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David Strathairn as Pierce Patchett, Paolo Seganti as Johnny Stompanato, Screenplay by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson. Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson have won for Outstanding Adapted Screenplay. Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and Kevin Spacey have won L. A.
Confidential starts as an expos, told by scandal magazine columnist Sid Hudgeons. It's stylized, and also stylish, to the point of being a gently funny self-parody. It's so determinedly immersed in 50 's Los Angeles that we " re always partly enjoying the time travel to this tasty milieu and partly laughing at the film and ourselves for our extravagance. At the same time, L.
A. Confidential is something much more serious, a post-morality play in shades of dark and light. The novel on which it is based is the third volume in James Ellroy's L. A. Quartet, quintessentially expressing the author's vision, at once bleak and promising. It is a journey to the end of a night of near total destruction.
The only thing that's left afterwards is what the characters are able, of themselves, to salvage. But what they are able to salvage is something of value, a life maybe better than the daydream that they started out to achieve. Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson have earnestly taken on the job of adapting James Ellroy's book. It is inevitable that they have simplified it. A book can have a more intricate plot than a film because it is experienced under different circumstances: the reader is able to stretch it out over several days and, when puzzled, can turn the pages back. Even for a novel, the plot of Ellroy's book is complex, piling up layer upon layer of incident and explanation to build a sense of total apocalypse.
My impression of the strategy Helgeland and Hanson have used is that they have translated the book to a film by stepping its tone back one notch to match more closely to that of the book's predecessor, The Big Nowhere, the less extreme second volume of Ellroy's Quartet. Thematically, the main characters undergo instructively different versions of the transformation undergone by Buzz Meeks in that book. The film is still a good dose of genuine Ellroy. Although there are very many changes in plot details (including a complete change in the character of Buzz Meeks) and some of these are drastic, there is no betrayal or sanitizing. I am very impressed.
Ellroy himself is on record as saying that he thought the book was "movie-adaptation-proof" until Helgeland and Hanson proved him wrong. Following a brief introduction, the action takes place within a relatively short period and deals with the LAPD's investigation of the "Nite Owl Killings. " The plot seems complex as it unfolds chronologically within that period, but becomes quite neat by the film's end when we have learned all the antecedent events. Comparatively, the book covers a much longer period, Christmas Eve 1950 to April 1958, and although we are afterwards able to explain its plot as well, it is less straightforward. In the book, the explanations turn out to involve the partly coincidental superimposition of the activities of several independent groups of characters.
Sergeant Jack Vincennes, "The Big V, " celebrity cop, advisor to the Badge of Honor television show, has a neat scam going with Sid Hudgeons. Sid leaks information about lawbreakers to Jack, along with some cash. Then Jack lets Sid be present, with photographers, at the resulting arrest. These arrests help Jack's career and his celebrity status. Correspondingly, they help the circulation of Sid's magazine Hush Hush. Early in the picture, Sid and Jack wreck the career of a young movie actor, Matt Reynolds, by arresting him and his girlfriend for felony possession of marijuana.
Later, Sid finds out that D. A. Ellis Loew is a homo. Sid needs a bit player to lure Loew into bed so that Jack can arrest him.
Matt Reynolds, so air headed that after his 6 -month jolt in the pen he doesn't even recognize Jack VIncennes as the man who sent him there, agrees to be the patsy. Sid and Jack assure him that if he does well they can help him get a part on Badge of Honor. As Matt goes off to introduce himself to Loew, Sid remarks to Jack about Matt being stupid enough to think that Badge of Honor would even look at him "after he's been Hush Hush cover boy twice in one year. " This remark sets Jack to thinking. He sits in The Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard pondering the fact that he's about to complete the destruction of a good natured, if stupid, kid. He decides that he won't do it. This decision doesn't seem to have anything to do with morality in the traditional sense, because it doesn't seem to come from obeying an abstract principle.
It's more concrete than that. Jack's simply reached a point where he won't play along. He just can't see himself doing what he's been asked to. He goes to find Matt and head him off, but he's too late. Matt has been murdered. Officer Bud White is driven by a private demon.
When he was 12, he tried to get in the way when his father went after his mother with a bottle. He was tied to a radiator and made to watch while his mother was beaten to death with a tire iron. "Three days until a truant officer found us. They never found the old man. " He's grown up into a muscle bound machine conditioned to respond negatively to physical attacks on women. He seems to have reached an accommodation with himself and his rather humorless existence, satisfied enough with the results, if not the style, of his obsession and of his work as a policeman. In the course of his investigation of the Nite Owl Killings, Bud White meets a call girl, Lynn Bracken.
She's part of a stable of high class call girls "cut to look like movie stars, " kept by a man named Pierce Patchett. So far her situation has been easy. "He takes a cut of our earnings and invests it for us. He doesn't let us use narcotics and he doesn't abuse us. Can your policeman's mentality grasp those contradictions?" Sergeant (later, Detective Lieutenant) Ed Exley seems in some ways like Jack Vincennes, ambitious, fond of the public eye. The difference is that while Vincennes acts like a regular guy, Exley is a prissy loner. Through intelligence, luck, and persistence, he solves the Nite Owl Case, killing the three culprits in a spectacular shootout.
His career is now soaring. Later, he finds out that the three he killed, although rapists, are maybe not responsible for the Nite Owl. Setting out to find the real culprits, Exley comes to ask...
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Research essay sample on Nite Owl Killings Brian Helgeland And Curtis Hanson Jack
