First Black Dahlia Pics Online
The De Palma-directed Film Noir.
The first stills from Brian De Palma's big-screen adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia are now online. The blurry, almost colorized-looking pics can be seen here. (http://briandepalma.free.fr/news_dahlia9.htm) They were first revealed by producer Avi Lerner in a Canal Plus video segment from the Cannes film festival, where the film was scooped up by Universal for distribution.
The shots include our first look at Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart and Scarlett Johansson in character for the Film Noir. The photos also reveal that Mia Kirshner has been cast in the film, apparently as the ill-fated title character Elizabeth Short. Joey Slotnick (Hollow Man) has also been cast.
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i sense a scarlett nip in the works.
such a great los angeles story. please don't fuck it up.
according to the new EW, The Black Dahlia hits theatres Sept. 15
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Trailer here. (http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1449454&sdm=web&qtw=480&qth=300)
Release Date: September 15th, 2006 (wide)
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Mia Kirshner
Directed by: Brian De Palma
Premise: A fictional account of the notorious 1947 Los Angeles murder of actress Elizabeth Short and the obsession that develops for her between two cops investigating the case which destroys their lives.
Wow that trailer was fantastic. Can't wait till it comes out!
If anyone really cares the music in the trailer is by Death in Vegas called Dirge. I just had to get it when I first saw the trailer. I really hope De Palma doesn't blow this one.
I have two friends who work at NuImage (the company who is producing this movie) and they both say, unfortunately, that it is the hugest piece of shit ever.
:(
Why? Have they given you any specifics?
I don't believe it.
I've seen it. It's far, far from the "hugest piece of shit ever." It's exemplary of DePalma's style. Doesn't recognize any distinction between campy and creepy. Look for the The Birds and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? references. The acting is Nancy Allen/John Travolta-ish, as in Blow Out. If that ruined Blow Out for you, you'll hate Black Dahlia. Despite the big stars and (I'm assuming) budget, this one's much more like one of DePalma's "own" films than his other big-budgeters (Scarface, Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, etc.). Which means, yeah, that a lot of people are going to think it's "bad." But it certainly is not. It doesn't take itself seriously in the old-fashioned way--not any more than a Warhol or a Lichtenstein does, and DePalma is, in my opinion, the Warhol and/or Lichtenstein of the cinema--so don't go looking for that, and you'll have a fabulous time.
'Crazy, huh?'
With its glamour and gore, The Black Dahlia seems like the perfect film for Brian De Palma. But the director is more interested in making a very different type of movie - if only he could get away with it. He talks to Steve Rose
Source: The Guardian
Brian De Palma knows better than to ask, "So what did you think of the movie?" After 45-odd years in films, he's had enough negative reviews, box-office disasters and all-out character assassinations to thicken his skin to rhinoceros grade, but he also knows how arbitrary the line between success and failure can be, and how impossible it is to second guess how a movie will do.
"I've been through it so many times I'm sort of past it by now. I have no idea what this film will do. But I don't really care any more," he says, finishing with a short but hearty laugh. The laugh, somewhere between controlled desperation and hardened nonchalance, wells up with some regularity as De Palma talks about his career, usually preceded by a phrase like "what can you do?" or "crazy, huh?"
The movie in question is The Black Dahlia, which opened the Venice film festival last week - a detective thriller set in 1940s Los Angeles and led by the bankable combination of Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, who became a real-life couple during shooting. As we sit in a downtown New York still twitchy from the recent terrorist alerts, though, De Palma's thoughts are closer to home. "I'm astounded there aren't more American political films," he says, apropos of nothing. "I'm amazed, when you can make movies for nothing, there are not people out there making these incredibly angry anti-war movies. How come?"
I nearly choke on my coffee. Brian De Palma bemoaning the demise of political film-making? That's like a wolf crusading for sheep rights. De Palma has, after all, built a career on flash, horror, sex and violence. He is regularly maligned for being a superficial sensationalist, a flashy Hitchcock obsessive with a knack for dazzling cinematic tricks, but lacking either conscience or compassion. The critic David Thomson even compares him to Leni Riefenstahl, so morally vacant does he find De Palma's oeuvre. In fact, De Palma did start out making politically minded counterculture films in the late 1960s and early 70s in the Manhattan streets outside - Godard-influenced, anti-Vietnam fare such as Greetings and Hi Mom! So why isn't he out there making anti-war films now?
