Society Toolkit
Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, From Script to Screening
How Curtis Hanson turned James Ellroy's 1990 novel into L.A. Confidential: the script, the five films he screened for his cast, and presenting it today.
L.A. Confidential is the 1997 neo-noir that Curtis Hanson directed, produced and wrote with Brian Helgeland from James Ellroy's 1990 novel, a story of three Los Angeles police officers in 1953 caught between corruption and Hollywood celebrity. It premiered in competition at Cannes on May 14, 1997, opened in American theaters through Warner Bros. on September 19, 1997, won two of its nine Academy Award nominations, and was selected for the National Film Registry in 2015.
For a programmer the film is useful twice over. It is a 138 minute crime story that still holds a general room, and it is a director's lesson in rebuilding a period without turning it into a costume parade. This entry follows Hanson's choices in the order a society meets them, from the script to the screening night.
Who was Curtis Hanson when he made it?
Hanson was born in Reno, Nevada, on March 24, 1945, grew up in Los Angeles, left high school and worked as a photographer and editor for Cinema magazine before he wrote films. His name grew first as a writer, on The Silent Partner in 1978 and on Samuel Fuller's White Dog in 1982. As a director of thrillers he moved from The Bedroom Window in 1987 and Bad Influence in 1990 to two commercial hits, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle in 1992 and The River Wild in 1994.
Hanson said those two successes let him initiate, for the first time, a picture that was a personal project from the start. L.A. Confidential was that picture. After it he directed Wonder Boys in 2000, 8 Mile in 2002 and In Her Shoes in 2005, retired in 2014 because of poor health, and died in Los Angeles on September 20, 2016. When you introduce the film, that arc is the short version: a writer of tight thrillers who finally chose his own material.
How did Hanson and Helgeland cut down Ellroy's novel?
Ellroy's book is the third novel of his L.A. Quartet, after The Black Dahlia in 1987 and The Big Nowhere in 1988, and before White Jazz in 1992. Warner Bros. acquired the screen rights in 1990. Brian Helgeland, a longtime reader of Ellroy, lobbied for the job, then met Hanson while the director was making The River Wild and found that they agreed on the method: remove every scene of the book that did not include the three main policemen, then work outward from those scenes.
The two men wrote together for two years. Hanson turned down other work and Helgeland wrote seven drafts without being paid. Ellroy, who had seen The Bedroom Window and Bad Influence, later said the writers took a book with eight plotlines, reduced them to three, and kept the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny. That reduction is the first thing to tell a room that has read the novel: the film is a distillation, not a summary, and many characters and subplots of the book are simply gone.
What happens in the story, without the ending?
In 1953 the Los Angeles Police Department wants a cleaner public image. Three officers pull in different directions. Ed Exley, played by Guy Pearce, is a careerist sergeant living in the shadow of a murdered detective father. Jack Vincennes, played by Kevin Spacey, is a narcotics sergeant who stages celebrity arrests for the scandal sheet Hush-Hush with the tabloid journalist Sid Hudgens, played by Danny DeVito. Bud White, played by Russell Crowe, is an officer who uses his fists on men who beat women. Captain Dudley Smith, played by James Cromwell, outranks all three.
A massacre at an all night coffee shop called the Nite Owl becomes the case that ties their paths together, and it leads toward Pierce Patchett, played by David Strathairn, who runs call girls surgically altered to resemble film stars, among them Lynn Bracken, played by Kim Basinger. The story borrows from real Los Angeles history. Its police scandal takes the name of Bloody Christmas, the beating of seven young men by LAPD officers on December 25, 1951; the gangster Mickey Cohen and his bodyguard Johnny Stompanato appear as characters; and the title comes from Confidential, a scandal magazine first published in December 1952.
What did Hanson screen for his cast and crew?
To give the production points and counterpoints for 1950s Los Angeles, Hanson held a mini film festival for the production, one film a week. The list doubles as a ready made companion series for any society that books L.A. Confidential, because each title was chosen for one specific quality.
| Film | Year and director | What Hanson took from it |
|---|---|---|
| The Bad and the Beautiful | 1952, Vincente Minnelli | The glamorous Hollywood look |
| In a Lonely Place | 1950, Nicholas Ray | The ugly underbelly of that glamour |
| Private Hell 36 | 1954, Don Siegel | A lean and efficient style |
| Kiss Me Deadly | 1955, Robert Aldrich | The futuristic fifties of the atomic age |
| The Lineup | 1958, Don Siegel | A lean and efficient style |
Hanson and his cinematographer Dante Spinotti also studied The Americans, the photographic book by Robert Frank first published in 1958. Spinotti suggested the Super 35 widescreen format with spherical lenses, which in his view gave each frame the feel of a still photograph. Before filming, Hanson brought Crowe and Pearce to Los Angeles for two months, with dialect coaches and vintage police training films, and for six weeks the two leads, Hanson and Helgeland held rehearsals that went through each scene of the script.
