For Your Consideration: My Son, the Director

Three months and a week have now passed since I found myself sitting inside a Tarzana living room as the guest of an extraordinary group of women, all but one in their 70s. They had been meeting regularly for 43 years, sharing friendship and a thirst for philosophy, literature, art and history.

The Culture Club, they called themselves. “The leader of the pack,” they agreed, was 76-year-old founding member Beverly June Hanson--better known as B.J.

This was her home. Near the kitchen was a poster for the 1992 film “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” B.J.’s boy, the ladies explained, was a movie director. The ladies were bragging on Curtis, but Curtis’ mother soon steered the conversation elsewhere.

Curtis Hanson? The name didn’t ring a bell for this film buff. Later, I asked B.J. about her son’s next film.

She told me it was called “L.A. Confidential” and that she’d just been to a preview.

“It’s really good,” she said with an emphatic nod of her head. “It is.”

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Now, just three months later, film buffs the world over know the name Curtis Hanson. “L.A. Confidential,” the compelling noir thriller based on the James Ellroy novel by the same name, has done well at the box office and even better with the critics. It has been hailed as the year’s best film--and Hanson as best director--by film critics in Los Angeles, New York and Boston. Hanson has also won honors for his screenplay with writing partner Brian Helgeland. The National Board of Review, composed of critics and teachers, had already given “L.A. Confidential” top honors, as had the Toronto Film Festival.

So everybody seems to agree with the director’s mom: It’s really good. Maybe even great. The obvious question now: Is “L.A. Confidential” Academy Award material?

Certainly it’s a contender. And certainly the Culture Club is rooting for B.J.’s son.

“Everybody’s thrilled about Curtis’ success,” his mother reports. “They’ve followed his career throughout the years and they’ve all met him.”

Of course B.J. is proud. But then, she adds, she’s always been proud of Curtis and his older brother, Woody. He works in property management.

Curtis Hanson, 52, is getting much acclaim but still relatively modest press by Hollywood publicity standards. More has been written about another director raised in the San Fernando Valley: Paul Thomas Anderson, the 27-year-old creator of “Boogie Nights,” in part because of Anderson’s youth and his depiction of the porn business. It’s possible that the fictional porn director Jack Horner, played by Burt Reynolds, has gotten more ink than Hanson.

Curtis Hanson can be found on Page 586 of “The Film Encyclopedia” by Ephraim Katz, a kind of who’s who of cinema, along with Tom Hanks, animator William Hanna, actress Daryl Hannah and three foreign actors I’d never heard of. Curtis Hanson’s entry is, at seven lines, the briefest.

Within the film biz, Hanson certainly is not an unfamiliar name. His screenwriting credits include “The Silent Partner” in 1978, “White Dog” in ‘82, “Never Cry Wolf” in ’83 and the Hitchcock homage “The Bedroom Window” in ‘87, which he also directed. Other directing credits include “Losin’ It” in ‘83, “Bad Influence” in ’90 and “The River Wild.” Some of these films did well, but the phrase “sure-fire Oscar contender” never came up.

B.J. Hanson suggests “L.A. Confidential” is the achievement of a director who has worked hard and persistently, learning something new in every project, gradually mastering his craft. In his younger days, she suggests, her son lacked the clout to make films the way he wanted them to be made. Curtis Hanson says the commercial success of “The Hand That Rocked the Cradle” and “The River Wild” created the opportunity to initiate “L.A. Confidential,” his “most personal” film.

The director’s mom remembers some other credits you won’t find in “The Film Encyclopedia.” When Curtis was in high school in the early ‘60s, he and his pal Willard Huyck (who would later script “American Graffiti”) used a small, hand-held 8-millimeter camera to shoot a film where a home was being built near the Hansons’. B.J. couldn’t recall the name of the film but said it was sort of a “crazy” exercise “on the order of Fellini’s ‘8 1/2.’ ” One night the Hansons turned their home into a small theater. “We charged tickets for 50 cents apiece and all our friends came to see Curtis’ first movie.”

Read the Hollywood press and you may learn that Curtis Hanson was a high school and college dropout who was initiated into the film biz by writing for Cinema magazine, a trade publication owned by his uncle; that he got to know and was influenced by such cutting-edge directors as Sam Fuller and John Cassavetes; that he sold his first script to Roger Corman, the so-called king of B-movies.

Curtis Hanson will note another influence: “The great gift that I got from both my parents that has held me in good stead as a storyteller was the love of reading. They handed that down to my brother and myself.”

B.J. and Bill Hanson were sweethearts at Hollywood High. Bill would go on to become a longtime English teacher at Portola Middle School in Tarzana.

B.J. loved movies. Back in 1946, when Curtis was just a baby, they’d go to the old Campus Theater on Vermont Avenue across from Los Angeles City College. Upstairs on the balcony level was a glass-enclosed nursery where parents could take squalling babies. Curtis may well have been nursing, she says, when he attended his first film.

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“I saw it yesterday for the fourth time,” B.J. told me. “There were still little nuances I picked up for the first time.”

She went with one of the newer members of the Culture Club, Jessie Dahl. Afterward, she said, they were talking about Kevin Spacey’s extraordinary death scene. B.J. marveled at the way Spacey held his expression and Jessie wondered if it was just a freeze-frame.

It must be nice for a film buff to call up a director with a question. Nope, the director told his mom, that was all acting. A freeze-frame wouldn’t work, he explained, because the viewer could detect the film’s grain.

It must be nice for B.J. Hanson to hear this recording when she calls the Peppertree Fiveplex in Northridge: “In our main auditorium, from director Curtis Hanson, “L.A. Confidential.’ ” Said B.J.: “It’s really kind of shocking to me that they do that.”

But not, certainly, in a bad way.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.

Curtis Hanson? The name didn’t ring a bell. I asked B.J. about her son’s next film. She told me it was called “L.A. Confidential.” “It’s really good,” she said.