The Screengrab

Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland.  In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem.  His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough.  We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?

Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to.  Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory.  Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience.  With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask:  why was it even necessary to make the film?  The answer?  That is  a good question.

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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.

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Although much more commercially successful, the "L.A. Quartet" novels by the disturbed but fascinating noir novelist James Ellroy — consisting of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz — didn't represent the great artistic leap forward that his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and the upcoming Blood's a Rover) did. The latter books were the ones that really lifted Ellroy from skilled genre specialist to ambitious and near-brilliant American novelist, representing both his own development as a writer and his desire to see the noir novel shed its genre restrictions and take its place amongst great literature. Even if one argues that White Jazz is the real transition — and many people have, convincingly — The Black Dahlia is a rough piece of work, somewhat formless and definitely formulaic in a way that his later books would avoid. While it features many of the same themes of sexual obsession and moral ambiguity that would mark his later work, it remained somewhat inextricably bound in the bad parts of pulp and the tendency to police-prodedural tropes. That said, the "L.A. Quartet" books are far more straightforward narratives, with less emphasis on the black depths of psychology and more to carry the narrative than chopped-up internal monologues. No one has yet attempted to film any of the "Underworld U.S.A.", but if it ever happens, the results will likely be a less successful film than L.A. Confidential; the qualities that make it a lesser novel — overemphasis on plot, weaker internal monologue, and a grounding in the archetypical qualities of film noir — are the same ones that made it a better film. The Black Dahlia, for all its faults, is an eminently more filmable book than The Cold Six Thousand. Or so you might have thought until Brian De Palma showed up in 2006 and proved you wrong, wrong, wrong by burping out this mishandled disaster of an adaptation.

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SAN FRANCISCO: The 6th Annual Noir City Film Festival at the Castro is jam-packed with seamy rarities and not-available-on-DVD obscurities. It opens on January 25 with a tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who'll be interviewed onstage between screenings of the 1947 Repeat Performance and the striking 1943 backstage drama The Hard Way. There are also tributes to Dalton Trumbo — the Trumbo-scripted Joseph Losey film The Prowler will be introduced by modern noir master James Ellroy, and they'll even show the movie if ever stops talking — actress Gail Russell, and the granite-jawed Charles McGraw, who appears in Anthony Mann's Border Incident and Reign of Terror (sometimes known as The Black Book, and starring Richard Basehart as that least likely of noir villains, Maximilien Robespierre. ("Don't call me Max!")

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