Why is it called neo-noir and not simply noir?
Because it was made in 1997, in color, about 1953. Neo-noir is the usual name for films made after the classic period that keep noir's themes and sensibility, and the season guide on classic noir and its later heirs places L.A. Confidential in the deliberately retro strand, a story that looks as if it were lifted from a film of the year in which it is set.
Hanson did not want an exercise in nostalgia. He had Spinotti shoot it like a contemporary film, with more naturalistic light than a classic noir, and he told Spinotti and the production designer Jeannine Oppewall to get the period detail right and then put it all in the background. Reviewers in 1997 read the result two ways. Richard Schickel wrote in Time that it came closer than any earlier attempt to the old black and white noir look on color stock, while Liam Lacey wrote in The Globe and Mail that the big star was Los Angeles itself and compared the atmosphere to Chinatown. Both readings help an introduction, because they tell the audience where to look.
Which Los Angeles places did the film use?
The production used landmarks that suited the 1950s: the Formosa Cafe in West Hollywood, the Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard, and the Crossroads of the World, an outdoor shopping mall dressed as a movie theater for the premiere of When Worlds Collide that opens the film. Patchett's home is the Lovell House, the International Style residence designed by Richard Neutra. Lynn Bracken's house stands at 501 Wilcox Avenue in Hancock Park and needed a $75,000 renovation to become the Spanish style home of the script.
The hunt for the Nite Owl suspects was filmed in Angelino Heights, Lincoln Heights and Koreatown, while the Victory Motel was one of the few sets built from scratch, on a flat stretch of the Inglewood Oil Field in Culver City. A handout naming three or four of these real places gives a room something concrete to watch for.
What happened at Cannes and at the Oscars?
According to Hanson, Warner Bros. did not want the film shown at Cannes, fearing a bias against studio pictures. He and other producers sent a print directly to the selection committee, and the film screened in the main competition of the 50th festival. That competition, under jury president Isabelle Adjani, ended with the Palme d'Or shared by The Eel and Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, the Iranian drama set in a car, which makes the two titles a natural Cannes 1997 double bill.
In the United States it grossed $64.6 million, and $126.2 million worldwide against a $35 million budget. The National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review each named it the best film of the year. At the 70th Academy Awards it had nine nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two: Best Supporting Actress for Kim Basinger and Best Adapted Screenplay for Helgeland and Hanson. Titanic won every other category in which L.A. Confidential was nominated.
How should a society present it today?
Start with the running time and the violence. At 138 minutes the film fills an evening on its own, and Kenneth Turan's review in the Los Angeles Times warned of unsettling bursts of violence, shootings and beatings alike, so say so plainly in the announcement. It is an American studio release distributed by Warner Bros., which means a public screening needs a license from whoever represents the title for that use; the steps are set out in the guide to public performance rights for a small film society.
Then choose a frame. A one night introduction can rest on three facts: a 1990 novel cut from eight plotlines to three, a 1953 city rebuilt with its detail pushed to the background, and two leads chosen because North American audiences did not yet know them. Hanson said he wanted the audience to dislike the characters at first and care about them later, as he had with the book. A short series can borrow two titles from his own list, In a Lonely Place and Kiss Me Deadly, so the room sees what the 1997 film took from the 1950s and what it changed.
The film in brief
About L.A. Confidential. American neo-noir crime film, 1997, 138 minutes, in English. Directed by Curtis Hanson, who lived from 1945 to 2016; screenplay by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson from the 1990 novel by James Ellroy; cinematography by Dante Spinotti, editing by Peter Honess, music by Jerry Goldsmith. Produced by Arnon Milchan, Curtis Hanson and Michael Nathanson for Regency Enterprises with The Wolper Organization, and distributed by Warner Bros. Premiered at Cannes on May 14, 1997, and released in the United States on September 19, 1997. Two Academy Awards from nine nominations, and a place in the National Film Registry since 2015. The Wikipedia entry on the film lists the full credits, locations and awards used in this entry.
Questions readers ask about L.A. Confidential
Who directed L.A. Confidential?
Curtis Hanson directed it. He also produced it with Arnon Milchan and Michael Nathanson, and wrote the screenplay with Brian Helgeland from James Ellroy's 1990 novel, which won the two writers the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Is L.A. Confidential a true story?
No. It is fiction drawn from Ellroy's novel, but it uses real material: the Bloody Christmas beating of December 25, 1951, the gangster Mickey Cohen and his bodyguard Johnny Stompanato as characters, and a scandal magazine modeled on Confidential.
Did L.A. Confidential win Best Picture?
No. It was nominated for Best Picture at the 70th Academy Awards, where Titanic won. L.A. Confidential won Best Supporting Actress for Kim Basinger and Best Adapted Screenplay for Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson.