‘It made me want to throw up’: When novelists hate the film adaptations of their books

As James Ellroy continues to bad-mouth the 1997 adaptation of his hit noir novel ‘LA Confidential’, Geoffrey Macnab salutes Hollywood’s long history of writers who signed over the film rights to their books, only to be embarrassed by the resulting movies

‘Kubrick had no apparent understanding of the genre’: Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ (Shutterstock)

I think it’s turkey of the highest form,” the US crime writer James Ellroy recently said about Curtis Hanson’s 1997 movie adaptation of his 1980 novel, LA Confidential. Ellroy had decided he could be frank because its director Hanson is long since dead.

It’s easy enough to understand why the novelist didn’t like the film. Ellroy’s books come from very dark places. They’re morbid, violent and full of seedy, voyeuristic sex. By contrast, Hanson’s movie – which most critics loved and won multiple Oscar nominations – was shot in iridescent colour and was strangely upbeat in spite of a storyline dealing with dope, rackets, prostitution and extreme police corruption. The film seemed to take its tempo from Danny DeVito’s cheery voiceover narration, the actor playing the editor of a very trashy, National Enquirer-style tabloid.

Ellroy also didn’t like two of the film’s leads, complaining that Russell Crowe was “impotent” as the rugged cop Wendell “Bud” White, and that he didn’t think much of Kim Basinger in the role of high-class call girl, Lynn Bracken. The real problem, though, was that Hanson made the three main characters – Office White and the detectives played by Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey – so likeable that audiences ended up identifying with them as if they were traditional movie heroes. Ellroy had created them as deeply flawed characters. He certainly didn’t want them to be ingratiating.