L.A. Confidential

"L.A. Confidential" was on tv this past Saturday night so I watched it for the fourth time. I never tire of this movie, it's one of the only successful adaptations of a James Ellroy book – unlike "The Black Dahlia", which just pissed me off because it could have been so good and it was soooooo bad. Does anyone else think Scarlet Johannson is as overrated as I do? She was good in "Ghostworld", and "The Man Who Wasn't There", and "Lost In Translation" – until you realize that she plays every role in the same detached, toss the hair and smile way. Her performance in "The Black Dahlia" was just over-the-top annoying. The other problem with the movie was that all the actors were too young and beautiful for the characters that they were playing. In the book detective Bleichert is nicknamed "Bucky" because he has huge front teeth, unlike pretty boy Josh Hartnett. I won't go on but suffice to say your 5 dollars is better spent on half a coffee at Starbucks.

But back to Ellroy, one of America's grittiest, graphic and erudite fiction writers. Surely his masterpieces were a pair of bookends titled "American Tabloid" and "The Cold Six Thousand" (a third companion to these books is apparently in the works, making this a trilogy). These books fictionalize the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King FROM THE INSIDE, but in fact they're much more than that. By the time he penned "The Cold Six Thousand" Ellroy's style had become so taut and bullet-like that no sentence is longer than 5 words. At first this is jarring, after a while it's incredible.

Aspiring authors are often told to "write what you know". James Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was 12 years old, her body dumped near their LA home. To this day it's a cold case.

Write what you know.