"Well ... ," De Palma says, with a sigh. "Of course, I can do it because I still have the same feelings now that I did then. But you'd have to make it for no money and you'd probably have to make it in Europe and get it independently financed. I'm just amazed you don't see them."
The Black Dahlia is not what you would describe as a political movie. Despite the story's dark undercurrents, it is a glossy studio thriller with top-notch production values and an A-list cast. It was adapted from James Ellroy's dense novel, which outlines a fictional conspiracy around the gruesome real-life murder of Betty Short, an aspiring Hollywood actress. Hartnett plays a cop assigned to investigate the murder who instead finds himself distracted by his partner's wife (Johansson, for whom the wardrobe department have pulled out all the stops), and a woman who bears an unsettling resemblance to the victim, (Hilary Swank enjoying the chance to play the vampy seductress for once).
With its themes of obsession, corruption, deception and doppelgangers, you'd imagine De Palma to be a perfect fit with the material. And with echoes of Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential, another Ellroy adaptation, expectations have been high for The Black Dahlia, but it's a relief he doesn't ask me what I thought of the movie. Despite the technical flair - and some high praise from critics who saw it in Venice - it isn't as gripping or coherent as I'd hoped it would be. According to sources, it was cut from three hours down to two. Furthermore, De Palma came on to the project as a late replacement for David Fincher, when many of the roles were already cast, and he subtly denies authorship of it.
"If I'd written it from the beginning I would have done certain things," he explains. "But I didn't put my particular storytelling ellipses in it. I'm doing Ellroy here. My basic thing that I had in my head was that I'm going to tell the story the way Ellroy tells it. This is James Ellroy's Black Dahlia, don't ever forget. I mainly bring out what he put on paper."
De Palma was effectively a director for hire here, and it's a little sad to see. Even his detractors would have to acknowledge the 58-year-old New Yorker as a tireless, distinctive and influential director. And someone without whom US film-making would look very different. His place in history is assured by solid favourites such as Carrie, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way, Casualties of War and, above all, Scarface - that violent, macho Al Pacino-led gangster rise-and-fall that has become a key influence on popular culture and won De Palma fans as diverse as P Diddy and Saddam Hussein. De Palma has also made a host of cult favourites, including Blow Out, Phantom of the Paradise, The Fury and Dressed to Kill. Furthermore, he was at the very centre of the New Hollywood revolution of the 1970s, and many of the greats of that era are indebted to him. It was De Palma who inspired Terrence Malick to take up film-making, who gave Robert De Niro his first acting breaks, who passed the script for Taxi Driver on to Martin Scorsese, who introduced Steven Spielberg to future wife Amy Irving, and who helped George Lucas write the "A long time ago ..." prologue to Star Wars. So why isn't De Palma considered a Great Director himself?
"It doesn't bother me," he says. "Because I've always been against the establishment from day one. I've never been accepted as that conventional artist. Whatever you say about David Lynch or Martin Scorsese, they are considered major film artists and nobody can argue with that. I've never had that. I've had people say it about me. And I've had people say that I'm a complete hack and you know, derivative and all those catchphrases that people use for me. So I've always been controversial. People hate me or love me."
It seems to be easier, and safer, to hate De Palma than to love him these days. The crisis point came with 1990's The Bonfire of the Vanities, a Hollywood stinker of epic proportions and a textbook example of what happens when a studio tries to make a crowd-pleaser out of a difficult novel, and hires a strong-willed director to do it. De Palma was hardly to blame, but his name was blackened by the movie. "In Hollywood, I might as well have put on my leper suit," he says. Clawing his way back up the ladder hasn't been made any easier by his uncompromising waywardness. Even with the Tom Cruise franchise-starter Mission: Impossible - as plum a rehabilitation project as any ostracised director could wish for - De Palma was incapable of playing it straight. Instead, he took audacious, potentially audience-losing risks, such as having Jon Voight tell one story in voiceover while Tom Cruise imagined a different story in the images. Thrilling stunts were enough to see it through in the end, but the actual plot left audiences and critics scratching their heads. As usual, De Palma was exasperated by their incomprehension.
"I thought that was absurd. I'd be happy to explain it. I mean it's the Knock List, everybody's trying to get the Knock List! It's all there in the movie! But who cares?" he says, and laughs again. "If you want to see CSI, or Law and Order, they're on every night. It all fits in a neat bag, but to me procedural dramas are extremely boring."
