L.A. Beyond Your Wildest Nightmare

James Ellroy, who enjoys being known as the Demon Dog of crime fiction, wears his Cameron kilt for only the most significant black-tie occasions. So far, there have been two: his 1991 marriage to Helen Knode and the world premiere in May of “L.A. Confidential” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Reviews of the movie were sensational; opinions of how Ellroy carries a kilt were mixed.

“Let’s just say that he’s brave,” suggested Curtis Hanson, director of “L.A. Confidential,” “and that his legs are strong and hairy.”

“He looked like an idiot,” offered the less politic Brian Helgeland, who collaborated with Hanson on the “L.A. Confidential” script, “but I think the real reason he wore the kilt was so that when people would ask, ‘Where’s Ellroy?’ he’d be easy to point out.”

Ellroy’s never been known to be a wallflower, but with “L.A. Confidential” set to open on Sept. 19, the teenage delinquent who used to break into Hancock Park homes and steal the underpants of girls who thought he was creepy has become one of Hollywood’s literary lions. All but one of his 13 hard-boiled books had been optioned for the movies before Cannes, as have short stories like “Dick Contino’s Blues” and “Gravy Train.” Ellroy was himself hired to write the script for “White Jazz,” the last of what he calls his L.A. Quartet, a sprawling series of noir novels about bad cops and nominally worse robbers that also includes “The Black Dahlia,” “The Big Nowhere” and “L.A. Confidential.”

“What’s amazing to me,” said Ellroy during a June trip to Manhattan from his home outside Kansas City (he and his wife moved there to be closer to her mother), “is that ‘L.A. Confidential’ was so successfully adapted, because with the exception of ‘American Tabloid,’ it’s probably my most uncontainable, incompressible and movie-adaptation-proof novel.” (HBO is taking a whack at 1995’s “American Tabloid,” in which Ellroy abandons L.A. cops and criminals for an equally seamy national tapestry that includes such real-life figures as President John F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa and Howard Hughes. “American Tabloid,” which ends with Kennedy’s assassination, is the first of three books that Ellroy says will conclude with his take on the Watergate scandal.)

Ellroy is hardly a new name to Hollywood. His third novel, “Blood on the Moon,” was made into a 1987 movie, “Cop,” with James Woods. Ellroy’s cult of fans mushroomed with the L.A. Quartet, but his books were also seen as problematic film material because of their convoluted plots, unsympathetic characters, wicked violence and period settings. Lately, Ellroy’s mainstream profile has risen with “American Tabloid” and “My Dark Places,” a memoir that details the murder of his mother when he was 10, and the 15 months the now 49-year-old novelist spent investigating the unsolved crime that had shaped the young life and unlikely adult redemption of Jean Ellroy’s only child.

Still, it took the interest of director Curtis Hanson, fresh from the commercial success of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “The River Wild,” to awaken interest in “L.A. Confidential,” which had languished at Warner Bros. since 1989, where it was seen as a potential miniseries.

“It’s like I was at the poker table and had won a few hands,” explained Hanson, “and then pushed my chips into the middle and said, ‘This is the hand I’m betting on.’ ”

Hanson, an L.A. native and a reader of crime fiction, was attracted to “L.A. Confidential” because “I couldn’t get Ellroy’s characters out of my mind--it was the characters more than the specifics of the plot that kept my interest. It also touched upon a theme that I’ve always enjoyed playing with: exploring the difference between how things appear and how they are. I’ve always wanted to make a movie about L.A. that dealt with the specific duality that goes with being the city that creates illusions.”

Hanson cast two relatively unknown Australian actors (Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce) to join Kevin Spacey in playing the three cops whose individual stories propel the narrative of “L.A. Confidential.” It’s at this point that producer Arnon Milchan asked, “Are we going to have any stars in this movie?” Danny DeVito and Kim Basinger added some marquee value, with DeVito playing the crooked, camera-toting editor of a scandal sheet called Hush-Hush, and Basinger a call girl whose calling card is her resemblance to Veronica Lake.

