Los Angeles on the screen as you’ve never seen it before, the chance that this statement will turn out to be not entirely true is a distinct possibility. The filmmakers at the helm of the forthcoming TriStar movie “Devil in a Blue Dress” are now repeating those very words, but on the face of it, they seem to have more to promise than most.

Adapted from the 1990 Walter Mosley mystery novel of the same title and starring Denzel Washington and Jennifer Beals, “Devil in a Blue Dress” will show a side of the city that has not been much photographed by Hollywood: specifically, the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles just after World War II. The film, which has just finished shooting on locations around the city, is drawn from a story cast in the mold of film noir, but it is film noir peopled largely by working-class African Americans who in 1948, it will be remembered, were still living on the far side of the civil rights movement.

“There was an unwritten code for black people at the time,” says the film’s director, Carl Franklin, who, like Mosley and Washington, is black. “You don’t go north of Slauson Avenue, you don’t go to Venice or Malibu. You don’t go to Hollywood at night. You could get picked up (by the police). The movie we’re making is set against a very racist milieu.”

Washington, 39, plays the part of Easy Rawlins, a World War II combat veteran and aircraft assembly-line worker who stumbles into a new line of work as a private detective when a tough-talking white man offers him money to locate a mysterious white woman known to frequent black jazz joints. Beals plays the part of the mysterious woman, who bears the noirish name of Daphne Monet. She has a secret, as readers of the novel already know and which the filmmakers would rather not advertise, at least until the movie opens sometime next winter.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Franklin and his cast were on location in a very white neighborhood of Pasadena, using the stately white stone main building of the private Mayfield Senior School as the setting for the foundation offices of Todd Carter, a wealthy businessman in love with Daphne who, at this point in the story, has disappeared.

Mosley, 42, who grew up in Los Angeles but now lives in New York City, was in town to see how things were going and was pleased to discover that the set of Carter’s office was exactly as he had originally imagined it.

“This is beautiful,” said the author, who was wearing a black polo shirt as he sat in a sun-dappled garden on the baronial school grounds that in the 1940s were the private estate of silk thread manufacturer John Eagle. “I walk into the room and check out Carter’s office, and when I went in there, I’m looking at the office that I wrote, right down to the bottle of brandy and the glasses. Pretty wonderful.”

Mosley wrote an early draft of the script himself when the movie was in development at another studio, but the screenplay being filmed was written by Franklin. This suits the author just fine. “I’m not a cinematic thinker,” Mosley confided. Nevertheless, TriStar has retained him as an associate producer. “Basically Carl calls me up and asks questions. He had to change the name of a character the other day and he called me up and we talked about it.

“He’s cut out a few things. A couple of the characters have been combined. But I think he’s been very true to the novel as a whole. I have no problem with the way he’s changed it.”

When it was published four years ago, “Devil in a Blue Dress” drew immediate attention to its young author and attracted movie interest from such actors as Danny Glover, Wesley Snipes and Tim Reid, all intrigued with the possibilities of playing Easy Rawlins, a heroic black protagonist chasing demons through the unexamined racism of post-war California.

But a movie did not get off the ground until producer Jesse Beaton happened upon the book and brought it to Franklin’s attention about the same time that TriStar-affiliated director-producer Jonathan Demme saw Franklin’s low-budget critical success “One False Move” and called to say he wanted to work with him. (Demme is executive producer of “Devil.”)

Then Bill Clinton got elected President.

Candidate Clinton had already told members of the press that Mosley was one of his favorite writers, and the day after the election at least one national newspaper ran a front-page story speculating about what was going to be “in” once Clinton was in the White House--a list that included the Easy Rawlins mysteries.

“So we sent that to (Mike) Medavoy,” Franklin, 45, said with a big smile, referring to the then-chairman of TriStar. “I don’t know exactly how much that had to do with anything, but everything seemed to move a little quicker after Clinton was elected.”

Mosley said he had not imagined Easy being played by any particular actor, though he is understandably pleased to see Oscar winner Washington in the role. “A lot of people you talk to, they say, ‘Who do you see as Easy?’ But I come from the theater where if someone tells you Laurence Olivier is going to play Hercules, you say, ‘Gee, I wonder how he’s going to do that?’ That’s the way I think.”

Beals, who was not in the day’s scenes but had come to the set to watch, said she wanted the part of Daphne badly since first listening to the book on audiocassette while filming the upcoming “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” in New York. “Ugh! Did I read for it?” she said. “I jumped through burning hoop after burning hoop and watched as they got smaller. I never wanted a part like I wanted this part.”

As a clutch of Mayfield’s Catholic girls waited politely to get her autograph, Beals, 30, clad in casual black, stepped gingerly around what she called “the truth” about Daphne. “I don’t know how much I can talk about it because it should be a surprise.” She did say the role was proving difficult because “a character like this, there’s no moment where I’m just sitting over a cup of coffee chatting with somebody. Every moment is a life-or-death situation, so it’s pretty extreme.”

The leading lady of “Flashdance” said the clothes she is wearing in “Devil in a Blue Dress,” as the girlfriend of a wealthy man running for mayor, are “very alluring but very tasteful--pearls. There is one dress that’s a little more sensual, a little more degenerate.” Daphne, she explained, “has to use the weapons that she has.”

One of the changes that Franklin has made in the story is to build up Daphne’s romance with Carter (played by Terry Kinney), who in the film is a somewhat younger character than in the book. “I didn’t want this to be an older guy who’s got this sweet thing,” Franklin said. “I wanted it to be a situation where he might be losing a very vital love relationship. Especially with Jennifer. Jennifer looks like she could be the mayor’s wife. She has that carriage.”