Where other directors are praised for expanding the possibilities of film language, De Palma doesn't get away with it as often as he feels he deserves to: "Hitchcock did it all the time! Are you going to build a whole murder plot over the fact that I throw somebody out the window and you're expecting the guy to get vertigo as he goes up the steps? And also he's a detective, but he's not going to look at the body and realise it's not Kim Novak? That's like a hole you can drive a battleship through. But who cared?"
The Black Dahlia will probably do better than De Palma's recent releases, but it's a sad indication of how narrow the concerns of movie-making have become when a director who's still taking risks this late in his career doesn't have the space to do his own thing. Too often, De Palma is too lurid for the art crowd, but too cerebral for the multiplexes. His previous effort, Femme Fatale, for example, was a far better movie than The Black Dahlia. Sure, the acting was pretty ropey, and Rebecca Romijn's lesbian jewel thief was a preposterous character to swallow, but Femme Fatale is a gloriously stylish and snaky thriller deploying many of De Palma's trademarks - a masterful, wordless heist sequence, split screens, swooping crane shots, dizzying hierarchies of surveillance, snatches from other people's movies, and some of the most bewildering plot twists this side of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive - but it didn't even get a UK cinema release.
Looking back, it's clear De Palma is not simply obsessed with serving up glorious images; he's also at pains to point out how untrustworthy they are. Again and again in his movies, even in "failures" such as Mission to Mars and Snake Eyes, people pay the price for taking visual information at face value, for failing to grasp the whole picture. Perhaps they have done the same with the man himself. And perhaps it's a political point he's been making after all.
"I've always had the inverse quote to Godard: film lies 24 times a second," he says. "And anybody that's used to using moving images like a film director, when we see stuff on TV, it's all positioning and public relations, there's not an ounce of truth to any of it. I always look behind the image and say, 'why are we seeing children with flies on their eyes this week?' Those images are always out there. Like the war in Iraq. If you think Americans are ignorant, it's because we're not seeing anything. We're constantly being manipulated by images. They're lying to us all the time. We have no idea what we're doing!" And he laughs his short, desperate laugh again. "I've been screaming about this stuff since the 60s, but it doesn't seem to have had any effect."
'Dahlia,' a postmortem
Brian De Palma probes the crime that shocked a city and the mystery it leaves behind.
Source: Los Angeles Times
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In his neo-noir mystery, "The Black Dahlia," director Brian De Palma brings his camera into a morgue where the remains of the mutilated murder victim, Elizabeth Short, are displayed on an autopsy table. Through the director's lens, we gaze with grim fascination at the grotesqueness of the crime, wondering not only who this woman was and how she met her fate but what twisted mind could carry out such a heinous murder?
In real life, Short's remains were discovered on Jan. 15, 1947, by a passerby pushing a stroller past a vacant lot near 39th Street and Norton Avenue in Leimert Park, touching off a mystery that endures to this day.
The 22-year-old Short, nicknamed the Black Dahlia for her ratted raven hair and a penchant for black clothes, had been bound and tortured, her body severed at the waist, then drained of its blood and washed clean. Her blue eyes were open with her hands above her head. Several of her internal organs were missing. There were gashes at the corners of her mouth leaving her with a maniacal, clown-like grin.
The body depicted in the film was reproduced from the crime scene photos and are only fleetingly viewed on-screen.
"But once you see it, you'll never forget it," De Palma said. "If you are going to show the body and the way it was displayed and the horror of it, it has to be absolutely accurate .... The most compelling thing about the 'Black Dahlia' are the pictures. Once you see those pictures, you never forget [her]. When you see a girl so beautiful and she winds up like this, you say, 'My God, what happened?' "
There are few directors as adept at stylized scenes of voyeuristic violence as De Palma. Some of his films — "Sisters," "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill," "Scarface" and "Body Double" — are drenched in blood. Do his films reflect a fascination with death?
"I don't know if it's a fascination," he replies. "My father was an orthopedic surgeon. I sort of grew up with death from an early age. I remember going to surgery classes where they would be working on cadavers. I saw dead bodies on tables when I was in my teens."
For his source material on "The Black Dahlia," which Universal Pictures will release Friday and which stars Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank, De Palma used James Ellroy's crime novel of the same title, which creates its own fictional scenario behind Short's unsolved murder.
