The Unofficial James Ellroy Archive

James Ellroy joins Walter Kirn on BylinerTV for a conversation where nothing is restrained and the boundaries of polite conversation are obliterated. Ellroy testifies to the vile and glorious corners of LA, and shares his visions of history without refracting the present day. With all the confidence of a shotgun blast, he tears through the politically correct limits on discussion and breathes fire with each admission and opinion. From his roots in writing, crime, fame fascination and current events, it's an interview that could be measured on the richter scale. GUEST BIO: A master of noir crime fiction, James Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime. His life has been shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. In 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy's body was dumped on a roadway in El Monte, California, a seedy L.A. exurb. Her killer was never apprehended. Her murder unleashed a force that has propelled Ellroy's work. Ellroy channeled his anguish and transformed himself into an outsized public persona: an audacious, uncompromising, and unapologetic chronicler of humanity's dark side. James Ellroy is masterly at speaking, his own backstory as riveting as any in fiction. Ellroy was born in 1948. He consumed crime novels as a young reader and developed an obsessive fascination with homicide after his father bought him Jack Webb's The Badge. In the book he discovered the story of the ghastly murder and mutilation of Elizabeth Short, known after her death as the Black Dahlia, whose murder and the subsequent investigation captivated the postwar imagination of the entire country. As a young man haunted by his mother's death, Ellroy became a thief, an alcoholic, a drug abuser, and a peeping Tom. He served time in jail. Much of the first thirty years of his life was consumed by homelessness, alcoholism, drug abuse, petty crime, and a period of insanity. Ellroy eventually found steady work caddying at Los Angeles country clubs and joined AA. As he walked the golf courses while he worked, he harnessed his narrative passion to his fascination with crime and began to daydream a novel. In 1985 he began The Black Dahlia, an explicit attempt to marry his mother's murder to the famous case that had so obsessed him in his youth. The novel appeared in 1987 and was dedicated to his mother. As a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and memoirist, James Ellroy is more closely identified with Los Angeles than any writer since Raymond Chandler. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. Four of his novels --- The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential (an Academy Award winning-movie), and White Jazz --- are collectively known as the L.A. Quartet. They comprise a dark and obsessive 1950s anti-history of his hometown. His novels American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover (September 2009) form the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, and American Tabloid and his memoir, My Dark Places, were both named as Time magazine's Best Book of the Year, respectively. Curtis Hanson directed the blockbuster film adaptation of L.A. Confidential (1997) in which (as in the book), everything is suspect, everyone is for sale, and nothing is what it seems. The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian De Palma, was released in 2006. Ellroy himself has been the subject of seven documentary films, including Feast of Death, by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vikram Jayanti. ADD'L LINKS: http://jamesellroy.net/ http://byliner.com/james-ellroy EPISODE BREAKDOWN: 00:01 A very special message from James Ellroy 01:05 Walter Kirn welcomes James Ellroy. 01:22 Fred Otash and getting the real dirt in old Hollywood. 05:14 Yiddish and using words that jumps of the page. 06:31 Bringing tabloid language to literature and, "having fucking fun with it." 07:56 Shakedown and the sordid séance stories of Fred Otash. 11:49 Getting hooked on crime stories and riding the whirlwind of history. 14:11 The truth about Marilyn Monroe, JFK and the "cashew club." 16:38 A voyeur of history and tuning out modern society. 20:09 "Are you a cynic?" 22:09 The greatest genius ever spawned. 23:18 "What is LA all about?" 25:01 Getting thrown in county jail in the bad old days. 26:50 Time spent breaking into houses, vs. at the public library. 29:19 L.A. Confidential the film: "It was the best thing that happened to my career that I had nothing to do with." 32:01 The state of the L.A.P.D. 33:02 Political correctness and being big in France. 35:10 "Bad men in love with strong women," The L.A. quartet of novels. 39:35 Rewriting history to his own specifications. 42:37 "Shakedown," and what the 'mistress,' means to Ellroy.