Let me say this right up front: I totally acknowledge that an item about The Black Dahlia is by no means a tailored fit for a New York film blog like The Reeler. Sure, director Brian De Palma was local, like, 40 years ago, and co-stars Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson did just buy a soundproof fuckpad here in town. Besides that, The Black Dahlia is the roiling Los Angeles nightmare to end all Los Angeles nightmares, and the classic source novel’s author James Ellroy is the unparalleled bard of L.A.’s ugliest (and, occasionally, best-kept) secrets. Based in part on the unsolved case surrounding the torture, gutting and murder of wanna-be starlet Elizabeth Short in 1947 and Ellroy’s obsession with the mysterious murder of his own mother, Geneva Hilliker, in 1958, The Black Dahlia symbolizes the extra-dimensional psychosis bracketing L.A.’s sun, sprawl and smog–death effacing beauty. Promises unkept, and violently so.

Josh, Josh, Josh–what are you doing here? (L-R) Eckhart and Hartnett in The Black Dahlia. (Photo: Universal Pictures)
At least that is the lesson I have always taken from Ellroy’s work (Dahlia in particular), which may or may not be his intent but is nevertheless the only recognizable DNA strand left in The Black Dahlia’s screen adaptation, which opens today. For his part, De Palma has created an atrocity for the ages, diluting decades of mortal imagination into period sets that squint in sepia tone and sitcom lighting, accommodating its cast as comfortably as the 405 would welcome a bicycle rider. Everyone and everything here is outclassed by the Dahlia myth and by Ellroy, its principal orchestrator: Hartnett flounders as young detective Bucky Bleichert, wedged into a relationship with partner Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and his live-in lover Kay Lake (Johansson) until the Short murder consumes them. Femme fatale Hilary Swank’s dulcet death coo provokes more laughter than seduction or fear. Screenwriter Josh Friedman would be sent to prison for doing to a man what he does here to his source material; with his fractured narrative and such outlandishly banal characters, he may as well be an armless man adapting Braille.
I could go on about the ratio of De Palma’s fat to Ellroy’s bone, but the hell with it. Let’s hear what Ellroy thinks about Dahlia, L.A., all of it; The Reeler spoke with him during a recent visit to New York, and I figure the less of me and the more of him, the better:
ON JOSH HARTNETT AND THE ANGUISH OF BUCKY BLEICHERT: “You know what it is? I can tell you what it is an instant. It’s unrepentantly twisted male heterosexual angst is what it is. You know? I proposed marriage Saturday night to a woman I’ve never been intimate with–I’ve never kissed her, and I would have married her and been devoted to her for the rest of my life. That’s how fucked up I am. And Bucky has that quality too, because he’s me. What we’re talking about here is we’re talking about a book whose one big emotional theme is the prevalence–however tenuous–of love over sexual obsession. Bucky gets there however tenuously. And it is very tenous. The important thing is that he tried. As I said in the afterword, he emboides a strain of the Hilliker code: You’re fearful but you always go forward.”

ON THE ADAPTATION: “What the movie is a drastic compression and reduction of my story. It is deft nonetheless. It capturs the arc of the three main charcters: Bucky Bleichert, Kay Lake and Lee Blanchard. And it captures the triangulation–Bucky Bleichert in triad with various women, including Elizabeth Short herself. It’s a visual record. That’s what it is–in the end, I have a lovely visual record to savor and one that will bring people to my books and intensify their overall experience with this story.”

ON THE FILMING OF HIS BOOKS: “Here’s the thing, Mr. VanAirsdale. They give you money for nothing and money is the gift that no one ever returns. Money is the gift that no one ever returns. You should know going in that it’s highly unlikely that any optioned book will ever be made into a movie. The option is to the made movie what the first kiss is to the 50th monogamous anniversary. Many called, few chosen. I wasn’t apprehensive. I cashed the check. My feeling from that point on was: ‘Write when you get work.’ I knew somebody was going to call me when the movie was about to shoot, and that’s what happened. I didn’t give it a hell of a lot of thought. I don’t chatter with my various ex-wives about which actors would play which roles. That’s fully the extent of it.”
ON THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHY ON LANGUAGE: “Here’s how I address Los Angeles in my books: I make no wide sweeping generalizations and attribute them to Los Angeles. I’m from Los Angeles. I set my stories in Los Angeles, and implicitly, there’s this: L.A. itself is a deus ex machina, and its very existence explains why everybody comes there: To exist there and to engage in my dramas there. Thus L.A. is a constant character that is never commented on, thus you get the feel about it–you understand that there’s a reason these people are in LA, and that reason itself is L.A.”
ON THE URBAN CINEMA OF LOS ANGELES: “I haven’t thought about it. I think one of the quintessentially heralded L.A. films–Chinatown–is bullshit. It’s a flat-out bad movie–bad drama from the get go: Scenes that go nowhere, a plot full of holes, an unconvincing thesis, a tacked-on ending. I saw it recently again, with my brilliant second ex-wife (Helen Knode), former film critic of L.A. Weekly, heralded best-selling novelist in her own right, and we were astonished by how bad it is. You know what? I don’t think about this shit, actually. I’m from L.A. I just got lucky that my parents hatched me in a cool locale.”
ANYTHING ELSE? “Yeah, there is something else: The Black Dahlia is a dandy movie; it’s a much better book. And books are more important than movies.”
At any rate, between this and Shit Film, I think my L.A. quota is good for the year, don’t you?
(Photo of James Ellroy: Marion Ettinger)

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