Ellroy noted that there have been numerous theories about who killed Short proffered by authors of nonfiction books over the years, but while some theories seem more credible than others, "none of them are provable."
"It's a signature murder case," Ellroy said, one that causes people of that era to remember where they were when they heard about it. "It was a hideous example of a sex murder."
Ellroy met with De Palma to discuss the book but said he did not have a direct role in shaping the film, in which Mia Kirshner is cast in the title role. He called De Palma the right choice to make this movie, noting the director has "great visual sense and period sense." De Palma, in turn, credits the author with making his job easier.
"There are so many theories about the 'Black Dahlia.' I thought that Ellroy's was one of the best, especially because of the fascinating way he tells stories. It's so complex — something you don't see on the screen too often. You really have to bore into it. This is not an episode of 'CSI.' This is really dense, with a captivating mystery."
The movie's plot revolves around Hartnett's character, police officer Bucky Bleichert, who, like his partner, is a prizefighter in his spare time. Both are in love with Kay Lake (Johansson), the former girlfriend of an imprisoned robber. Bucky also has a steamy affair with Madeleine Linscott (Swank), who may have had a lesbian encounter with Short.
"Josh's character is in a universe where there is no morality, basically," De Palma explains. "He's the only one who seems to have some sort of conscience. He doesn't want to sleep with his partner's girlfriend. He feels his partner saved his life, which, of course, he didn't."
Johansson's character, he said, is a woman with a hidden past who is scared that her former boyfriend is about to get out of prison, though we don't know exactly why she's afraid. "Hilary's character is completely crazy in a kind of endearing yet vulnerable way," he said. She admits to sleeping with Short because she wanted to sleep with somebody who kind of looked like her.
Kirshner, who had auditioned for the part of Madeleine, was vacationing in Cambodia when she got a call from the director asking if she was interested in the role of Short. "At the time, there was nothing about Elizabeth in the script. I said to Brian, 'I don't think I'm the right girl for that. It's not my thing.' " So De Palma went back to the original draft, which gave Short's character a fuller role.
Kirshner read many books and articles to research Short — "everything from reportedly the way she spoke to the way she dressed. There was a very negative portrayal of her," Kirshner said, noting that Short's sexual history had become sensationalized because of the murder. "I felt it was much more important to humanize the person. At the end of the day, she really did deserve that."
De Palma talks wistfully of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Hollywood was churning out great noir movies where "everybody is rotten, everybody gets killed. It's fascinating. What happened to this genre? I've never seen so many movies made where nobody is likable but they are still fun and interesting."
Though the film now has the marketing muscle of Universal behind it, De Palma said he spent three "unnerving" years on the "Black Dahlia" project. "It would get started and then fall apart, get started and then fall apart," he recalls. "It was a relatively inexpensive independently financed movie, but you don't have the security of a studio behind it." Much of the film was shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, to cut expenses.
To give the film the look and feel of 1940s Los Angeles, De Palma relied on veteran production designer Dante Ferretti ("The Aviator," "Cold Mountain"). Ferretti re-created a portion of downtown L.A. for scenes depicting the infamous Zoot Suit Riots.
Art Linson, one of the film's producers, noted that the vacant field where Short's body is found was actually shot outside Sofia using vintage police photos as a guide, while scenes of the old Hollywoodland sign were rendered by CGI, also using historic photographs as a resource. "In some ways, it feels more authentic than if it were shot here," Linson said.
De Palma said the violence in "The Black Dahlia" is not as visceral as it was in "Dressed to Kill" and certainly there is a visceral crescendo that builds in "Carrie" from the moment the bucket of blood is dumped on Sissy Spacek. "To me, it's like pure cinema," he said of the bucket of blood scene, still one of cinema's most memorable. "Telling a story with pure pictures."
A contemporary of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, De Palma has seen remarkable changes in Hollywood since the '70s and the rise of the auteur director.
"It's so tough out there now," he said. "Those movies we made in the 1970s, I don't know if we could ever get them made now. They were crazy. There was that era of director as superstar, a flash of light between the demise of the studio system and the rise of the [talent] agencies. About a decade and then it was sort of over."
De Palma said the movie business today is not unlike the toy business. "You've got to make these mechanical toys that keep the industry going." He is critical of a certain type of studio executive. "Everything now depends on polling, screenings, testing this and testing that.... We're in an era where people who are sort of making movies were never in the movie business. They think, 'We're going to reinvent it.' But the only experience they have is television."
