![]() Hanson held a mini film-festival for cast and crew in the run up to the start of production. As such, the ending is very different as well - Smith survives the novel (one of the few that does), and ends “ White Jazz” in a retirement home.ģ. And indeed, Rollo Tomassi is entirely the invention of Hanson and Helgeland - Exley’s father Preston is a key character in the novel, who eventually ends up taking his own life, but he’s amalgamated with his brother, who had been killed, in the film. Smith’s role as a gangland kingpin had already been revealed in “The Big Nowhere,” and his true motivations are clear throughout the “L.A. ![]() Vincennes does die in the novel, but it’s almost random, killed by a escaped con after a breakout from a prison train. Perhaps the biggest change revolves around the film’s most memorable scene - the shocking death of Jack Vincennes at the hands of Dudley Smith, at the subsequent pay off of “Rollo Tomassi,” the invented name given by Exley to the anonymous mugger who killed his own cop father. There’s a lengthy subplot involving Bud White investigating a serial killer targeting prostitutes, while Inez Soto (who’s kidnapped and raped by the Nite Owl suspects) has a much larger role, and is the focal point of a love triangle between Bud and Ed Exley, which is transplanted to Lynn Bracken in the movie. Jack Vincennes has a different nickname and backstory - he’s called “Trashcan Jack” after dumping Charlie Parker in a garbage can during a drug bust, and is haunted by his accidental shooting of two tourists. it opens with the death of Buzz Meeks (the protagonist of “ The Big Nowhere“) at the hands of Dudley Smith’s men, but in the film, Meeks’ character is very different, and is killed off-screen. For one, the book was set over nearly a decade - between 19 - but the book shrinks the timeline massively. Given the sprawling, multi-character nature of the book, it’s no surprise that Helgeland and Hanson had to depart from the source material in their ultimately Oscar-winning screenplay. The adaptation is faithful in the broad strokes, but very, very different from the book. Company head Arnon Milchan was excited by the “contemporary” feel of casting relative unknowns, and by a pitch by Hanson involving vintage photos and postcards of LA (which the director recreates on the DVD), and the project was given the go ahead.Ģ. Fortunately, the script was passed on to New Regency Productions CEO Michael Nathanson, who loved it, although he concedes in the making of documentary on the DVD that when he later became the head of MGM, that he wouldn’t have greenlit the film either. The studio tried to convince him to cut two of the three leads, so a big star could play Bud White or Ed Exley, but Hanson refused. ![]() Period pieces are expensive, film noir was deemed uncommercial, and Hanson wanted to avoid casting stars. Ellroy himself paid tribute to them, saying, “They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme…Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny.” Even so, Warners weren’t keen for a number of reasons. resident born and bred, who’d worked with his uncle supplying clothes for movie stars like Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe as a teenager, and had a deep connection with the material - had been hired to direct the film, and Helgeland wrangled a meeting on the set of “ The River Wild.” The two found that they had a similar take on the material, and at the time Helgeland told the Dallas Observer that the plan was “to remove every scene from the book that didn’t have the three main cops in it, and then to work from those scenes out.” The result was a model of streamlining, allowing them to adapt a book that some had deemed unfilmable. But years later, Curtis Hanson - who as an L.A. Warner Bros had picked up the rights to James Ellroy‘s novel soon after publication, and Brian Helgeland, who was working on other projects with the studio at the time, pursued the job, but was deemed too inexperienced. Warner Bros were unenthusiastic about the project. ![]() ‘Succession’ Review: Episode 9 Says Goodbye to a Father and Hello to the World He’s Wroughtġ.
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