It's been 24 years since Bret Easton Ellis's debut novel Less Than Zero opened a West Coast branch of the '80s Literary Brat Pack franchise, an two years less than that since the movie version, directed by Marek Kanievska. Now, Ellis has written a sequel to the novel, called Imperial Bedrooms--the man does love his Elvis Costello references--and has informed MTV's movie blog that he can already see the movie version. Actually, it sounds as if he may have hatched the idea partly in hopes of reconnecting with the spectacular but unpredictable comet that is the career of Robert Downey, Jr. As one of our most stylish and perceptive voices on the contemporary movie scene noted last year, it was Downey's high-wire performance as Julian, a rich boy caught in a drug-fueled downward spiral, that first hinted that Downey, already a known commodity as a gifted comic actor, might be a performer capable of then-unimaginable levels of depth and daring. “It’s in present-day,” Ellis says of the new book. “You’ll find out where all the characters from the book have now ended up, for better or for worse...When I began to outline the book and figure out who’s going to be around and who’s not – some of the main people are going to be okay. There was some supporting cast that I realized was expendable – you knew something bad was going to happen to them. But the leads? Yeah, they kind of stuck around.” As for Julian, Ellis says that the character is "in the book is sober. Fragile, but sober.”
One clue that Ellis may be trying to hitch a ride on Downey's tail is that, although he has specifically talked up the attractions of the making a sequel to the 1987 movie, noting that "“The cast is still around", Julian died at the end of that movie. In fact, at the time, Ellis loudly disowned the movie, which altered his story and icy emotional tone and turned the material into a strident anti-drug melodrama. (The need to adjust rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and drugs in the late '80s also helped torpedo the movie version of the original East Coast Literary Brat Pack artifact, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, which came out the next year.) Although the MTV blog item stresses the fact that Downey and James Spader were in that movie, the leads were actually Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz, two long-gone candidates for Hollywood stardom who will never be gone far enough away for my liking. As for Kanievska, he didn't get to direct another movie until the forgotten 2002 Paul Newman picture Where the Money Is. Aside from Downey's performance, the Less Than Zero film is probably best remembered for its Rick Rubin-produced soundtrack album, which included two charting singles, L L Cool J's "Going Back to Cali" and the Bangles' cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Hazy Shade of Winter." Ellis has said that in recent years he has grown "sentimental" over the film and now appreciates it as a "snapshot" of its era, though many viewers probably still think that album is a better snapshot to listen to.
It could be that what Ellis is really sentimental about is his place in the Hollywood food chain, which isn't as firm as it might be for a writer whose stock in trade is suntanned, well-financed decadence. Of the movies made from his books--Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and The Rules of Attraction--only Mary Harron's Psycho has had much success or enjoyed much of a post-theatrical afterlife, and it's widely taken for a satirical deconstruction of the book on which it was based. The Informers, a movie based on his 1994 short story collection that is due for release later this month, will mark the first time that Ellis has worked on the screenplay for one of these films. (The script is co-credited to Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, who also both served as executive producers.) But that movie, which features the final performance by the late Brad Renfro, seems unlikely to do much for Ellis's reputation, and in its finished form may bear little resemblance to the author's intentions. "It’s hard to tell now," Ellis has said of the screenplay after the film's director, Gregor Jordan, had edited it, "but it was supposed to be like criminals and vampires and girls and young people. There were things I recognized, and a lot that I missed." The presence of a vampire in the book inspired a fair amount of discussion at the time, and Jordan did cast Brandon Routh in the role, but word has it that Routh's part and the supernatural elements have been completely excised from the finished film.