James Ellroy

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James Ellroy : biography

March 4, 1948 –

While he has frequently been disappointed by these adaptations (such as Cop), he was very complimentary of Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland’s screenplay for L.A. Confidential at the time of its release. In succeeding years, however, his comments have been more reserved:

L.A. Confidential, the movie, is the best thing that happened to me in my career that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a fluke—and a wonderful one—and it is never going to happen again—a movie of that quality.

Here’s my final comment on L.A. Confidential, the movie: I go to a video store in Prairie Village, Kansas. The youngsters who work there know me as the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential. They tell all the little old ladies who come in there to get their G-rated family flick. They come up to me, they say, “OOOO… you wrote L.A. Confidential…. Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful movie. I saw it four times. You don’t see storytelling like that on the screen anymore.” … I smile, I say, “Yes, it’s a wonderful movie, and a salutary adaptation of my wonderful novel. But listen, Granny: You love the movie. Did you go out and buy the book?” And Granny invariably says, “Well, no, I didn’t.” And I say to Granny, “Then what the fuck good are you to me?

Shortly after viewing three hours of unedited footage for Brian De Palma’s adaptation of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy wrote an essay, "Hillikers," praising De Palma and his film. Ultimately, nearly an hour was removed from the final cut, and the film was a commercial and critical disappointment. Of the released film, Ellroy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Look, you’re not going to get me to say anything negative about the movie, so you might as well give up." He had, however, mocked the film’s director, cast, and production design before it was filmed.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32M2N3zD-Tk

In 2008, Daily Variety reported that HBO, along with Tom Hanks’s production company, Playtone, was developing American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand for either a miniseries or ongoing series.

Ellroy co-wrote the original screenplay for the 2008 film Street Kings but refused to do any publicity for the finished film.

In a 2009 interview, Ellroy himself stated, "All movie adaptations of my books are dead."

Films

  • 1988 Cop
  • 1997 L.A. Confidential
  • 1998 Brown’s Requiem
  • 2002 Stay Clean
  • 2002 Vakvagany
  • 2002 Dark Blue
  • 2003 Das Bus
  • 2005 James Ellroy presents Bazaar Bizarre
  • 2006 The Black Dahlia
  • 2008 Street Kings
  • 2008 Land of the Living
  • 2011 Rampart

Life and career

Ellroy was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Geneva Odelia (née Hilliker) Ellroy, a nurse, and Armand "Lee" Ellroy, an accountant and, according to Ellroy, onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth. After his parents’ divorce, Ellroy and his mother relocated to El Monte, California. In 1958, Ellroy’s mother was murdered. The police never found the perpetrator, and the case remains unsolved. The murder, along with reading The Badge by Jack Webb (a book composed of sensational cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, a birthday gift from his father), were important events of Ellroy’s youth.

Ellroy’s inability to come to terms with the emotions surrounding his mother’s murder led him to transfer them onto another murder victim, Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia"; throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires. His confusion and trauma led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.

Ellroy dropped out of school. He joined the army for a short while. During his teens and twenties, he drank heavily and abused Benzedrex inhalers.Desert Island Discs Interview, BBC Radio 4, 17 January 2010 He was engaged in minor crimes (especially shoplifting, house-breaking, and burglary) and was often homeless. After serving some time in jail and suffering a bout of pneumonia, during which he developed an abscess on his lung "the size of a large man’s fist," Ellroy stopped drinking and began working as a golf caddy while pursuing writing. He later said, "Caddying was good tax-free cash and allowed me to get home by 2 p.m. and write books…. I caddied right up to the sale of my fifth book."

After a second marriage in the mid-1990s to Helen Knode (author of the 2003 novel The Ticket Out), the couple moved from California to Kansas City in 1995. In 2006, after their divorce, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles. He is a self-described hermit who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and claims never to read contemporary books by other authors, aside from Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field, for fear that they might influence his own. However, this does not mean that Ellroy does not read at all, as he claims in My Dark Places to have read at least two books a week growing up, eventually shoplifting more to satisfy his love of reading. He then goes on to say that he read works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler accompanied by abuse of alcohol and Benzedrex inhalers.

Literary career

In 1981, Ellroy published his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, a detective story drawing on his experiences as a caddy. He then published Clandestine and Silent Terror (which was later published under the title Killer on the Road). Ellroy followed these three novels with the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, three novels centered on Hopkins, a police officer.

Television

  • 1992 "Since I Don’t Have You" adapted by Steven A. Katz for Showtime’s Fallen Angels.
  • 2011 James Ellroy’s L.A.: City of Demons for Investigation Discovery.