The Black Dahlia

[MacGuffin]

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. 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.

[Pubrick]

i sense a scarlett nip in the works.

[dufresne]

such a great los angeles story.  please don't fuck it up.

[modage]

according to the new EW, The Black Dahlia hits theatres Sept. 15

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

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.

[Chest Rockwell]

Wow that trailer was fantastic. Can't wait till it comes out!

[edison]

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.

[SoNowThen]

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.

[I Don't Believe in Beatles]

Why?  Have they given you any specifics?

[Chest Rockwell]

I don't believe it.

[diggler]

I don't believe it.

i do.

i mean c'mon... mission to mars?

[godardian]

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.

[Bethie]

Look for the The Birds i> references.

The Clams.

[MacGuffin]

'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."

[MacGuffin]

'Dahlia,' a postmortem
Brian De Palma probes the crime that shocked a city and the mystery it leaves behind.
Source: Los Angeles Times



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."