Crime Wave

He did it. He wrote the critical pieces and feature interviews and took the photographs. He took some shots of Faye Dunaway and was paid with a plane ticket. He flew to Texas and watched the filming of Bonnie and Clyde.

It was a period film and a crime film. Curtis Hanson wrote it up in Cinema magazine. He prophetically called it “the most exciting American film in years.”

I read that issue of Cinema magazine thirty years ago. I was 19 and strung out on pills and Thunderbird wine. I was breaking into houses in a ritzy L.A. enclave and stealing things that wouldn’t be missed. I was shoplifting and reading crime novels and going to crime movies.

Hanson got me hot to see Bonnie and Clyde. I saw it and wigged out on it. I stole the money that paid for my ticket.

A year ago, I drove out to Lincoln Heights to watch a day’s filming of L.A. Confidential. It was mid-August and very hot and humid.

A northeast-L.A. street was doubling for a street in south L.A. Nineteen ninety-six was doubling for 1953.

Period cars lined the curb. A dozen equipment trucks and trailers were parked just out of camera view. Twenty-odd technicians and gofers were standing near a catering van. They were snarfing cookies and ice-cream bars in the hundred-degree heat.

The focal point was a shabby wood-frame house. It was a near perfect match to the house I’d described in my novel. I visualized the scene I wrote in 1989.

A cop vaults a backyard fence and walks up a flight of outside stairs in broad daylight. He slips the catch on a second-story door and enters a cramped apartment. He sees a woman gagged and tied to a bed with neckties. He walks into the living room and shoots her presumed assailant in cold blood.

My cop was named Bud White. He was a huge man with a football-injury limp and a gray flattop. The movie Bud White is an actor named Russell Crowe. He is a compact and muscular man with dark hair and a quasi-flattop.

I watched Crowe nosh an ice-cream bar and bullshit with extras in cop uniforms. The actors playing Lieutenant Ed Exley and Captain Dudley Smith were standing across the street. My Exley was tall and blond. Guy Pearce, the film Exley, is medium size and dark haired. My Smith was burly and red-faced. James Cromwell, the film Smith, is pale and imperiously tall.

I felt like I was entering a brand-new L.A. world and a multimedia extravaganza. Period snapshots and scandal-rag headlines formed the visual borders. The audio track was the sound of my written words spoken by the actors around me. My mother’s ghost was somewhere in the mix. She was eating popcorn with a spoon and humming Kay Starr’s 1952 hit, “Wheel of Fortune.”

I reeled behind a jolt of heat and a thousand quick-cut blips of my own private L.A. I had written L.A. Confidential as an epic hometown elegy. It was established fact and half-heard scandal and whispered innuendo. It was the world of horror I had first glimpsed the day my mother died.

It was Mickey Cohen and his henchman Johnny Stompanato. It was Hush-Hush magazine, my stand-in for Confidential. It was sex shakedowns and perverts modeled on Stephen Nash and Harvey Glatman. It was the “Bloody Christmas” police-brutality scandal and the twisted story of a theme park disingenuously disguised to remind readers of Disneyland.

L.A. Confidential was conceived and executed as a large-scale novel. It was not written with an eye toward movie adaptation. I did not expect it to bushwhack me six years after its publication.

I read the screenplay. Two writers had taken my milieu, my characters, and a good deal of my dialogue and fashioned their L.A. world within my L.A. worlds.

I walked into the wood-frame house. I was entering their visual world now. I passed the bedroom where the woman would be gagged and bound with neckties. I found Curtis Hanson framing a shot in the living room.

He saw me and smiled. He said, “What do you think?”

I said, “It looks inspired.”

I had dinner with Hanson that night. We met at our mutual favorite restaurant.

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