"James Ellroy's LA: City of Demons"

CRIME novelist James Ellroy is hosting a new television show that goes up Wednesday night. He's both perfect for this -- who's written about crime in the Southland better than Ellroy? (All due respect to Ross Macdonald, Robert Crais, and a few others.) But his manic intensity also makes him a strange fit for television -- he can be a bit too much onscreen.

The show looks at both classic LA murders -- the Black Dahlia, Ellroy's mother's slaying -- as well as more recent stuff. Much of it it familiar to Angelenos. The busload of TV journalists I rode through town with on a chartered bus -- Ellroy ranted and raved up front -- were mostly spellbound by the mad dog. Here is my full story.

Some highlights from the tour:

"I am nothing if not a right-wing, LAPD apologist."

"The twin influences on my childhood were Confidential and the Lutheran church."

Finally, on the Ronnie Chasen murder:

"Somebody will rat somebody out for it... It will be an astonishingly prosaic revelation. It will be a head-scratcher until then.... And life will go on."

Christopher Nolan's Early Years

About a decade ago I was tipped off to an odd, inscrutable film by a budding English director living in LA. Christopher Nolan's Memento, which starred Guy Pearce in an ill-fitting pale suit and bleached hair, knocked me out, and I spent an afternoon talking about movies, memory and fragmented narrative with the 30-year old director at his apartment near the LACMA while he played Radiohead's Kid A on a boom box.

I just dug up my old New Times cover story, "Indie Angst," because of Nolan's new film Inception, and part of what's striking is how much a struggle the director went through to get that early film shown. For reasons I have never understood, the company that owns New Times does not keep an online archive for the LA paper, but thanks to the UC Berkeley film archives you can read the story here.

Memento, of course, is one of the most original movies of the last 20 years, with a bizarre structure -- a few minutes of exposition, then a violent jump back to a previous sequence -- that should not have worked but somehow did.

Nolan talked about how the novel had spent more than a half century messing with chronology -- he was especially interested in Graham Swift's Waterland -- and discussed Harold Pinter and his interest in noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and James Ellroy.

"The only useful definition of narrative I've ever heard," Nolan told me, "is 'the controlled release of information.' And these novelists and playwrights -- they're not feeling any responsibility to make that release on a chronological basis. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we don't feel that responsibility in day-to-day life."

Of all the filmmakers I interviewed during my years at New Times -- Labute, Linklater, Solondz, Spike Jonze, Kevin Smith, the Blair Witch guys -- Nolan was among the smartest, the most sure of himself, and the last one I would have expected would be making blockbuster movies.

Nolan's lean, mean, Hitchcock-inspired debut, Following, was made with borrowed equipment from his British university and almost no money. "For me it's very satisfying filmmaking, because the only sacrifices are practical ones. The filmmaking process in my head, the imaginative process, was identical to making a film for millions of dollars. When I made a film with a bigger budget, I realized it's the same thing. You've just got more trucks."

One thing I don't recall discussing with Nolan, by the way, was comic books.

"LA Confidential" in Mexico

THE Misread City just landed in Guadalajara, where an enormous book festival will pack in 500,000 or so by week's end.

Tonight I took in a panel on one of the best movies ever made about Los Angeles -- "LA Confidential." Actually, it was just die-hard Angeleno David Kipen interviewing the film's director, Curtis Hanson, but the conversation was quite revealing.

Hanson talked about his fight with Warner Bros. to cast lesser-known actors in the role of Bud White (which went to Russell Crowe) and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and said he almost lost the film because of the casting issue. "But here's the deal," he said. "I want to shoot unknown."

He also described trying to find parts of LA that still existed from the novel's 1950s setting, to capture the city's continuity rather than the fragmented memory that's typically the way old LA is remembered. Hence the use of the Formosa Cafe, near his grandparents' house, and where he took the actors to talk about their roles.

"I didn't want the movie to feel like the snapshot of a period that doesn't exist anymore," Hanson said.

And he talked about the role of "Chinatown" as a precedent for his film, and how he showed the actors the great Bogart film, "In a Lonely Place," as well as Billy Wilder's "The Apartment," to set the tone.

Even then, by the way, Crowe was known -- as the director put it -- as "trouble."

By the way, here is my LATimes piece about films based on Ellroy's work. All in all, a fascinating discussion about one of the great works of art about the city.

This movie came out a month or so after I moved to town and was a very big deal for me and everybody I knew back then. For me, the movie stands as an important step -- as well as Kevin Starr's histories, most of Ellroy's work, and books on West Coast jazz and Central Avenue -- in which this city that often has amnesia began to recover some of its own past.

Chasing Women with James Ellroy

OVER the last year or so i've been lucky enough to hang out with james ellroy, self-proclaimed demon dog of american crime fiction, including a bizarre/memorable dinner at taylor's steakhose at which the author insisted i bring along some good looking women.

because he always seems to be on camera -- barking like a dog, offering off-color anecdotes and ethnic jokes, and generally acting out -- it was intriguing to follow him last week when an actual camera crew was on him.

ellroy was walking around LA's old-money hancock park neighborhood -- his teenage 'hood -- for a video doc playboy will post on its website... the video, like his new memoir/essay in playboy, gets at how the murder of his mother sent him on a tailspin and shaped his relationships with women. (the "relationships" in the hancock park chapter mostly involved stealing underwear and watching girls undress through windows.)

you can read all about it in my latest LATIMES piece. and it's playboy's april issue you want.

i remember moving to LA in 1997, the summer before the film "LA confidential" came out... everyone i knew -- film people, music people, book people -- was talking about the movie and how good it was. that sent me and a lot of other people into a fascination with the mad dog's work. 

here is a piece i wrote last year about the weird inability of hollywood to match LA Conf with another good adaptation. ellroy's next novel is due this fall.

i welcome comments, especially, from anyone who's read the playboy stuff.