Synopsis
In Los Angeles of the early 1950s, Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe) stops on his way to deliver his fellow cops booze for a Christmas party. White visits a wife beater and settles the ex-con’s latest domestic assault out of court. Sgt. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is introduced at a cast party for the TV show Badge of Honor, for which he serves as technical advisor. Vincennes is approached by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), publisher of gossip rag L.A. Confidential. Hudgens offers Vincennes $100 to bust a starlet for marijuana possession so Hudgins will have fresh scandal to cover.

Sgt. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) serves as watch commander at Hollywood station. Exley’s ambition is to make detective, but Lt. Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) notifies his protégé, “You’re a political animal. You have the eye for human weakness, but not the stomach.” When four Mexicans assault two officers, several drunken cops, including White’s partner, drag the suspects out of their cells and beat them. The incident makes the front page under the headline “Bloody Christmas.” Exley volunteers to testify against White and his partner to the grand jury, winning the promotion he covets.

Lt. Smith gets White off the hook so the officer can serve on a special detail to strong-arm organized crime from moving in on L.A. The bodies of gangsters start piling up all over the city. Vincennes is demoted to vice and told the only way to get his job at narcotics back is to make a major case. Vincennes investigates a secretive escort service known as “Fleur-De-Lis.” Exley - despised by the cops he now works with - rushes to the scene of a massacre, six victims shot dead at the Nite Owl Coffeeshop. Lt. Smith grabs the case, but allows Exley serve as his second in command.

Meanwhile, White has become infatuated with the mysterious Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a call girl who’s been made up to look like Veronica Lake. Her manager (David Strathairn) is a millionaire investor with ties throughout the city. The Night Owl Massacre is pinned on three Black youths, but even after Exley tracks them down and kills them, he begins to have doubts they were responsible. The investigations of Exley, White and Vincennes soon intersect, and in each case, lead them back to the LAPD.

Production history
Shortly before L.A. Confidential hit bookstores in 1990, author James Ellroy received word from his publisher that the film rights to his novel had been sold to Warner Bros. The men broke into hysterical laughter. At five hundred pages, over one hundred characters, a timeline that spanned eight years and a labyrinth of a plot that unfolded in the minds of its three protagonists – “Bad white men doing bad things in the name of authority,” as Ellroy summarized his fiction - the publisher and writer agreed that the book was unfilmable.

The studio reached the same conclusion. Then Curtis Hanson entered the picture. Hanson had toiled in Hollywood for close to twenty years as a screenwriter and director for hire. His latest film - The River Wild - starred Meryl Streep and was considered a step up in prestige. Given his choice of several high profile projects, Hanson recalled, “I’d always wanted to make a movie about L.A., to deal with this city at that magic moment in the ‘50s when the dream of L.A. was being bulldozed to make way for all the people that were coming here in pursuit of the very dream that was being destroyed.” He wanted to make a film version of L.A. Confidential.

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland was also a fan of James Ellroy and lobbied Warner Bros. for the adaptation. The studio notified him that Hanson had been signed to write and direct. Undeterred, Helgeland sought out the filmmaker as he was editing The River Wild. Both men shared an enthusiasm for Ellroy’s fiction, and believed they knew how to adapt L.A. Confidential. “Basically, to remove every scene from the book that didn’t have the three main cops in it, and then to work from those scenes out,” Helgeland revealed.

After spending two years and seven drafts on the script with Helgeland, Hanson sought financing. He made a presentation consisting of fifteen vintage postcards and photographs of L.A. mounted on poster board, taking his audience from the glamorous facade of the city to its hidden side. His first pitch was to Arnon Milchan, principal of New Regency Enterprises. Milchan hadn’t read the script, but recognized Hanson’s enthusiasm and agreed to finance the picture at $40 million.

For the roles of Bud White and Ed Exley, Hanson “wanted people that the audience could discover as the story went along, in the same way I discovered the characters as I read the book.” The director had seen Romper Stomper and cast a virtually unknown actor named Russell Crowe as White. Another little known Australian – Guy Pearce – was awarded the role of Exley. With a more familiar face in Kevin Spacey selected to play “a movie star among cops,” Jack Vincennes, shooting commenced in Los Angeles in May 1996.

Following enthusiastic response at the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, L.A. Confidential opened in the U.S. in September 1997. It garnered critical praise and five different national boards of review proclaimed it the best film of the year. Nine Academy Award nominations followed, including Best Picture. Kim Basinger did win Best Supporting Actress, while Helgeland & Hanson were awarded Best Adapted Screenplay, but Titanic became the motion picture sensation of its time, and the 2 ½ hour, densely layered film noir never managed to catch on with audiences.

Opinion
With cinematographer Dante Spinotti and production designer Jeannine Oppewall, Curtis Hanson went to great lengths to avoid the familiar look and feel of mysteries set in the ‘30s or ‘40s, opting instead of recreate a postwar Los Angeles that was looking ahead to its future. The depth of Ellroy’s morally complex, gratuitously violent and ceaselessly entertaining narrative combined with Hanson’s progressive design and newfound affinity for actors rate L.A. Confidential as one of the key films of the 1990s.

Helgeland & Hanson’s colorful adaptation sidesteps nearly every known cliché of the detective genre, moving at breakneck pace from a sleazy journalist, to freeway construction, to an uptight detective who questions Johnny Stompanato & Lana Turner, to an LAPD hit squad. Somewhere in there, the portrait of a metropolis takes shape in all its glamour and deceit. The cast – headed by Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce in career making roles – is easily one of the decade’s finest, while Jerry Goldsmith composed a rousing musical score to match.

Jeffrey Anderson at Combustible Celluloid writes, “In some cases, a filmmaker can live an entire career by flipping a coin. Curtis Hanson has been working steadily in Hollywood for over 20 years, with nothing but exploitative thrillers and ‘B’ movies — his coin had come up tails. Now, in 1997, he has finally hit heads. L.A. Confidential is a big, long movie, full of great costumes and sets. You could call it a huge epic, but it’s also a scrappy movie, full of energy as well as style.”

“Not since Chinatown has a modern noir film been able to captivate on this level, and while it falls just short of being the artistic masterpiece that Roman Polanski had been able to deliver, it’s difficult to imagine improving LA Confidential to make it any more engaging or satisfying. It’s gutsy, gritty and perfectly paced, much like the best of the film noir classics that were being made during the era the film is set. In the end, it’s really about how to tell a story that makes L.A. Confidential heads and shoulders above other cop thrillers of its era,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

John Crewson at The Onion A.V. Club writes, “As the story unfolds, carefully and elaborately, what develops is not just a remarkably intricate crime tale but a brilliant and compassionate story of people who struggle to rise above their flawed nature. This may be the best movie of the year; it’s definitely one of the greatest crime films of all time.”

© Joe Valdez