Author Ellroy reflects on filming of ‘Black Dahlia’

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, September 14, 2006

“The Black Dahlia” is one of the most successful novels by James Ellroy, whose work includes “L.A. Confidential” and the searing memoir “My Dark Places,” which looked back at the murder of his mother in 1958 (a crime that remains unsolved).

Now that “The Black Dahlia” has been filmed, Ellroy came to the area recently to talk about it. He was not involved in the making of the movie, but the real-life 1947 case of the Black Dahlia murder has occupied him for many years. In person, the bullet-headed writer has the intensity of a no-nonsense robbery detective from a 1940s movie, and he began by talking about the long history of “The Black Dahlia” coming to the screen.

James Ellroy: David Fincher (“Fight Club”) was attached to direct it for many years. And he wanted to do the movie at 31/2 hours in black and white, which proved financially and creatively untenable. At some point, Brian De Palma was enlisted – not surprisingly, given his great theme of sexual obsession.

Question: Did you work with Fincher at all?

Ellroy: I did not work with anyone on this.

Question: De Palma never consulted you on a plot point or anything?

Ellroy: It’s not my call. It’s not my call.

Question: All of your books have been optioned for the movies. Are you accustomed to this process, where someone buys the rights to make a film and then years might elapse?

Ellroy: I don’t think about it much. Here’s what happened. Money is the gift that no one ever returns. In 1986, when I was a young writer, I got a nice 25G windfall out of nowhere as the option for “The Black Dahlia.” I never expected it to be made into a movie. I get the money, I let them go away, if they’d like to talk, I’ll meet with them. If not, that’s fine, too.

Question: Is the finished film the way you envisioned it?

Ellroy: There’s two ways to do this movie. There’s this way, at two hours, where you get to the body fairly quickly. Or there’s the larger version, which is to do it as a historical romance. Since I never had the desire to adapt it, since nobody came forth to offer me the opportunity to adapt it, I have absented myself from hypothesizing on it. Overall, I’m satisfied with the results and it’s going to sell me a lot of books. But I don’t commit emotionally to motion pictures. Motion picture dysfunctionalism trumps the creative process most times. It has been said that the movie option is to the finished movie what the first kiss is to the 50th monogamous anniversary.

Question: You must have had some kind of emotional reaction seeing certain images for the first time.

Ellroy: Yeah, I did. And here’s the great boon of this movie. I have a case that I have obsessively claimed as my own, the Black Dahlia murder case, characters and a milieu that only I could have created, and now it has assumed a salutary visual record under De Palma’s eyes. And that’s the great gift of this. A lot of it was filmed in Bulgaria, it doesn’t really look like Los Angeles in 1947, but it looks like someplace we’ve never seen before. An imaginary landscape. In that sense, it’s a dreamscape.

Question: De Palma is known for dealing with violence on screen in interesting ways. Did this – the treatment of the murder victim, for instance – feel right? Did it seem accurate?

Ellroy: It seemed enhanced. It seemed colorized in a wonderful way. The colors were more vivid than I would have thought they would have appeared to have been in real life. What De Palma does is he forces you to look, he arrests you, he restricts your vision, he forces you to see only what he wants you to see, in rather bold colors. … There is an obsessive, languid, beautiful rolling feel to the camera in this. And I appreciated it greatly. I went in expecting nothing visually, and was delighted by this.

Question: You’ve written original screenplays that have gone unproduced.

Ellroy: It’s work that keeps me going and allows me to earn money on my time off from my pure life’s work, which is writing novels. … I do the (screenwriting) job and I get the hell out.

Question: But your professional status is high enough that people in Hollywood will listen to you.

Ellroy: I am a great American novelist. I will always have that. I have six more books that I plan to write. I am a healthy 58. I will not be deterred from doing this. And in the meantime I make a couple of bucks here and there writing movies.