Dwight Garner once equated reading James Ellroy’s prose to “deciphering Morse code tapped out by a pair of barely sentient testicles.” Call me crazy, but that line has always stuck with me. The context of this vivid description was a review of the then-new movie adaptation of Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential. Ellroy and his publisher shared a good laugh when they sold those movie rights; they agreed that the book was essentially unfilmable.
“They were right, of course. And they were also wrong,” Scott Timberg writes in an L.A. Times profile of the hard-boiled crime writer and his filmography. “Only the most die-hard Ellroy fan resented that the film resembled his labyrinthine novel -- with its dozens of characters, thick historical context and overlapping subplots -- only slightly. It's considered one of the finest films of the '90s and one of the greatest film noirs since the genre's 1950s heyday. But since then, when it comes to movies, it's been more crying than laughing for Ellroy fans.”
Brian De Palma’s sodden take on The Black Dahlia was cause for much of that weeping, but there was also a little-known 1998 version of Brown’s Requiem starring Michael Rooker, and Ron Shelton’s so-so Dark Blue, based on an Ellroy story about police corruption in Los Angeles. Now Ellroy has taken his first shot at an original screenplay –Street Kings, another tale of L.A. cops gone bad. Opening this Friday, Kings stars Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker (recently seen treading this ground on The Shield), and according to Timberg, “its language, characters, sardonic morality and fast-reversing plot feel like an Ellroy novel.”
Ellroy isn’t talking, at least not to Timberg. (He’s been seen rubbing elbows with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies of late, talking up some golden oldies of L.A. noir.) Meanwhile, Joe Carnahan is still trying to get his adaptation of White Jazz off the ground, but finding it an uphill battle. Given the unholy mess that was Smokin’ Aces, that may not be a bad thing.