31 Days of Horror: ‘Inland Empire’, The Black Dahlia case

31 Days of Horror: ‘Inland Empire’ - an incredible showcase of Lynch’s most unsettling impulses:

Laura Dern in "Inland Empire" (2006) directed by David Lynch

"The only reliable constant throughout the film’s constantly shifting nightmare logic is Laura Dern, whose incredible performance is doubly impressive given that Dern has stated explicitly that she has no idea what the film is “about.” Inland takes place in a cruel, alluring Hollywood of the mind that recalls Mulholland Dr. (whose principal cast shows up here voicing a family of talking sitcom rabbits), but there are also callbacks to Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and possibly others, making Inland feel like a demented greatest-hits reel of sorts.

Over its colossal three-hour runtime, though, it becomes clear that Inland is not a mere restatement, but rather a digitized remix of Lynch’s pet themes and visual ideas, one that accentuates the most corrupting aspects of its cheap digital photography." Source: www.soundonsight.org

Poster of "Highway 301" (1950) directed by Andrew L. Stone

Poster of "Lost Highway" (1997) directed by David Lynch

FILMMAKER: There are a lot of film noir elements that come up in Lost Highway. In the late '40s, film noirs were considered B-movies, What is it about those particular movies is so fascinating now?

LYNCH: There's a beguiling and magnetic mood. There's so much darkness, and there's so much room to dream. They're mysteries and there are people in trouble, and uneasiness.

FILMMAKER: I thought that at certain times Patricia Arquette looked like Elizabeth Short, the victim of the real-life L.A. noir case, the Black Dahlia. Have you ever read a book called Severed?

LYNCH: No.

FILMMAKER: It's a book by John Gilmore where he says that he solved the Black Dahlia case.

LYNCH: I'll be darned. I talked to John St. John

FILMMAKER: Jigsaw John?

LYNCH: Exactly. We had dinner a couple of times. He was in charge of that case until he retired. Then he died, unfortunately. But he had a lot of information on her.

FILMMAKER: He was one of the sources for John Gilmore's book.

LYNCH: I'll bet he was.

FILMMAKER: What do you find interesting about that case?

LYNCH: Well, it's unsolved. And I love mysteries. And this thing just has this kind of other-worldly quality to it. The way she was killed a large part of it, and the fact that no one has ever come forward. They still don't know much about the case. Source: www.lynchnet.com

-John Gilmore: If David Lynch were to have a hand in The Black Dahlia, that would probably be a really good interpretation. I think he would do it rather well. It would be beautiful. But one of the problems facing David is... Lost Highway really didn't do anything for me.

-Yes, I went to see that film, and I wouldn't say it was so much esoteric as it was merely vague. But that was what occurred, and he was afraid, supposedly, to do something as stark as this. And so he's facing that problem, a typical Hollywood problem.

-Oh, it would have been a wonderful marriage, David Lynch and The Black Dahlia. He could have gotten back into the way he used to be, but would have done it in such a way that people would realise he just had a bad day with Lost Highway. Source: www.johngilmore.com

Tom Neal in "Detour" directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

John Gilmore: It wasn’t inspiration that focused my attention on the Black Dahlia case — although curiosity and fascination played their parts. It was a matter of financial necessity. It was ’63 and tough-guy actor Tom Neal wanted to produce and star in a movie based on the case. I was living in Hollywood, writing screenplays and stories, and trying to keep my head above water. The deal with Tom offered cash up front and a big carrot on the other end when he raised the financing “to get the cocksucker on a roll,” as he put it. Tom knew a retired cop who gave him information about my father, about his connections in LAPD and his past ties to L.A.’s former mayor, Fletcher Bowron. I took the “inside” door into LAPD and forged my associations with officers and detectives in homicide. After numerous ups and downs, the project with Tom collapsed almost two years later, when he was convicted of murdering his own wife in Palm Springs and sent to prison. Actor/director Jack Webb of Dragnet fame, closely associated with members of LAPD’s homicide, encouraged my unwillingness to give up on the case and prodded me to “keep hammering at the facts.”

I met Elizabeth Short in late ’46 when I was 11 years old. Elizabeth Short’s father abandoned his car on the Charlestown Bridge in Massachusetts, and seemed to vanish—to disappear. This was just after he lost his business during the Depression. Phoebe (Elizabeth's mother) worked as a bookkeeper whenever she could find employment, but for the next four years the family mostly depended on Mother’s Aid and government handouts. Phoebe Short was shocked when she received a letter from Cleo. He said he was in Northern California working in the shipyards, and apologized for leaving the way he did. He tried to explain in the letter that he had not been able to face up to the troubles, but knew that in his absence, if it appeared that he deserted or was dead, Phoebe would be eligible for more support. He asked if she might now allow him to return to the family. Phoebe answered her husband with an emphatic 'no'. She did not consider him her “husband.”

