Arkansas Society for Cinema and Television Production (ASCTP)

(a Non-Profit Education Corporation)

contact: Gary William Jones gary@jonesfilmvideo.com

RTV 3303-001 Spring 2010 Class #13

1990-1999

David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4^th Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.

“Hollywood Enters the Digital Domain”

Since the mid-1990s, digital-imaging technology has transformed the making of feature films in the industrialized West, and it will soon transform their distribution and exhibition as well on a global scale….Film is an analog medium: it creates images by recording the light bouncing off of objects in empirical reality onto a photosensitive chemical surface (the emulsion-coated negative stock), focused by a lens. As light is converted into film, the quality of the images varies with the quality of the light, the emulsion, and the lens; and, as in all analog media, this process of transference involves some degradation, or loss of information between the original and the master copy. When the master copy is duplicated further to produce other copies, a process known in film as “print generation,” even more information is lots. In digital image recording, however, light is not converted into another medium, but into a series and binary numbers, an abstraction that has no physical relationship to the original. The result is a digital file that can be used to reconstruct the original image or be manipulated by a computer through mathematical formulas to create a new one…this information can be copies or transferred endlessly, through digital means, without degradation…CGI, the acronym for computer-generated imagery…(pp. 881-82)

LA. Confidential (1997)

Steven Jay Schneider, ed. 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s, 2008, p.867

Set in 1950s Los Angeles, a festering swamp of corrupt cops dallying with freshly minted mobsters and fledgling tabloids, Curtis Hanson’s smart and soulful movie trims James Elllroy’s heavily plotted pulp bestseller to its emotional heart. Hanson’s pacing is exquisite, his casting impish and inspired, as he traces the morally ambiguous alliance between three radically incompatible copes roped together in a multiple-murder investigation.

Dressed in the sumptuous chocolate browns of warm film noir, L.A. Confidential is hot, funny, and sorrowful. Though it teases brash ‘50s optimism with glum ‘30s cynicism and tars both with the brush of the knowing ‘90s, the film is also wildly romantic—perhaps the last great mounting of American film noir’s feverish chase for and destruction of dreams. Dicks and dames collide in a grandiose lament for the loss of true love, moral courage, and, while we’re at it, hope in our civic culture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Confidential_(film)

Critically acclaimed, the film holds a 99% rating at Rotten Tomatoes with 73 out of 74 reviews positive, as well as an aggregated rating of 90% based on 28 reviews on Metacritic. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two, Basinger for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and Hanson and Helgeland for Best Screenplay - Adapted.

Curtis Hanson had read half a dozen of James Ellroy's books before he read L.A. Confidential and was drawn to its characters, not the plot. He said, "What hooked me on them was that, as I met them, one after the other, I didn't like them - but as I continued reading, I started to care about them."[2] Ellroy's novel also made Hanson think about L.A. and provided him with an opportunity to "set a movie at a point in time when the whole dream of Los Angeles, from that apparently golden era of the '20s and '30s, was being bulldozed."[2]

(Ellroy) later said, "They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme...Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny."[2]

Critical reaction

Overall, L.A. Confidential scored very well with critics, presently sporting a rare 99% "Certified Fresh" approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes with 77 out of 78 reviews positive. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and described it as "seductive and beautiful, cynical and twisted, and one of the best films of the year".[13] Later, he included it as one of his "Great Movies" and described it as "film noir, and so it is, but it is more: Unusually for a crime film, it deals with the psychology of the characters ... It contains all the elements of police action, but in a sharply clipped, more economical style; the action exists not for itself but to provide an arena for the personalities".[14] In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Mr. Spacey is at his insinuating best, languid and debonair, in a much more offbeat performance than this film could have drawn from a more conventional star. And the two Australian actors, tightly wound Mr. Pearce and fiery, brawny Mr. Crowe, qualify as revelations".[15] Desson Howe, in his review for the Washington Post, praised the cast: "Pearce makes a wonderful prude who gets progressively tougher and more jaded. New Zealand-born Crowe has a unique and sexy toughness; imagine Mickey Rourke without the attitude. Although she's playing a stock character, Basinger exudes a sort of chaste sultriness. Spacey is always enjoyable".[16]