He is working on a prequel to "The Untouchables," addressing the rise of Al Capone and the relationship to Sean Connery's cop character in the original film. De Palma said what he likes most about moviemaking is the planning stages of a film. "In the beginning, everything is possible," he said. "Then it's a process of keeping the elements you need."
As for "The Black Dahlia," he says: "I just made the best movie I could out of the book. It certainly is interesting."
i had pretty much assumed this was going to be awful, and with those expectations i found myself very pleasantly surprised. its not a great film, and in no way can compare to LA Confidential, but it wasnt a disaster either. i'm not a huge fan of Josh Hartnett, especially in a leading role like this and had thought that the idea of he and Scarlett Johannson in this film would seem to much like kids playing dress-up. i kept waiting for the parts that would surely make me wince, but they never really came. the film kept me interested, maybe only because i was waiting for it to fly off the rails. it was a very classic noir, not a neo-noir, not a hip modern twist, just a detective story he could've made 30 years ago right after Chinatown. to me, contrary to godardian, i felt this was a more restrained Untouchables DePalma as opposed to the unhinged version who made Femme Fatale. but due to its critical lashing i feel like in a few years when people watch this they'll wonder why it was received so harshly.
I agree. The two main criticisms of this film have been along the lines of "it's a mess" and "its an empty mess".
[small-spoilers]
I expect a good detective story with any complexity to be a mess the first time I see it. I was thinking about how deftly the third act revelations were handled by the first of this years noirs - Brick - particularly by a first time director. There I just managed to keep my head above water but The Black Dahlia's final explanations and twists came down on me like tidle wave of bricks (edit: that is totaly unintended). I knew I'd fallen too far behind when I felt like hitting myself for not recognising the matching film sets, or rather; just not putting the two together.
I really want to see how it all feels wth a bit of a head start.
I'm a huge Hartnet Fan, Depalma's a hit and miss with me and I also came into this film thinking it was going to be a piece of shit but it really was alright. The camera work was perfectly constructed and stood out in a good way.
my friend works at the movie theater. she's gonna get me in for free. that's good, b/c i kind of need to see this again as i have no fucking clue what it was about and i'm not entirely sure if i liked it. i don't think i did. there were girls talking behind me throughout the whole thing, i had to turn around and tell them to shut up three times. i mean, non-stop talking. they didn't even take breaks to breathe. just would not shut up. that may have been a factor in me not knowing what the fuck was going on. i was too busy stewing in my own anger to pay attention.
but all in all, i felt that when it was resolved, it was resolved too quickly and too easily and it was really hokey. i don't know if it was because the movie didn't really care about the resolution of the plot and the film was an excuse to tie all these people together and have their worlds scrambled up, or if the movie was really self-aware and wanted to tie everything up quickly and efficiently like classic noir movies (of which i'm not too familiar). i never knew if the movie was trying to make a noir, a noir homage, or a noir parody. was that the point? i just didn't get "why?" casting josh hartnett and scarlett johannson was stupid. i don't like them. they just look pretty. scarlett just can't act and that's all, i'm sticking to it, i don't give a fuck what you say. she looked so young, which i feel detracted from the fairly mature character she was playing. he looked too skinny and not tough enough to be a boxer, but whatever, i just tried to stretch my imagination and went along with it. i did kind of like the relationships between all the characters. everything seemed very meticulous, but ultimately cold. FOR EXAMPLE: josh hartnett and aaron exckhart are both supposed to be obsessed with the black dahlia, but there's really never any effort taken to show this. a couple of shots of eckhart freaking out and SLIGHTLY overacting and narration saying shit like, "he was obsessed with her." i just didn't buy it. it was well plotted, but poorly displayed. this is why i want to see it again. maybe there's a heart in there that i'm missing because of the dense plot. obviously, the set design and cinematography were beautiful, but that was expected.
SPOILERS
i nearly died laughing when kd lang showed up out of nowhere at the lesbian bar. it was like the scene in body double where he's walking through the nightclub and "relax" is playing. you all remember, i'm sure.
that one scene where aaron eckhart gets murdered was pure depalma, but i didn't think it belonged in this movie. the rest of the movie is so restrained, that part felt so out of place. i wanted the rest of the movie to be like that, but it wasn't. all these little stylistic touches served to do was make the whole thing seem kind of uneven. plus, it was pretty easy to figure out who the shadowy figure in the dark was.
