I love crime thrillers to be dense and rewarding. I love it when I get a full meal. I want them to be intelligent and complicated yet I want them to be rational and engrossing until the end. I also like them well acted, and to be about something. I want them to leave me something to think about when it ends. Am I asking too much? One of the films that fit that bill is Curtis Hanson’s spellbinding “L.A. Confidential.” This masterpiece was released in 1997, and it was eclipsed by the release of the juggernaut known as “Titanic.” Hanson – who co-authored the script as well as directed it – has made a film that’s worth repeated viewings.
One aspect of the film that has always enthralled me, but I found even more enticing seeing it again a couple of days ago, is how the main three characters in this movie get the rug pulled from underneath and they unexpectedly walk into violence and peril. All of a sudden – there’s no one to trust and nothing is what it seemed before. They also all encounter a feeling of isolation. All three cops find a way to redeem themselves but only by facing evil and corruption head on as well as their own demons.
The movie is based on James L. Ellroy’s novel and it revolves around three LA Police Department officers in the early 50s who become embroiled in a mix of sex, corruption and murder which will eventually encompass organized crime, heroin trafficking, pornography, prostitution, and Hollywood. Hanson juggles all the different plot lines – moves at a clip pace – but never losing you. The film captures the psychology of the characters as well – something rare and welcomed in this type of movie.
Another aspect of this film that makes it so prescient is how it subverts some of the expectations of this genre. An example is how it shows minorities being blamed for crimes they’re innocent of – and how women are taken advantage of and appear to be the “femme fatales.”
Curtis Hanson wanted unknown actors to play the two leading men. He didn’t want the audience to like the main characters at first but for you to learn to sympathize with them as the movie progresses. He cast two unfamiliar Australian actors – Guy Pierce and Russell Crowe. In order to appease the producers he surrounded them with Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and Kim Bassinger. They’re all incredible in this film – and Ms. Bassinger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
The recreation of Los Angeles and the soundtrack is phenomenal – including tunes by Johnny Mercer, Dean Martin among others. Stir or shake yourself a very dry martini and get ready for this movie. And you will never forget Rollo Tomasi…
Jack: “Why in the world do you want to go digging any deeper into the Nite Owl. Killings, Lieutenant?”
Ed: “Rollo Tomasi.”
Jack: “Is there more to that, or am I supposed to guess?”
Ed: “Rollo… was a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty, and he shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I just made the name up to give him some personality. Rollo Tomasi’s the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It was supposed to be about justice. Then somewhere along the way I lost sight of that. Why’d you become a cop?”
Love,
Roger
Available to rent on iTunes, YouTube, Vudu, Redbox and Google Play.
Directed by Curtis Hanson
Written by Brian Helgeland (screenplay), Curtis Hanson (screenplay), James Ellroy (novel)
Starring: Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito
138 minutes
Three policemen, each with his own motives and obsessions, tackle the corruption surrounding an unsolved murder at a downtown Los Angeles coffee shop in the early 1950s. Detective Lieutenant Exley (Guy Pearce), the son of a murdered detective, is out to avenge his father’s killing. The ex-partner of Officer White (Russell Crowe), implicated in a scandal rooted out by Exley, was one of the victims. Sergeant Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) feeds classified information to a tabloid magnate (Danny DeVito).
About Writer and Director Curtis Hanson
Curtis Lee Hanson was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He was born in Reno, Nevada, and grew up in Los Angeles. He was the son of Beverly June (Curtis), a real estate agent, and Wilbur Hale “Bill” Hanson, a teacher. Hanson dropped out of high school, finding work as a freelance photographer and editor for Cinema magazine.
Hanson began screenwriting in 1970, when he co-wrote The Dunwich Horror, a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story. Hanson wrote and directed his next feature Sweet Kill in 1973, then in 1978 wrote and produced The Silent Partner. From the early 1980s into 1990s, Hanson directed a string of comedies and dramas. He did thrillers, too: many of them deal with people who lose their sense of control or security when facing danger or under threat of death. Some, like the financial executive in Bad Influence and the police officers in L.A. Confidential, unexpectedly walk into violence and disaster.
In the 1990s, Hanson found box-office success with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild, and received significant critical acclaim with his 1997 film L.A. Confidential, an adaptation of the James Ellroy novel. The film was nominated for 9 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two — Best Adapted Screenplay (a credit Hanson shared with Brian Helgeland), and Best Supporting Actress (for Kim Basinger). Hanson’s later works included In Her Shoes, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile, and Lucky You. His last film was Chasing Mavericks in 2012, but he was unable to finish the film due to ill health. Michael Apted replaced him as director during the final days of shooting.
