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     Filmbuff Comedian Username: Filmbuff Post Number: 1125 Registered: 11-2011 Posted From: 117.213.227.41 Rating: N/A |
LA Confidential Screenplay I just finished reading LA Confidential. I had kept postponing reading this as i had already seen the movie a few times and did not know what the book would add. I had first tackled some other James Ellroys - American Tabloid, Black Dahlia and White Jazz. Discovering James Ellroy has been a big source of reading pleasure of late, each of the above books is different in tone, though largely fitting the Ellroy staple. American Tabloid is a true epic and my favourite, Black Dahlia is the most approachable while White Jazz is the most difficult to read. In fact, read in the right order they show an increasing complexity in story telling with White Jazz the best example of Ellroy’s final evolved form which is in a nutshell, Raymond Chandler meets Virginia Woolf. Coming to LA Confidential, i was gladly mistaken within the first few pages itself and realised that this book has little resemblance to the movie. And therein lies the genius of the screenplay of LAC. The book and the screenplay have to be made mandatory reading in all screenwriting courses. I would rank it, along with Godfather, as one of the finest book adaptations. In fact, i daresay, it even surpasses Godfather, atleast Coppola made two movies out of the book. Here Curtis Hanson had to make only one movie out of this intricate book. The book, LAC, has probably more than 100 speaking characters (some of them very key), a incredibly dense plotline with multiple crime threads and a denouement which is darker than even the most hardened noir books. What the screenwriters have done is taken the basic spirit of the book, reduced the characters down to a few countable names, taken the crux around which the various crime threads revolve and eliminate everything else. They have done this and still managed to retain the essence of the book and James Ellroy’s vision. I think having a supportive writer is crucial. If writers play too much of a spoilsport and treat their words as the gospel, which a renegade like Ellroy is not wont to do, then the movies just end up like a visual book a la an audio book. A movie is more than an visual book as you are not using the incredible powers of the visual medium fully. The first Harry Potter movie disaster is a perfect example of this. After that horror, i never read any other Harry Potter book or saw a movie. For a movie like LAC, i don’t know what was the thought process of the writers. But a distance from the book is essential so that one is not too influenced by the book or the writer has to be dead and the estate not too difficult to handle. Of course, in an Ellroy book, it does not matter as even just one week after reading the book, one does not remember too many details barring the key characters, their motivations, the nucleus of the story which is the Nite Owl case here etc. And that is a good starting point for the screenplay. The writers have taken a lot of liberties, eliminated a lot of key scenes, brought conclusions to the Dudley Smith character which does not happen till a subsequent book – White Jazz. However none of the core character definitions are lost (at least largely) – Exley is still an ambitious snitch, Bud White is still a brute and Jack Vincennes is still a sleazeball. After you strip away all the layers of history around the characters, this is the innermost core of these guys. Same goes with the investigations, the incidents etc. Once you have done that it becomes easier. Getting that right is the biggest success of LA Confidential. As i read a quote by a French writer recently “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away”. Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland deserve a spot in the screenwriters pantheon for putting this in practice. |