END SPOILERS
i never really connected with anything that was going on in the movie. i don't ever remember being bored, but i definitely got lost many times and when i found my way back, it wasn't nearly as rewarding as i'd hoped it would be. whatever, we'll see what i think if i ever get that second viewing.
oh, and i loved that the chick that played the black dahlia was that terrorist chick who was involved in two plots to kill president david palmer and who helped out marwan in his little plot to destroy america. fuckin' bitch.
EDIT: here's an interview with james ellroy. this guy's insane. i guess i was wrong about josh hartnett's casting. 'tever.
The Sex Appeal of Big-Ass Dogs
A Conversation with James Ellroy
BY BRADLEY STEINBACHER
The following is a fairly unfocused, and occasionally strange, conversation with James Ellroy, author of The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, and American Tabloid, among other novels. As an interviewee, Ellroy is intimidating and likes to control the conversation. He also likes to throw his interviewers curve balls.
The Black Dahlia took almost 10 years to get to the screen—
Twenty.
Twenty?
Optioned, 1986. Released movie, 2006. Twenty years.
How involved were you in the process during that time?
Not at all. I was given option money in 1986. Money is the gift that no one ever returns. The movie optioned to the finished release of the motion picture is what the first kiss is. To the 50th monogamous anniversary, I never expected it to be made. I was pleasantly surprised when it was.
Do you worry about the process of turning your books into films?
No. They give you money for nothing. They probably won't make it into a movie, you know? Twenty years later they make it and the book's walking out of bookstores. You know I'm happy.
So you weren't at all protective of The Black Dahlia because of what it meant to your career?
No. I don't hold the patent on the Black Dahlia murder case, and I don't hold the patent on murdered women, or murdered mothers.
After you wrote My Dark Places, did you feel like you put the Black Dahlia to rest, or was it something that was still with you?
There are some stories that won't let you go. That stated, I should say that this motion-picture tour, the book tour, and personal appearances mark the end of my public discourse on both my mother's murder case and the Black Dahlia. After this November I will never answer a personal question, or questions pertaining to the Black Dahlia, Betty Short, the various theories pertaining to who killed the Black Dahlia, or my mother's murder ever again. 86,000 questions, 8,200 interviews... life goes on.
Is it strange for you to be revisiting all this?
No, it won't let me go. I've decided this is my last gasp. I recently watched a boxing match on TV where one guy ran out of steam and his opponent, the man who won the fight, kept saying, "He shot his load! He shot his load! Motherfucker shot his load!" You know? As far as the Black Dahlia goes, I shot my load—or will have in November.
In many ways Brian De Palma seems like an ideal choice as director of The Black Dahlia.
Yeah, he's a sexual-obsession guy. He's fucked-up about women like me. I'm really fucked-up about women. But you know what? I dig it. Are you fucked-up about women?
Pretty much, yeah.
It's a blast. Scared, tormented. You want mom, you want a hooker. One of the things I've come to realize is you've got to get a woman with a dog. I got divorced recently, and I had a deep, dark, obsessive thing with a woman in San Francisco. But I want the new woman, whoever she is, to have a dog.
Any type of dog in particular?
A big-ass, good-looking dog. Like an Akita or a pit bull, so when the woman's out of the bed you can curl up with the dog, talk to the dog about the woman.
Not one of those tiny dogs people carry around?
No. I want a pit. A pit that uses some nigger voice. Says, "Hey Ellroy, let's get some bitches." A big dog.
The casting in the movie was inspired. At first I thought Josh Hartnett wouldn't be right for it.
Did he surprise you?
He totally surprised me.
Here's the thing about Hartnett that's interesting: It's the only time that the character they cast physically resembled the character that I wrote. The Bucky Bleichert character is modeled physically on me: tall, pale, lanky, dark-haired guy with fucked up teeth from boxing. And that's Hartnett, that's just a coincidence. But what Hartnett nails is that Bucky is always thinking. It's a still performance, and I like that.
Aaron Eckhart seemed perfect as well.
He's this shorter—rather than taller—stockier, blond-haired, kind of exaggeratedly masculine, lantern-jawed motherfucker. There was some good-looking period shit going on.