Hanson and Helgeland’s strategy in boiling down the large cast and multiple plot lines of Ellroy’s novel was to focus on the book’s three troubled cops. “Once we decided to follow these three characters with equal affection,” said Hanson, “we said, ‘All right, what scenes are most important to these guys and their individual stories; where are the scenes where they play off each other; and how can we bring their stories all together?’ ”

To explain his vision of the film, Hanson presented his principals with a portfolio of 15 photos of Los Angeles from the early ‘50s. He also arranged for his actors and crew to see a series of L.A. crime films shot in the ‘50s, including “The Lineup” and “Private Hell 36” (both directed by Don Siegel), Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly,” Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” and Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing.”

After a year of multiple outlines and many drafts, Hanson and Helgeland sent Ellroy a copy of the script; as fans of the author’s work, his approval was important to the screenwriters. Ellroy, who’d gotten used to cashing option checks without thinking that his books would ever reach the screen, dug the script. “It’s my world, yes,” he said. “They’re my characters, yes. But where the book goes through 10 plot lines and eight years of L.A. history, the film goes through a few months of L.A. history in 1953, and maybe three of the 10 plot lines. Still, they’ve retained a lot of my dialogue, and the idea of bad white men doing bad things in the name of authority.”

Hanson says that Ellroy has recently left messages on his answering machine that conclude not just with the barks familiar to associates of the Demon Dog, but with the phrase, “ ‘L.A. Confidential’ rules, all other film adaptations drool. Woof.”

James Ellroy has never been shy about banging his own drum. He signed the entire first printing of “My Dark Places,” all 75,000 copies. The John Hancock promotion was Ellroy’s idea. “We’re in the business of selling books,” he said by way of explanation. Knopf shipped the pre-bound pages out to his home, where Ellroy spent seven 10-hour days scribbling his initials while listening to Mahler, Brahms, Bruckner and Beethoven. (Ellroy must be one fast paper shuffler--that’s more than 1,000 books an hour. He said the letters “started out looking presentable and deteriorated.”)

Ellroy’s an old hand at promoting books. Before going on a book tour to promote 1987’s “The Black Dahlia,” he decided to exploit the similarities between the death of the title character and that of his mother. He fed journalists a story perfectly shaped to sell his book: Boy traumatized by mother’s killing fixates on famous unsolved Hollywood homicide and blows his mind behind speed, vodka, hard-boiled novels and petty crime. Lost soul cleans up right before he seems sure to die to become a novelist who writes a book based on the Dahlia murder that he dedicates to his mother. The sordid story was all true, and out of Ellroy’s mouth, it rang like pure pulp fiction.

I took down Ellroy’s rap for a magazine profile in 1992 at the time of “White Jazz,” the fourth installment of the L.A. Quartet. At the time, he’d just signed a three-book domestic deal with Knopf for $1.1 million, a bid that was dramatically less than that of three other publishers. Friends such as screenwriter Joe Stinson figured that having the Knopf logo on his books was a symbol of redemption for a man who little more than a decade before was stumbling toward a derelict’s grave. “The borzoi,” concluded Stinson, “is Ellroy’s Rosebud.”

Ellroy had turned his mania into his metier, and now he’d be published by the tony literary house that had been home to the cream of crime writers: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Knopf Editor in Chief Sonny Mehta handled the editing of “White Jazz” and encouraged Ellroy to flesh out a manuscript that remained as lean as the frame of a speed freak. Ellroy told me then that he had no interest in writing a screenplay to one of his own books.

Three years later, Joel Gotler, a Hollywood literary agent who’d begun to handle Ellroy’s dramatic rights in conjunction with his longtime book agent, Nat Sobel, set up a dinner for Ellroy with Nick Nolte, who had read the L.A. Quartet while preparing for his role in “Mulholland Falls.” The actor told the author that he was looking for a contemporary L.A. cop movie, and Ellroy suggested running with “White Jazz” minus the late-’50s period detail. The deal paid Ellroy in the mid-six figures for the option on the novel and to write the script, with more to come if the film is made.

In June, Ellroy spoke of the “White Jazz” script as “pure Ellroy” and “a very literary screenplay.” He also talked about his determination to write books that would be even harder to translate into movies. “I love a big, dark, complex, densely layered and plotted book that’s steeped in detail,” he said. “These are all the things that mitigate against a book being successfully adapted for the movies.”

