James EllroyEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

Over the last few months, we’ve had author and James Ellory biographer Steven Powell on the show to discuss both the man himself, and the cinematic adaptations of his work. We’ve talked about Cop & L.A. Confidential, but today we’re getting to possibly the most divisive film born from Ellroy’s work: The Black Dahlia. Based on the infamous murder mystery from 1947, the film failed to find an audience when it was released in 2006, despite the big names both in front of and behind the camera, and effectively ended De Palma’s studio funded movie career. We’ll discuss the film’s time period, its cast of characters, the infamous Elizabeth Short murder and of course, the James Ellroy novel on which the film is based.

We've arrived at the penultimate film in our James Ellroy adaptation series. And luckily for us, we're joined by author of Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, Steven Powell, as we take on Curtis Hanson's 1997 masterpiece(?) LA Confidential - a film that many believe that have been robbed of the Best Picture Oscar by James Cameron's disastrous romance behemoth Titanic.

James Ellroy’s hardboiled, idiosyncratic explorations of Los Angeles police corruption and midcentury Washington power politics have earned him a worldwide following; his new novel, Perfidia (Cornerstone), is the first in a new trilogy featuring some familiar characters, including the gleefully amoral Dudley Smith. Ellroy joined us at the Bookshop in conversation with the American novelist David Vann, whose most recent book is Goat Mountain (Windmill). Warning: contains strong language. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Ellroy, the author of the bestselling L.A. Quartet novels — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz — has just concluded another high-selling set of novels: the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. Like the prior two volumes, American Tabloid and The Cold Six-Thousand, Ellroy's latest, Blood's A Rover, captures the explosive 1960s, placing Ellroy's strange characters — a Klan-raised, Yale-educated FBI agent, an ex-cop and heroin runner, and a wheelman for divorce lawyers — in the middle of that decade's fierce battles over race, sex, and crime. The great Ellroy visited Zócalo to ballyhoo, consecrate, deconstruct and ridicule his bestselling new novel, and to reflect on the nature of his historical fiction and the America it invents. He chats with his girlfriend, writer Erica Schickel.