[At this point, Ellroy asks a question of his own.] So here's the deal, man. You've got one month at a Four Seasons resort in Fiji. One month. Comped. Waiting for you at the pad is Scarlett [Johansson], Hilary [Swank], or Mia Kirshner...
That's a tough one. I'd have to go with Hilary. There's something about her... going back to being fucked-up about women, there's something terrifying about her.
Yeah, she's a Scientologist, too.
Really? It's like a virus.
Yeah, it is. You know what my ex-wife said? She said, "You've got to go to the Venice Film Festival and fuck Mia Kirshner, because it's as close as you're going to get to fucking the Black Dahlia, and by extension your mom." [Laughs] Spoken like an ex-wife.
Was she already your ex-wife at the time?
Yeah, we got divorced a couple months ago.
You wrote the forward to [former LAPD Detective] Steve Hodel's Black Dahlia Avenger.
Steve Hodel's book is the best theory ever, but it's all unprovable. It's all unprovable. And Hodel's fantastical extrapolations, like his dad's henchmen killing my mother, it's all horseshit. He's a very decent, highly sensitive, and imaginative guy, and if your dad had porked your little sister in a big swank-o pad in Hollywood you'd be fucked-up as well. But [his] old man really was a suspect, which is why his book has some credibility.
It seems fitting that his theory of who killed the Black Dahlia is so flawed yet still believable.
Absolutely right. Good for you. Here's the thing about this: Hodel proceeds from the incorrect assumption that the photographs [he uses as evidence in the book] are of Elizabeth Short. They have been photographically analyzed and they're not Elizabeth Short—you can tell by looking at them that it ain't her. He writes a book, posits a preposterous, hypothetical case against his old man. Then, a year after hardcover pub, in that lag period between hardcover and softcover pub, Steve Lopez, an independent guy from the L.A. Times, turns up a DA's bureau file and the old man was the main suspect in late '49, early 1950. He actually admitted to the crime on a bugging transcript. Was it a sincere admission? Who knows? It's all unprovable.
Quote from: bonanzataz on September 18, 2006, 07:05:40 PM
EDIT: here's an interview with james ellroy. this guy's insane. i guess i was wrong about josh hartnett's casting. 'tever.
The Sex Appeal of Big-Ass Dogs
A Conversation with James Ellroy
BY BRADLEY STEINBACHER
ellroy may be insane (and hilarious), but bradley steinbacher proves to be the bigger nutcase in the following passage:
Quote from: bonanzataz on September 18, 2006, 07:05:40 PM
[At this point, Ellroy asks a question of his own.] So here's the deal, man. You've got one month at a Four Seasons resort in Fiji. One month. Comped. Waiting for you at the pad is Scarlett [Johansson], Hilary [Swank], or Mia Kirshner...
That's a tough one. I'd have to go with Hilary. There's something about her... going back to being fucked-up about women, there's something terrifying about her.
that's just plain disturbing.
yeah he also said "nigger voice."
Quote from: pete on September 19, 2006, 03:48:44 AM
yeah he also said "nigger voice."
that was the best part. tho he stole it from Little Nicky.
I feel like I have to fight them for Mia Kirshner's honor now.
I'm on exactly the same page as Modage on this one. I thought it was going to be an all-over-the-map mess, based on the reviews, but it held together pretty well and even the rather pat solution to the mystery worked pretty well. The only thing that bothered me about it was that it wasn't really about The Black Dahlia (which is a really fascinating true story) - but as long as I didn't think about it in the context of the real murder, I thought it was a fine old fashioned noir. The script barely scraped by at times, but DePalma's handling of it was pretty awesome.
I thought it was so-so at best. It had it's moments, like an awesome crane shot which goes over a building, discovers elizabeth shorts body and the leads to a shootout, Josh Hartnett has a pretty cool voice for a voiceover and I thought Scarlett Johannsen did pretty well. She didn't have much to say but she sure as hell looked good doing it, And Aaron Eckhart is reliably good.