At the same time, Daphne’s romantic fling with Easy in the novel evidently has been toned down. An erotic bathtub scene involving the two of them will not be in the movie. “It’s a great scene; I love that scene,” Beals said. “But no, it’s not in the script. I’m not falling for Easy as much as I was in the book or as I was in the first drafts of the script. There’s a lot of flirtation and a lot of tension. But who knows? With Carl, all of a sudden he could change it back and it would be in there.”

Although recognized by some as an actor who had a recurring role on “The A Team” and who made his first films with Roger Corman, Franklin demonstrated in “One False Move,” an interracial crime thriller, that he could handle violence on the screen in a realistic but unspectacular way.

“Coming from an acting background, the emotions are more important to me. It’s the invasion of humanity that I think is important about violence. It’s not whether we have some neat way of killing somebody.”

When things get truly desperate for Easy in the story, he gets some muscular help from an old childhood friend named Mouse (played by Don Cheadle, lately of television’s “Picket Fences”). In the novel, Mouse is a key figure but in an earlier draft of the script he had been eliminated, with the thought that some of his action-hero qualities be grafted onto Easy himself.

“They wanted Easy to be a stronger character,” Franklin said of another studio’s creative executives. “But that’s not who Easy is. Easy’s dilemma is that he’s a guy who’s fighting fear: the basic fears of a black person in 1948, problems with the police, being in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time; afraid because he’s been in the war and has killed, afraid of becoming like that again; afraid of being killed; afraid of becoming like Mouse.”

He said he found a quick affinity for the story of “Devil in a Blue Dress” since its background details roughly parallel his own. Easy and many other of Mosley’s characters are blacks who migrated from Texas and Louisiana during World War II to work in California’s shipyards and defense plants. This is the story of Mosley’s family and Franklin’s as well.

“Film noir is one of my favorite genres,” the director said, “although I don’t think you need to approach it as a genre when you do it. I like the ‘40s, I like detective kind of things. But what I never liked about them is the inaccessibility of the characters. Usually they’re people that you never run into in real life. You know, where does (Phillip) Marlowe live? Who’s his mom? Where did he come from? Same with the Continental Op or Sam Spade. The thing about these people is that they were all people I had seen before. Easy lives in a neighborhood.”

The neighborhood is 103rd Street and Central Avenue in the area that later became known as Watts.

Filming it as it was then has meant using other parts of the city that have undergone less change from urban decay, vandalism and supermarket make-overs.

Some of the filming has been done closer to downtown, near Pico, with buildings and streets in the area doctored to eliminate anachronisms like parking meters.

The producers had difficulty even locating many period photographs of Central Avenue to help them reconstruct its look. “We asked everybody involved in the production if they had any old family photos to bring them to us,” said Jesse Beaton.

“This is difficult because it’s period,” Franklin said, comparing this to his last picture. “It’s a big film, there are a lot of characters, a lot of locations and it’s all 1948. And we want to do it so that it’s full of feeling and not just snippets of reality but big vistas.

“We’re getting it, we’re getting it good, and everybody’s having a good time. Denzel has been real cool to work with. The problem with Denzel is he wants all your research. He’s just so into it. I ask somebody, where’s my research? They say, ‘Denzel’s got it.’ ”

When the cameras start rolling, Denzel Washington, dressed in 1940s suit and tie, makes his way across the spacious dark-paneled room that is actually the head of school’s office at Mayfield but on this day is the headquarters of the Carter Foundation.

Diego Rivera paintings hang on the wall. Leather-bound volumes fill the bookcases. The air smells of money. Carter gets up from his antique desk to greet Easy, whom events have transformed overnight from a lowly aircraft worker into an important black man standing square-shouldered in an inner sanctum of white power.

“Look at Denzel,” said a member of the crew gathered behind cinematographer Tak Fujimoto’s video monitor. “That’s actually a cheap suit he’s wearing because that’s what Easy would be able to afford, but on Denzel it looks GQ.”

This was true.

“Did something happen to Daphne?” Kinney asks.

“The last time I saw her she looked fine,” Washington says.

“You saw her?”

“Yeah, last night.”

“Is she still in town?”

“She was last night.”

“What did she say, what was she wearing?”

“A blue dress and blue heels.”

“You know, I’ve never known a woman who could wear perfume so slight. . . .”

Just then Washington takes the measure of this needy millionaire and sees something sad and unexpected. It’s that moment in a mystery when the hero gives a look that says, “What have I gotten myself into?”

Mosley, who had been looking on, said, “What genre is this that I’m writing in? It’s harder to say than it seems. Because I’m packaged as a mystery writer, but I’m also writing about the history of Los Angeles. I’m writing about black people in America.”

He has written three more books following the development of Easy Rawlins--”A Red Death,” “White Butterfly” and the just-published “Black Betty.” He said he would rather be compared to Dickens.

“I’m trying to write about a social life, a linguistic life. I think the (hard-boiled detective) genre is about corruption. That’s what Chandler was writing about: the end of the European man. The sense that his world doesn’t work anymore.”

Mosley seemed to be in a good mood during this film--financed visit to his hometown, watching his literary creatures come to life in a $20-million studio feature. But he said he was not ready to move back to the land of the palms. “I enjoyed ‘Boyz N the Hood’ and ‘Menace II Society,’ but I think that Hollywood has brought a hip-hop sensibility to black experience that is not true.”

“Devil in a Blue Dress” presumably will be different?

“My experience with Hollywood is very clean,” he said. “I don’t have any expectations. I feel the way James M. Cain did when he was asked how he felt about what Hollywood had done to his novels. He said, ‘My novels are right here on the shelf.’ ”