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Ellroy says his interest in movies "doesn't reach beyond their depiction of crime. I love a lot of the classic film noir shit, from '46 to '59. But I can't sit through comedies or westerns or outer space flicks; if you want to put me to sleep forever just set me down in front of a John Ford movie. My books are not written to be films; a lot of their strength as novels comes from their dense structure and their complexity, the internal access I give to the characters; there are interior monologues in all the books."
Hanson's entering the project piqued his curiosity: "In the two films of his that I had seen then, Bad Influence and The Bedroom Window, I found him a competent and interesting storyteller. He's not some bullshit auteur.
"I figured that if he wanted to talk to me he'd find me. He did find me, but he found me when there was a reasonable chance of it getting made. That made me feel I was dealing with a mature man right away. I told him it was my book, but it was his movie, and even if his movie fucked up my book beyond redemption it would sell books of mine. And even if it was a piece of shit, I wouldn't be quoted on that for attribution when the film came out."
The Curtis Hanson Film Festival
Over dinner at James Beach in Venice, I tell Hanson that almost all his movies take tropes we love from Hollywood classics and put new twists on them. He replies, "You do carry around those images that made strong impressions on you as a kid, of that crazy world that adults live in, or seem to, and a lot of it comes from movies. You wonder how much those fantasies that you construct with the help of images from movies and stories will connect with reality. That's where Bud is in L.A. Confidential when Lynn walks into the liquor store in that hooded cape. He sees a nocturnal purity in her, and his image of her doesn't change when he finds out she's a hooker."
Hanson retains the Film Generation's erudite infatuation with the medium. Unlike the rambling omnivores of the video-store generation, he doesn't separate movie art from the rest of storytelling, and his tastes are particular and refined. He never enrolled in college or film school, but began writing on film for Cal State L.A.'s campus paper. He also worked as an unpaid gofer for one of Uncle Jack's least-lucrative enterprises, a swank-looking movie magazine called Cinema. Eventually he became its editor.
Cinema clinched his ambition to tell stories through pictures. During his years on the magazine he befriended a number of filmmakers he revered, including masculine genre specialists Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry) and Sam Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor). He's particularly close to Fuller; he's been a frequent attendee and speaker at the American Cinematheque's Fuller retrospective in L.A.
From the late '60s on, Hanson amassed an eclectic body of experiences. His photos of an unknown actress named Faye Dunaway helped producer/star Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn cast her in Bonnie and Clyde. In 1970 he co-wrote a low-budget version of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and wrote and directed a small-scale psycho-killer film called The Arousers. He did patch jobs for Roger Corman while angling to direct A movies. In his years of struggle, he did score a couple of bull's-eyes, including his cunning script for the Elliott Gould-Christopher Plummer thriller The Silent Partner and his deft direction of the Tijuana fable Losin' It. But few Americans saw The Silent Partner, and Losin' It typecast him as a director of teen-oriented movies (including the TV film The Children of Times Square).
To get on the adult track he wrote a deft Hitchcockian pastiche, The Bedroom Window -- and writer/director Robert Towne, an acquaintance from his days on his Uncle Jack's tennis courts, godfathered it into production with Hanson at the helm. More directing jobs followed: on Bad Influence and the evil-nanny shocker The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (a commercial smash) and the rousing white-water adventure The River Wild (with Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon).
Hanson fulfilled a film buff's dream when he suggested Sam Fuller for the director's slot on an adaptation of Romain Gary's anti-racist parable White Dog. The premise of a dog raised to kill black people proved too hot for Paramount to handle in the early '80s (the film premiered on cable). But Hanson was thrilled to co-write the script with Fuller. Hanson says, "When we were working on the character of a young screenwriter, Sam said to me, 'It's you! He's a screenwriter with a hard-on to direct, just like you are!' I said, 'I don't talk that way.' Sammy said, 'You would if you could!' There's a line in the picture, 'That dog is a four-legged time bomb.' It's newspaper talk of the '20s; nobody but Sammy talks that way."
To Hanson, Sid Hudgens of Hush-Hush, the scandal-sheet editor in L.A. Confidential played with grungy elan by Danny DeVito, is a bit like Fuller, "that enthusiastic, roll-up-your-sleeve reporter in search of a story. He's the one who sets the tone in terms of the Ellroy lingo. We expect the words to come out of his mouth as you picture them on a page in large type."
To capture the L.A. he needed for the movie, Hanson screened his favorite '50s films to his Confidential collaborators both for points and counterpoints. He used Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful to epitomize the glamorized Hollywood they were hoping to avoid, except in the depiction of Lynn Bracken. He showed Nicholas Ray's volatile Bogart film about a pent-up screenwriter, In a Lonely Place, to evoke the emotional wasteland behind the glamour. Siegel's The Line-Up served to highlight "the faces of men who'd been through World War II and drank and smoked and never worked out." And with Robert Aldrich's rock 'em, sock 'em piece of pre-postmodernism Kiss Me Deadly Hanson proved how cutting-edge and anti-nostalgic '50s pop culture could be.
