NP new Ellroy book and film

[Doug Millison]

I haven't read anything by Ellroy yet, but his name comes up here now and
again...


>Subject: PW Daily for Booksellers (May 8, 2001)
>Warm Receptions for James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand
>
>Today James Ellroy's latest novel, The Cold Six Thousand (Knopf)--a work of
>historical fiction that blasts the Jack and Bobby Kennedy mythologies and
>is just as relentless with real-life (actually, now-dead) figures from both
>organized crime and labor (see review below)--hits the stores.
>
>Last night at a premier of a documentary on the author called The Feast of
>Death by Academy Award-winner Vikram Jayanti (When We Were Kings), PW Daily
>discovered that Ellroy can take it as well as he dishes it out.
>
>"There have been five documentary films made about me," Ellroy told PW at
>the post-film party at the Screening Room in Manhattan. "But this is the
>first time I've been nailed."
>
>Feast of Death is not a work of biography. "It appears to be a film about
>James," Jayanti said to PW, "but it is secretly a film about what writers
>do."
>
>Of course, what the writer in question does can be at once brutal and
>brilliant; any film about him is bound to attempt the same balance. Readers
>of Ellroy's last book, a memoir titled My Dark Places, will not be shocked
>to hear about Ellroy's mother, who was murdered when the author was 10
>years old. But seeing him sit around a dinner table with Los Angeles police
>detectives discussing that case and another gruesome unsolved L.A. murder
>from the period, the Black Dahlia, the subject of another of his books, is
>jarring to say the least.
>
>Ellroy rides at night with the filmmaker, shining a flashlight on the
>scenes connected to the murders and victims as if he is both stalking his
>own memories and the souls of these women. Viewers go with Ellroy and the
>detective who showed him the effects from his mother's murder and others in
>the archives. In one of the most poignant moments, the same detective tells
>of his initial fear of Ellroy, and how in the end he watched a "grown man
>fall in love with his mother for the first time."
>
>Some of the images--especially crime scene photographs--in The Feast of
>Death will inspire nightmares. "I had nightmares every night I was
>filming," said Jayanti. "James doesn't want to stop at the things that give
>us nightmares. He digs into why we are fascinated by these things and what
>they make us feel."
>
>Then there's the Ellroy charm. "These books are written in love and seminal
>fluid and napalm," he warns a bookstore audience. So why are so many
>attracted to his work? At least, he says, he tells things as they are, or
>at least as good any "wicked mother-f__cker" can.
>
>We can only wonder what will happen if Ellroy gets his wish and outlives
>Bill Clinton so he can have his fictional way with him. Hey, we warned
>about nightmares already.--Bridget Kinsella
>
>
>
>The Cold Six Thousand: The Starred Review:
>
>
>The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy. Knopf, $25.95 (672p) ISBN
>0-679-40392-2
>
>Dig it: Ellroy writes tight. Ellroy writes large. Ellroy vibes great
>lit--he's the Willie S. of noir.
>
>It's easy to elbow Ellroy, but that's only because he's got his act down.
>His new novel is a career performance. Running from one day of infamy
>(11/22/63) to another (6/5/68) and a bit beyond, it limns a confluence of
>conspiracies beginning with the shooting of JFK in Dallas and ending with
>the death of his brother in L.A. In between, Ellroy depicts the takeover of
>Vegas by the Outfit, with Howard Hughes as its beard; the escalation of the
>war in Vietnam and the takeover of heroin cultivation there by the Mob; the
>enmity of J. Edgar Hoover toward Martin Luther King, leading to the King
>killing months before bullets topple Bobby K.
>
>Big names play roles huge and small: the aforementioned celebs; Bayard
>Rustin, an FBIblackmail target for his homosexuality; Sal Mineo, a Mob
>blackmail target for carving up a male trick; Oswald, Ruby, SirhanSirhan,
>James Earl Jones, patsies all; Sonny Liston, sliding from world champion to
>world-class thug; assorted "Boys," including mobster Carlos Marcellos, the
>spider at the center of the web. While great men pull strings, however,
>smaller men not only dance but sometimes tug back; a wide cast of
>characters--mercenaries, twisted cops, thieves, financiers, pimps, whores
>and cons--keep the conspiracies chugging while indulging in assorted
>vanities and vendettas.
>
>What emerges is a violent, sexually squalid, nightmare version of America
>in the '60s, one that, through Ellroy's insertion of telephone transcripts
>and FBI and other documents, gains historical credence. With Ellroy's
>ice-pick declarative prose (thankfully varied occasionally by those
>documents), plus his heart-trembling, brain-searing subject matter, readers
>will feel kneed, stomped upon and then kicked--right up into the maw of
>hard truth.
>