Hannah Eaves Interview With James Ellroy

James Ellroy: "I'm an LA guy"
By Hannah Eaves
Green Cine



"I judge my characters sternly."

James Ellroy is an enigma wrapped in confident, arrow-direct statements. He's unerringly polite, remembers your name, and it seems like he's telling you the unadulterated, bullshit-free truth the whole time, but all along you know that you'll be printing exactly what he wants you to - no more, no less. You're a reader looking at a character in one of his books while he, the author, tells you exactly what to think about them. Does he really like the film adaptations of his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia? Who knows. Unsurprisingly, he wants people to read his books, so he'll submit to the press engagements surrounding their release. But after a making a long career of it, he's grown sick of profiting by his own mythology - his obsession with his mother's unsolved 1958 murder, the 1947 murder nearby of Elizabeth Short, dubbed the "Black Dahlia," and other unsolved murders of women.
In interviews with Adam Curtis and Michelle Goldberg, much has been said in these pages on the importance of demystifying the American nostalgia for a "pure" time - the 1950s and early 1960s - that never really existed. In all of his novels, and particularly in the Underworld USA trilogy, Ellroy has gone far to expose, and then further fictionalize, the grim underbelly of those times. The Black Dahlia is a perfect extension of the seedy, corrupt side of neo-noirs like Chinatown, but dirtier and with more heart. Ellroy himself believes that noir ended with Odds Against Tomorrow, and his "noir" novels are instead "historical romances."

Brian De Palma's cinematic rendering of Ellroy's flawed, dark novel is a good film, with outstanding performances by Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, who is drop-dead sexy throughout, particularly when she's in satin tap pants, and that's probably enough to draw audiences right there. The novel tells a story that unfolds over several long periods of time, with characters entering, then exiting, and something intangible has been lost in the film's condensation of these story arcs, a problem which becomes particularly apparent just over halfway through. But those not familiar with the book will likely find the denouement satisfying as the threads come together and Ellroy's ability to combine the dirty and the cool shines through.

The film adaptation of The Black Dahlia features a significant change to the ending of your novel. This change seems to alter the psychology of the main character, Bucky Bleichart. Were you consulted about this?

No. Nobody consulted me about anything pertaining to the story. I forfeited all rights to it when I optioned the book to James B. Harris way back in 1986 before the book was even published in hard cover. I understood that they would probably never make it into a movie, and if they did make it into a good movie, as this one is, there would be significant changes to it. The story would be greatly reduced, as L.A. Confidential was, for the sake of comprehension. It will be, in the end, more melodramatic because you can't have the off-the-page conclusion to The Black Dahlia that I did, which is epistolary in letters between Kay Lake and Bucky Bleichart and which is all about an overview in narration - Bucky taking the Sprague family down at a great personal cost to himself, which is something you can have in a book that you can't have in a movie. I knew that there would be a more melodramatic and, in fact, a bloodier resolution to this movie, so I was resigned to that from the outset.

What a good movie gives you, an appealing movie gives you, is a viable compression of your story and a visual record of verbal events that you've created. I am not a visualist; Mr. De Palma is a visualist. I write in a black word on white paper milieu and leave the visuals up to the reader. I will never know what you saw in your mind when you read my book, but we all see the same thing when we see a film like The Black Dahlia. I understand reduction. I understand compression. I understand the isolation of themes and what I think Mr. De Palma did very well was isolate the triangulations inherent in my book. Bucky-Lee-Kay. Bucky-Madeleine-Kay. Bucky-Lee-Dahlia. Bucky-Dahlia-Kay. Dahlia with everybody. It's a lot of "one man and two women," and he got it.

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