In his review for the Globe and Mail, Liam Lacey wrote, "The big star is Los Angeles itself. Like Roman Polanski's depiction of Los Angeles in the thirties in Chinatown, the atmosphere and detailed production design are a rich gel where the strands of narrative form".[17] USA Today gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, praising the screenplay: "it appears as if screenwriters Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson have pulled off a miracle in keeping multiple stories straight. Have they ever. Ellroy's novel has four extra layers of plot and three times as many characters ... the writers have trimmed unwieldy muscle, not just fat, and gotten away with it".[18] In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, L.A. Confidential asks the audience to raise its level a bit, too - you actually have to pay attention to follow the double-crossing intricacies of the plot. The reward for your work is dark and dirty fun".[19] Richard Schickel, in his review for Time, wrote, "It's a movie of shadows and half lights, the best approximation of the old black-and-white noir look anyone has yet managed on color stock. But it's no idle exercise in style. The film's look suggests how deep the tradition of police corruption runs".[20]

In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, "Mr. Crowe strikes the deepest registers with the tortured character of Bud White, a part that has had less cut out of it from the book than either Mr. Spacey's or Mr. Pearce's ... but Mr. Crowe at moments reminded me of James Cagney's poignant performance in Charles Vidor's Love Me or Leave Me (1955), and I can think of no higher praise".[21] Kenneth Turan, in his review for Los Angeles Times, wrote, "The only potential audience drawback L.A. Confidential has is its reliance on unsettling bursts of violence, both bloody shootings and intense physical beatings that give the picture a palpable air of menace. Overriding that, finally, is the film's complete command of its material".[22] In his review for The Independent, Ryan Gilbey wrote, "In fact, it's a very well made and intelligent picture, assembled with an attention to detail, both in plot and characterisation, that you might have feared was all but extinct in mainstream American cinema".[23] Richard Williams, in his review for The Guardian, wrote, "L.A. Confidential gets just about everything right. The light, the architecture, the slang, the music ... A wonderful Lana Turner joke. A sense, above all, of damaged people arriving to make new lives and getting seduced by the scent of night-blooming jasmine, the perfume of corruption".[24]

IMDB Trivia

http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0119488/trivia

Twice the project was pitched to television: first, producer David L. Wolper wanted to produce the project as a mini-series, and later, it was being developed as a weekly series by HBO.

In Mickey Rooney's autobiography, he makes a passing reference about The T and M Studio, a brothel where the women were film star lookalikes.

Pierce Patchett's business is based on the long-time rumor that there really was a house of prostitution in Hollywood that supplied ladies meticulously dressed and made up to resemble famous movie stars. In his memoir "Hollywood: Stars and Starlets, Tycoons and Flesh-Peddlers, Moviemakers and Moneymakers, Frauds and Geniuses, Hopefuls and Has-Beens, Great Lovers and Sex Symbols", screenwriter Garson Kanin describes a visit to a place called Mae's where the madam dressed as Mae West and presided over a cast of replicas of Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich and Ginger Rogers, among others.

Jerry Goldsmith, who got an Academy Award nomination for this movie's score, replaced Elmer Bernstein.

The film has 80 speaking parts.

Izabella Scorupco was offered the lead female role but turned it down, fearing she was too young for the part.

According to an Australian radio interview with Guy Pearce, the role of Lynn Bracken was offered to Jennifer Jason Leigh, who turned it down because she had already played a few prostitutes.

The character of Brett Chase is modeled after Jack Webb.

The closing credits include old footage of famous cowboy star William Boyd as his character Hopalong Cassidy on horseback at a parade. Special effects make it appear that he is marching just in front of the cast of the films fictional police show Badge of Honor.

The shotguns used by the LAPD in this film are Ithaca Model 37s, easily identifiable by the lack of an ejection port on the right side (they eject from the bottom). White and Exley both carry Colt Detective Specials.

In preparation, Curtis Hanson showed his cast and crew Kiss Me Deadly, Bad Influence, The Killing, The Bad and the Beautiful, In a Lonely Place, Private Hell 36 and The Lineup.

"L.A. Confidential" is the third installment in author James Ellroy's "L.A. Quartet" series.