What Ellroy forgot to say during a discussion focusing on Hollywood’s interest in his work was that he also had deals to write two original screenplays: “The Plague Season” for Paramount and “The Night Watchman,” for Warner Bros. Both are contemporary cop movies.

“I’m a good verbal storyteller,” he said later, assessing his prowess in a pitch meeting, “and I have stories in my head that are simpler and more generic than the stories I’ve moved on to as a novelist. The process of writing a script isn’t what novels are to me, where you control everything from the gate. I’m happy to have the experience, but,” he adds, “it’s not over yet.” Ellroy, famous for talking at length about the most sordid aspects of his early life, made it clear that this was all he has to say on the subject of his screenplays.

“I think he might have succumbed a bit to the F. Scott Fitzgerald-William Faulkner fantasy of coming out to Hollywood to make some easy money,” says Helgeland, who is himself riding on the Hollywood gravy train. Helgeland also wrote this summer’s “Conspiracy Theory,” a draft of Kevin Costner’s upcoming “The Postman” and will begin directing his own “Parker,” starring Mel Gibson, this fall. “I ran into [Ellroy] a few weeks ago and he basically said, ‘I don’t know how you guys do this. I’m going home.’ So I think his Hollywood honeymoon might be over.”

People who’ve invested time and money in Ellroy’s work are extremely interested in how “L.A. Confidential” makes out at the box office. After Joe Stinson scored with his first screenplay, Clint Eastwood’s “Sudden Impact,” he bought the rights to Ellroy’s second novel, “Clandestine.” (This is how Stinson remembers how Ellroy, who at the time was working as a caddy, handling the 1984 negotiation: “I’ve got $200 in the bank and caddy season is three months off--I think we can make a deal.”) For 13 years, Stinson has polished his script, and showed it around town. Now he’s working on a deal to direct his labor of love.

Maurizio Grimaldi has been struggling to get “The Big Nowhere” off the ground for more than eight years. Once he had Wayne Wang attached to direct, but the deal fell apart. Rudy Cohen’s got a script based on his property, “The Black Dahlia,” but is still searching for a director. Nick Nolte is attached to star in “White Jazz,” but a director has yet to sign onto the project.

It remains to be seen how “L.A. Confidential” will affect the cinematic fate of Ellroy’s other books. Sure to be compared with “Chinatown,” that alone won’t banish persistent doubts over the financial viability of film noir, a view corroborated by the commercial failures of “Mulholland Falls” and “Devil in a Blue Dress.” Even if “L.A. Confidential” is a commercial hit, some suspect that it might be seen as the exception to the rule. Ellroy may have become more of a Hollywood player, but he still abides by his old philosophy: “I think it unlikely that any of these movies will be made, and I hope that I’m wrong.”

“L.A. Confidential” went into production while Ellroy was in Los Angeles investigating his mother’s murder and researching “My Dark Places.” The project started as an article for GQ about the famous author reviewing the case files of the El Monte homicide, and viewing the pictures of the corpse, which was found strangled, a silk stocking wrapped around one leg, in the bushes outside Arroyo High School. The article prompted producer-director Robert Greenwald to advance $150,000 for an option on the book it inspired (the deal calls for a total payout of$1 million if “My Dark Places” becomes a film).

Ellroy hasn’t lived in L.A. since the late ‘70s, when he wrote his first novel while living in a cheap hotel and working as a caddy at the Bel-Air Country Club. One day, after caddying for actor Robert Stack, Ellroy learned that he’d scored $3,500 for that novel, a paperback original called “Brown’s Requiem.” During Ellroy’s work on “My Dark Places,” he arranged for a reenactment of his mother’s murder to be produced for “Unsolved Mysteries.” Stack was the narrator.

That’s the way it is now with Ellroy and L.A. He used to break into the houses of rich men for kicks. Now he lives in a rich man’s house. He used to caddy for producers. Now he titillates them with tawdry tales and sells them his stories of men behaving very badly. Ellroy may live in Kansas, but he’ll never shake off L.A. It’s the city of his nightmares, and the city of his dreams.