Hanson later retired from film work and was reported to have frontotemporal dementia. He died of natural causes at his Hollywood Hills home at the age of 71. (peoplepill.com)
From Novel to Screenplay
Curtis Hanson had been a longtime James Ellroy fan when he finally read L.A. Confidential, and the characters in that particular Ellroy novel really spoke to him, so he began working on a script. Meanwhile, Brian Helgeland—originally contracted to write an unproduced Viking film for Warner Bros.—was also a huge Ellroy fan, and lobbied hard for the studio to give him the scripting job. When he learned that Hanson already had it, the two met, and bonded over their mutual admiration of Ellroy’s prose. Their passion for the material was clear, but it took two years to get the script done, with a number of obstacles.
“He would turn down other jobs; I would be doing drafts for free,” Helgeland said. “Whenever there was a day when I didn’t want to get up anymore, Curtis tipped the bed and rolled me out on the floor.”
To adapt L.A. Confidential for the screen, Hanson and Helgeland had to condense Ellroy’s original novel, boiling the story down to a three-person narrative and ditching other subplots so they could get to the heart of the three cops at the center of the movie. Ellroy, in the end, was pleased with their choices.
“They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme, which is that everything in Los Angeles during this era of boosterism and yahooism was two-sided and two-faced and put out for cosmetic purposes,” Ellroy said. “The script is very much about the [characters’] evolution as men and their lives of duress. Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny. I’ve long held that hard-boiled crime fiction is the history of bad white men doing bad things in the name of authority. They stated that case plain.” (mentalfloss.com)
Iconic Noir Style
Gossip reporter Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) mentions in the movie’s opening lines how Hollywood and Los Angeles’ essential identity depend on “selling an image.” With its crisp suits and glamorous classic-Hollywood-inspired looks, the film buys into that directive completely. Costume designer Ruth Myers sat down with EW to discuss what it was like constructing a seedy mid-century Los Angeles with a veneer of glamour.
Myers says the process was one of the most collaborative she’s ever experienced (then or since). She, Hanson, and production designer Jeannine Oppewall spent weeks together watching a litany of B-movies selected by Hanson and immersing themselves in the period prior to shooting. “They were films I’d never heard of with actors I’d never heard of,” she says. From the first, she and Hanson were committed to storytelling over replicating. “We talked about conceptualizing the period,” she says. “It was very clear to me that what he wanted was to look at the period rather than to slavishly reproduce the period.”
For Myers, that meant working one-on-one with actors to find looks that both evoked the era and allowed audiences to form a meaningful connection with the characters. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful it looks and how accurate it is… if you lose the audience, there’s no point,” she says. “It’s so easy for clothes to look like costumes. I’ve never been interested in the idea of high fashion. I’m not really interested in making people look beautiful. I’m interested in telling stories.” (Entertainment Weekly)
Locations of 1950s L.A.
One of the ways that Hanson and co. made the film viable on a mere $35 million budget was by vowing to shoot as much as possible on standing L.A. locations. As much as the City of Angels likes to tear down and rebuild its past, there’s plenty of 1950s era-architecture still around, and only the Victory Motel set at the end of the movie had to be built as a standing set (in part because it got shot to pieces). Even then, it wasn’t on a studio backlot, but on the Baldwin Hills oilfields in Culver City. In terms of a tour of the rest of the city, you can find the cops’ HQ in LA City Hall, which was also police headquarters in Dragnet. The premiere of When Worlds Collide, the site of Jack Vincennes’ pot bust, was at an abandoned bank building on Hollywood Boulevard, while the famous globe of Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard provided the exterior for Sid Hudgens’ office. Location favorite Boardner’s on North Cherokee Avenue is where Dudley Smith and Bud White meet, and Jack suffers a crisis of conscience at Bob’s Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard, while the Liquor Store where White meets Lynn Bracken for the first time is Ramon’s Cane Shop on South Cochran Avenue. The Nite Owl Cafe was in fact the J&J Sandwich Shop on East 6th Street, while Pierce Patchett’s home is the gorgeous 1929 Lovell House on Dundee Drive. The body of bisexual actor Matt Reynolds is found on the Hollywood Center Motel on Sunset Boulevard, and Exley and White come across the real Lana Turner in the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard. And in the less glamorous side of things, Mrs Lefferts’ home is in Elysian Park, Lynn Bracken’s is on Wilcox Avenue, the Nite Owl suspects were found on Avenue 27 in Lincoln Heights, and Jack and Ed interview an informant at Bellevue and Marion in Echo Park. (indiewire.com)