This was an instance where I unashamedly admit to seeing the film before reading the book. It was also the start of me delving back into crime fiction with a stronger passion than ever before; sure I’d read and enjoyed some of the classics, but I was too young to really soak in what was happening. L.A. Confidential arrived just at the right time. The film pulled back the curtain; the book ripped the curtain off the rail.
I was always going to end up in that place, I can see looking back. At a high school writing project in English, I chose to write a private detective story at thirteen. Some gumpf involving missing Incan gold and a man in a long coat. I was writing the clichés, knowing that they had some resonance with me, but not yet any real meaning. Also, as I’ve written before, the comics I’d been drawn to in the previous decade were the noir-inspired ones, the etchings of David Mazzucheli and even the impressionism of Norm Breyfogle.
As any pulp fan will tell you, most of the things I love ultimately came from the same source. Comic Books, Hardboiled fiction and Film Noir all have the pulps as a grandparent
I’d already been watching black and white crime films while bunking off school, and gone on a massive binge of German Expressionism that probably owed more to Tim Burton than I’d like to admit. But as a writer I was usually writing horror stories, and as a reader it was more often than not fantasy or sci fi. Then 1997 happened, and this film happened. In fact, it wasn’t just this film, as I recall. JACKIE BROWN was in the same year, with all its Elmore Leonard goodness.
Wow, what a year that was.
Things made more sense, there was a worldview that I could really understand and that matched the comics and music I was listening to.
In the blink of an eye I was ditching German films about cabinets for British films about having nil by Ray Winstone’s mouth, I was ditching BLADE RUNNER in favour of the films it was cribbing from, and my bookshelves saw a revolution. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK has forever stayed at number one in my list, but it has faced stiff competition from CHINATOWN.
How is the film as an adaptation?
It’s both the best example you can find and lousy. It’s gold dust.
The book is epic. So epic it’ll need a separate blog at some point. It has serial killers, a conspiracy involving a thinly disguised Walt Disney, it has drug addicts and alcoholics. It covers, if I recall correctly, about six years. And the ending, oh boy, that ending messed me up good.
The film is lean by comparison. The plot takes place over a few months, almost all of the books sub plots are gone, and the characters are pared down to angry, bristling impressions of the originals. Dozens of characters are missing, back-stories have been changed or ignored, and, with the addition of a motel shoot out and a touch of glory, you could almost say the entire point of the book has been lost. Ellroy himself, when discussing the addition of the high-noon style shoot out, once said “It was madness. But it was inspired madness..” And he should know.
It’s an absolute genius adaptation. It highlights the difference in language between book and film. I often complain about adaptations, and people think I’m being dumb. They tell me that a film has to be different to the book, and yes, it does. But this is the standard that I’m holding them too. You can adapt a book, make changes, and still get it.
The ‘hero’ was a self-serving political animal. The only honest guy in the film was a woman-beating thug, and even the happy ending was about three stages past fucked up.
It was period without ever feeling old. The director or set designer deserve an Oscar just for that. Too many people think that telling a story set in the past means you need to make things look quaint or old, when quite the opposite, you need to make the old setting look contemporary. You need to feel like you’re in the period, when all of the set dressings and clothes would look modern.
The dialogue crackles along, a mix of Ellroy originals and new touches bought in by Brian Helgeland (who previously appeared on this blog when I looked at PAYBACK.)
The film understands the book; it shares its dark beating heart, and gives us a condensed version. The first and final scenes are pretty much identical from book to film, but the route there is changed. And that’s a good thing; Ellroy is not really meant for the masses. And there are nice touches along the way. Jack Vincennes pivotal scene in the film is when he looks himself in the mirror in a bar, and leaves his dirty money on top of an untouched drink.
If you add to that the knowledge that Jack was an alcoholic in the book, the scene gets extra depth. His fate is wildly different in the film, but it makes the same point as the book in a much simpler way.
Ultimately, the film is a much brighter and nicer version of the story. Its ending is much less ambiguous, it’s characters much more likeable. It is the cleaned up Hollywood version. The things we usually hate, the added action, the changed ending, the missing subplots. But, somewhere along the line, everyone making the film understood the book they were adapting and the story they were telling. They just got it. And it was stunning.
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