Page 5 of 5
He and cinematographer Dante Spinotti knew they would shoot wide-screen, so they studied two exemplars of expressive CinemaScope -- Douglas Sirk's adaptation of William Faulkner's Pylon, Tarnished Angels, and Minnelli's adaptation of James Jones' small-town saga Some Came Running. Spinotti also screened each of Hanson's own features, deciding that their signal characteristic was the director's fix on his characters' points of view. "I like strong point of view in movies," admits Hanson. "That's part of their visual attraction; suspense in particular works well when you get the audience involved in a single point of view. The challenge of L.A. Confidential was to use multiple points of view to get the audience invested in several characters instead of one. Bud White, Ed Exley, Jack Vincennes -- each is a leading man in his own story. Then the stories come together."
Kansas City Confidential (II)
Ellroy saw the movie at a "blue-collar" test screening in Tacoma, Wash. He and his wife, former L.A. Weekly critic Helen Knode, flew out for it. Ellroy was delighted. "I understood in 40 minutes or so that it is a work of art on its own level. It was amazing to see the physical incarnation of the characters -- I had spent time with Pearce and Crowe in Australia when on a book tour. I knew what they looked like, knew their original Australian accents.
"I was startled by the film more than anything else, and happily relinquished myself to it. Then as I saw it on subsequent viewings I got more of a sense of the depth and design of the work. For example, Basinger is noticeably older than Crowe, and it adds a maternal air to their scenes; here is a man who witnessed the brutal murder of his mother and at the end he's grievously wounded and being nurtured by a mature woman. A young kid could not have made this film, only a seasoned artist could have."
Ellroy thinks the movie is a time-jump to an age when "people looked different and were coiffed different, and buildings weren't so big; when people weren't so self-conscious, and just accepted a lot more things than we do now. It's a trip back to that world, but one that tells you those weren't better times. And frankly, who wouldn't want to visit those times?"
Ellroy cackles to think of his favorite period touch. "When I hear a tabloid headline like 'Ingenue Dykes in Hollywood,' " he says, "I'm still titillated. That's one of the 10 biggest laugh-getters in the movie. I'm sorry they cut another one from the movie: 'Swish Actor Gets Gay Blade.' "
A Hard-Boiled Valediction
Curtis Hanson is philosophic about his newfound heat: "From the advance reaction I feel that we're getting the benefit of a reverse backlash. People are saying that they miss, in most movies, something we worked hard to have in this movie -- an old-fashioned respect for narrative. Writers and directors used to be encouraged to develop their narrative skills; it's no accident that directors like John Huston and Howard Hawks got better as they went along.
"If they came up today there would be nobody to encourage them; now, too many people make their best movies first and shoot their wads. The fact that nobody on a studio level values narrative makes it harder to bounce around from genre to genre. What one envies about the careers of Huston and Hawks is they could do all sorts of movies. I know as a fan of somebody that if they can do a really good job with a western there's no reason they can't do a really good job with a Raymond Chandler story or an adult relationship picture. But that's because I value and recognize storytelling. If you don't, the tendency is to go, 'Well, they did a good comedy ... they can only do a good comedy.' "
Since they first teamed up, Hanson's co-writer, Brian Helgeland, has also become hot. He wrote the original script of the summer's underrated suspense romance, Conspiracy Theory, and rewrote Kevin Costner's dry-land post-apocalypse, The Postman. He's now preparing his directorial debut -- Parker, a variation on Point Blank set to star Mel Gibson. He already misses his anonymity: "I mean, the new Stanley Kubrick movie goes out with huge expectations; everyone's been following it. But when Curtis and I began work on L.A. Confidential, we weren't top writers or directors in this town. With this film, we didn't say we were going to make a great movie, but we thought we had the raw material to make a great movie. And we got to do it without being under the spotlight." For the moment, he's laughing at the image the two must now project to the industry: "Hanson and Helgeland -- who knew?"
L.A. Confidential opens Sept. 19.
