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James Ellroy
Contributed by Sara Schieron
Saturday, 21 January 2006
"THE NOIR UNIVERSE HAS ONE THEME AND THAT IS: "YOU'RE FUCKED". AUTHOR JAMES ELLROY TELLS THE ADORING CROWD "YOU'RE FUCKED"
Proudly, Eddie Muller takes stage and introduces this evening's guest:
James Ellroy. There is no ‘hello', no gracious ‘thanks for attending',
there was no space for it, because Ellroy, like a rabid dog, barely
recaching center stage, begins a high energy tirade, not once stopping
for breath. "You're fucked! It's 1933; it's the height of the
depression. You're a tender, sensitive soul, and you attend a left wing
rally. Your name gets on a list. You hit fat city, you meet the woman
of your dreams, you're driving a Cadillac, making hit movies in
Hollywood and HUAC's down on you and before you know it, you've got a
spike in your arm and you're pulling ice on the bowery, because it's
Noir City and..." Ellroy pauses and waits for the crowd's prompted and
synchronized rejoinder: "You're Fucked!"
He rolls right into the
film introduction, Muller silently reflecting the awe of the crowd.
"The lackluster film Noir that we will watch tonight, explicates,
"You're fucked", in high, high, shall we say, "nuclear" style. You have
some very good-looking people, a heist gone bad, a run out into the
dessert where Uncle Sam is about to torch an A-Bomb. It ain't satire
and it ain't parody and nobody knew about half-life, or cancer from
nuclear fallout. You're fucked sub-textually, and you get really fucked
during the course of this movie. It's an imperfect work of art, which
serves to buttress the theme, "You're fucked". Many Noir themes are
missing. There are no desperate homosexual informants. There are no
dollar driven D.A.s. There are no good looking negros. There are no
hophead jazz musicians. And unfortunately, since I built a career out
of it, there are no L.A. cops with dubious sexual agendas...I'm picking
up a good vibe from this crowd." At this point, the audience, sensing
it's cue yells in unison "we're fucked", to which the haughty novelist
replied, "yeah but you're all gonna get laid tonight."
The film
Ellroy is introducing is Dick Powell's directorial Debut, one
SPLIT-SECOND. An uninspired noir, replete with the fast dialogue and
cheap souls that we've come to expect of the fair we call Noir. When a
reporter is called from an A-Bomb test site in Nevada to cover the
escape of a convict some two hours drive away he crosses paths with an
experienced girl who's hard on her luck. Not quite sympathetically, he
picks her up and the team of escaped convicts hijacks them - favoring
their larger, well-fueled car to the car they recently hijacked (pair
of snotty lovers included) which had run out of gas. Roads blocked for
the upcoming A-Bomb test, the cons have nowhere to hide but the
abandoned town near ground zero. The majority of the drama plays out
there: women trade sides, criminals make passes, cons grow consciences
and heroes get shot. It's the chicken fried steak of cinema: not much
nutrition but you could live off it easy.
Following the
screening we were joined again by James Ellroy. Ellroy, the mind that
penned the novel L.A. Confidential and like a hundred other books, also
wrote The Black Dahlia, which is currently being made into a film by
Brian DePalma, starring Josh Hartnet and Hilary Swank. Gushing over
this accomplishment, Ellroy said, "I've seen three hours of dailies,
Harnett is a revelation." Unfazed by a sentiment less than biting, the
writer did not lose his persona and the dialogue onstage promptly
jumped into another area of critique.
"Film Noir died
1959-1960. We love it. It's never going to come back. That's that, dig
it. You can't go back. You cannot disingenuously go to tiki lounges and
drink those big drinks, think that it's cool and it's not gonna kill
you. You can't smoke unfiltered cigarettes in cocktail lounges all day,
every day. It's over. The seduction of the past is just that. It's the
past. We know more now and you can't go back. Film noir circumscribed
an era and was fueled by the morays and repression of the era. You
can't go back. You can imitate it and if you imitate it, it had better
be something other than a stylistic and thematic imitation of film
noir. L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia ape noir, they're
historical novels. They trade on film noir but they're not film noir.
Noir is over."
Figure that. He comes to a collection of
empassioned fans and announces "God is Dead", but just like "God is
Dead", either you believe it or you don't and my sense is that the
crowd's laugh at his proclamation was not singly a response to his keen
timing, but a retort indicating that however "dead" noir is, few
corpses produce such avid and interested collections of dedicated
fandom. I mean really, a ritual turn out that size for films over 50
years old? David Cronenberg's last, the critically acclaimed HISTORY OF
VIOLENCE, spawned from the critically acclaimed graphic novel of the
same name, had a hard time getting an audience draw like that. Then
again, if God were dead we should hardly expect a change in church
attendance.
Religious relic or false idol, SPLIT-SECOND, the
film of the night, represents a rarity brought to projector lamp light
by the Noir Foundation. When offered the option to chose the film that
he appeared with Ellroy's requested three other films before settling
on SPLIT-SECOND. Ellroy's first three choices couldn't be procured
from their appropriate archives. "I wanted DRAGNET. The 1954, Jack Webb
directed, color feature film, adapted from the TV show of the same
name. An altogether wonderful work of art that would shit all over
SPLIT-SECOND." Eddie Muller, MC of the fest said, "I have to turn this
into a pitch for the Film Noir Foundation because I contacted Warner
Bros. and said "James Ellroy wants to show DRAGNET", their response was
"we don't have a print". So I had to go back to James and ask, "What's
your last choice?" and for some inexplicable reason you chose SPLIT-SECOND."
While the print wasn't pristine and the sound
track marred with crackles and hisses, the schmaltz and the quippy
prattle from character to character produced a wholly pleasurable view
that, while not classifying as high art, fit the bill, and filled the
stomach. Sure you're full of vinegar afterwards, but Ellroy's proof you
can live on fried steak alone. And he's a genius. Wonder what Einstein
ate. I'll bet he ate nothing but ice cream.
Festivals 
