James Ellroy Says He Can Now ‘Blow Off’ Curtis Hanson’s ‘LA Confidential’ Film Adaptation: ‘I Think It’s Turkey At Its Highest’

James Elroy, the author of LA confidentialappeared at the LA Times Festival of Books where he talked about the film adaptation of his book.

“People love the film LA confidentialElroy said about it Los Angeles Times. “I think the turkey is in top form. I think Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger are impotent. The director [Curtis Hanson] died, so I can now discredit the film.

LA confidential was released in 1997 and not only received rave reviews but was also a box office hit. The film won two Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay and a Best Supporting Actress award for Kim Basinger.

Ellroy was critical of Hanson’s adaptation of his work, and after the film director’s death, the author wrote an article discussing their differences.

“In 1953 I made up a story about LA and filled it with men and women in extremis. Curtis Hanson rearranged my world and populated it with men and women less extreme than mine,” Ellroy wrote in the diversity Tribute, released in 2016. “My storylines have been shrunk and reassembled, my time frame compressed, my love stories retriangulated. I created a world on paper. Curtis Hanson remade it for the film. It was my world, but his world, but my world to the point where all ownership faded and was lost. My sense of drama and Curtis’s sense of drama were always at odds.”

A sequel series LA confidential was purchased by Ellroy and New Regency in 2013. CBS ordered a pilot for the series in 2018, with Sarah Jones as the female lead. A sequel was reportedly in the works The wrestlers with Crowe and Guy Pearce reprising their roles and Chadwick Boseman as the young cop. Filmmaker Brian Helgeland said they “worked the whole thing out,” but “Warner [Bros.] passed.”