Now the faults; This has got to be one of the worst screenplays of the year. The characters end up being charactures of themselves. The dialogue is so cliche to the point that it's laughable. The story gets so muddled, new stuff is getting introduced when it should be getting wrapped up. The pacing is tediuos, first it starts slow, then it goes fast, then it goes really s l o w. Then it ends REALLY fast. DePalma, as awesome as he is, adds alot of style, some good, mostly bad. It just seemed to be thrown here or there, and of course theres the mandatory Hitchcock reference. Josh Hartnett was not good... at all, except for his voice he didn't much of anything. The guy can't perform an emotional scene to save his life and his face never seems to move, he can smile and he can poubt(spl?)...that's about it. Hilary Swank, I thought, looked really old and for that matter she didn't really look like Mia Kirshner. There is one definate razzie performance, and that is whoever played Hilary swank's mother. What the hell was she doing? She acted like she just knocked back a bottle of gin, got really stoned, then had a whole box of pep pills and then tried to act crazy.
The difference between this and L.A. Confidential is that this film has lots and lots of energy and I felt that L.A.C. was pretty ordinary, even so to the point that I felt it was kinda boring, and was nothing too special. Don't get me wrong The Black Dahlia dosen't even compare in terms of being as good a film (mainly because L.A.C. a WAY better story), but for MY tastes, I would much rather enjoyed De Palma's Confidential and Hanson's Dahlia, then the other way around.
The film sure did look good, and I guess I'll credit that to De Palma, but the story is so...insanely dumb that now I want to read the book for the sole purpose to see if it that's how it was really written.
Quote from: Ghostboy on September 23, 2006, 01:18:54 AMThe only thing that bothered me about it was that it wasn't really about The Black Dahlia (which is a really fascinating true story)
And the story I wanted to see. What a huge disappointment. The Black Dahlia case is one of the biggest never solved murders and this film was more interested in a love triangle. I never read Ellroy's book, so I guessing this is a faithful adaptaion, but I wanted more investigation of the case. There's a brilliant scene of Harnett's character watching Elizabeth Short's screen test, and in those brief moments we become mezmerized by her and want to know more about who this woman/victim is. That's where the mystery should have been focused.
And I'm with taz about Scarlett. As with Match Point, she is wrong for these parts that are more mature for her age and acting ability.
As a major Ellroy fan, the film is a dissapointment. De Palma gives yet another tour de force of style without anything else to offer. The novel is misread as a noir melodrama. It is actually quite funny with great sarcastic characterizations. Hartnett, very miscast, gives the protagonist Bucky a sad gloom I never felt was in the novel. If the film would have kept his portrait as comic the characterization would have been much deeper. As it stands in the film, it is just another noir job and had to be dusted off because it is so old.
The film also tidies up the novel with easy murders that lead to some unbelievable endings. Ellroy did write a romantic crime tale, but his ending wasn't this fucking stiff. Also the plot was confusing because De Palma was interested more in atmosphere and look and didn't have a story that kept close enough to the details. Having read the book recently, I felt bad I was even getting lost.
This should have been an easier adaptation. The Black Dahlia was Ellroy's first success and one of his last easy stories. The novel is pretty straightforward with little confusion. L.A. Confidential was a much denser and complex book but had a better adaptation. The main reason is that the filmmakers got the tone right and stuck closer to the facts of the novel. De Palma treats this adaptation as a way to make the Hitchcock thriller into a personal epic. It doesn't mesh at all.
With White Jazz in the pipeline for release, I'm nervous about future adaptations. That novel barely has a plot and is more stream of consciousness. Ellroy didn't take long to add depths on all levels to his novels to make them harder to fit into the confines of the big screen. I think Carnahan will do better with White Jazz than De Palma was able to with The Black Dahlia. While Smokin' Aces was mostly shit, it was decent filmmaking to keep a story crisp and always flowing. It's just that the original story was genre bullshit. White Jazz should give him the grounds to make a wholly good and energetic film that blisters at the intensity that Ellroy writes to.
And with those who wanted a better focus on The Black Dahlia murder case; fuck that. The murder is still unsolved so any film that fictionalizes the murder will come up with a theory that simplifies reality and is likely not to be much better than any other Hollywood scenario. This film does have a fictional idea of what happened, but thankfully does not base our interest in the lead up to that revelation. It's because no fictional revelation could outdue what a TV documentary could do in interest and accuracy for the murder. The Black Dahlia tries to create a convincing portrait of the way detectives find obsessions in victims and chase their killers to no end. It shows the love they have for victims they feel no one else can understand. It perfectly explains why many Homicide detectives romanticize the film, Laura, so much. The Black Dahlia is better to be criticized on the basis of how well it paints a portrait of the obsessions that detectives get when investigating murders.