Many of the events in the movie were based upon real events. These include the Bloody Christmas scene where drunken police officers brutally beat up Hispanic prisoners suspected of beating up two uniformed cops; the plot line of real-life gangster Mickey Cohen's arrest touching off a gang war for control of the rackets; the LAPD Goon Squad which would kidnap out-of-town gangsters, beat them up and threaten to kill them if they ever tried to come back to set up their operations; Lana Turner dating gangster Johnny Stompanato (although this movie is set in 1953, and the real Turner and Stompanato didn't start dating until 1957). In real life, Turner's daughter Cheryl Crane stabbed Stompanato to death on April 4, 1958, after catching him beating her mother.

At the end of the opening credits, where you see a copy of Hush-Hush Magazine before Curtis Hanson's director credit appears, the magazine's main cover story is an interview with mob boss Mickey Cohen. The other front page story is Ingenue Dykes in Hollywood. This leads into the scene a short time afterward, when Sid Hudgens, Hush-Hush's editor, approaches Jack Vincennes. Jack introduces Sid to his dance partner, Karen, who walks away. Jack then asks what's wrong and Sid explains "We did a piece on Ingenue Dykes and her name got mentioned."

The role of Bud White was supposedly offered to Michael Madsen.

Mickey Cohen, the mobster who gets locked up which causes the war for control of the drug trade in the story, was a real-life Los Angeles mobster from the late '30s until his death in 1976 after two imprisonments for tax evasion. He was a small-time hood who joined forces with New York gangster Bugsy Siegel when Siegel came to L.A. to run the rackets (see the film Bugsy). After Siegel's murder in 1947, Cohen took over the rackets that Bugsy had built up, including labor union shakedowns at the studios, drug trafficking, gambling and prostitution. He was so hated by the police that he was constantly arrested for any crime, big or small (he was once arrested for using foul language on the street). As shown in the movie, he was eventually imprisoned for income tax evasion and spent nearly ten years in prison. After his release, he was semi-retired from the rackets and lived off his wealth, remaining a colorful character in Los Angeles until his death in 1976.

Curtis Hanson cast Russell Crowe after seeing his performance in Romper Stomper. Studio execs were adamantly against the idea of casting two non-Americans (Crowe and Guy Pearce) in an American period piece - Pearce is English and Crowe is a New Zealander. Kevin Spacey was told to play his character loosely based on Dean Martin.

To pitch the movie to backers (and, later, to explain his aesthetic ideas about it to various cast and crew members), director Curtis Hanson put together a group of 18 period images illustrating different aspects of what he hoped to convey with the movie. These included the "Welcome to Los Angeles" postcard that's in the first shot of the movie. Photos of tract housing, orange groves, and the glamour shot of Veronica Lake are framed on Lynn Bracken's wall. Hanson also chose studio photos of two lesser-known 1950s actors (Aldo Ray and Guy Madison) to show to Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe what he envisioned as models for the characters Ed Exley and Bud White. Exley's model was Madison, while White's was Ray. This film takes it's name from "Confidential", a notorious 1950s-era movie star tabloid, which is fictionally portrayed herein as "Hush-Hush".

Body count: 30

Some of the close-ups of Guy Pearce's face in the scene where he and Russell Crowe get into a fight were shot four months after principle photography had ended. Much to Curtis Hanson's dismay, Guy Pearce had shaved his head within the time-span and had to wear a wig. During a Q and A session, Pierce referred to it as a "very expensive wig" and noted that in Australia there is no concept of returning to shoot pick-ups weeks or even months later.

James Ellroy describes the character of Bud White as the biggest cop on the L.A. force. Noting that he wasn't even 6 foot, Russell Crowe decided to move into an apartment so small that he had to duck to get into the doorways and could barely stand up in. Crowe said this worked in making him feel like a "giant" by the time he came to the set to shoot.

http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm0255278/trivia

The brutal murder of his mother, Jean Ellroy, in 1958, was the basis of his 1996 memoir "My Dark Places".

"The Black Dahlia" (1987) was his seventh novel. It was based on the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short. The same case was also the basis for John Gregory Dunne's 1977 novel and later movie True Confessions with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall ). Black Dahlia was the first novel in a series to become known as "The L.A. Quartet." "L.A. Confidential," "White Jazz," and "The Big Nowhere" are the other novels in the quartet