Almost daily Beth met new servicemen and went on dates, but she liked to think she was keeping a special place “in her heart” for Gordan Fickling. Several guys fell in love with Beth in Miami Beach before the season ended. “She was a natural vamp,” Sharon Givens says, “one who brings out the wolf in all men, no exceptions, and she didn’t even have to try.”

Beth met a very handsome Army Air Corps lieutenant, a pilot who had taken her to dinner twice. They danced at the Canteen, but she was also dating him on the outside because she wasn’t an “official” junior hostess. His name was Gordan Fickling and he’d come up from Long Beach. He had the use of a car and he’d take her to the beach and the amusement pier, or to Knott’s Berry Farm for fried chicken.

This sentiment changed on New Year’s Eve of 1945, when flyer Major Matt Gordan stepped into her life. A few days later the major asked her to be his wife. “I’m so much in love, I’m sure it shows,” she wrote to her mother. “Matt is so wonderful, not like other men... and he asked me to marry him.” Phoebe was very surprised with this news, but impressed with the photograph her daughter sent of herself and the handsome pilot. Matt gave Beth a gold wristwatch that was set with diamonds as a pre-engagement gift, and wrote to his own sister-in-law that Beth “is an educated and refined girl whom I plan to marry.”

Ann Toth portrayed Beth in a softer light: "In the first place, she didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke, because after all, living with her, I knew, and she always came in at a decent hour, 11 o’clock, or around there. She never came in later than that, and naturally if she was supposed to be sexy and do other stuff, there is a lot more that goes to it, rather than if a decent girl - there is drinking, smoking, wining and dining, and a few other things that go with it. I don’t think she was trying to be sexy."

Beth became a regular at the Medford Café, a late-night hangout in the Square. “It would usually be after midnight when she’d come in the café,” recalls Joe Sabia, at the time attending Leland Powers School of Radio. He had wanted to fight in the war but was 4-F due to a disability. “She was like a shadow figure,” he says. “There was this void—something missing.” A few days later a telegram arrived from Matt’s mother. Muriel watched as Beth tore it open, saying it was probably about the wedding. Beth read the telegram, then stood there, holding the piece of paper, staring at it. “It’s not going to be,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s not going to be...” She handed Muriel the telegram. Her sister read it out loud: “Received word War Department. Matt killed in plane crash on way home from India. Our deepest sympathy is with you. Pray it isn’t true.” She wrote an urgent letter to Matt’s mother, asking if she could possibly send Beth enough money to “start a new life over again.” She had waited faithfully for Matt, but their future together had been taken away by the war.”

A new movie was playing around the corner, The Blue Dahlia, with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Two soldiers started kidding around and called Beth “the Black Dahlia.” Even the drugstore proprietor and his son were amused by the name. A.L. Landers owned the pharmacy, and often winked to his son when Beth showed up. “She’d come into the drugstore frequently,” Landers says. “She’d usually be wearing a two-piece beach costume which left her midriff bare. Or she’d wear black lacy things. Her hair was jet black and she liked to wear it high. She was popular with the men who came in the drugstore and they got to calling her the Black Dahlia.” Other servicemen began looking for her. “Has she come in today?” they’d ask Landers, “the Black Dahlia?”

“Every few days or so I’d see this girl coming past the window, looking at the shoes. She’d come in and she liked to try on the most expensive ones.” Martin Lewis co-managed two Hollywood shoe shops, one on Cahuenga south of the boulevard. “We were down from Macy Jewelers,” he says. “She would come in after that, trying on shoes, and I’d be helping her if there wasn’t anyone else in the store. We’d flirt a little and one thing would lead to another. Maybe three pair of shoes I let her have, and I loaned her money to pay rent — on the second time we drove up Outpost after I’d closed the Leeds store. We got in the back seat that time, but she said it was her time of the month.” “She was running around in a loose circle, with people that were broken up, or not working. I don’t mean employment as we think of it, but getting settled somehow within the law, you know, being legal. She did gravitate in that way, and ran around getting rides and being picked up by men to get from one place to another. She had a way of walking — of advertising her ass, certainly drawing attention to it. “I know she wasn’t a tramp, and I do not have any way to say that she was—expect that was how I wanted to see her, even while another part of me was so drawn to her in a way that had nothing to do with any sort of sex.”

She still hadn’t managed an income on her own and the small but frequent loans made to her by Hal and others had quickly mounted to a good-sized sum. Nobody for a minute thought they would get their money back. Despite her optimism and the assurances of booking agent Fred Sherman, whom she’d met through Barbara, Beth was walking a thin line, trying to look the part— measuring up to the flash and verve she generated. Sherman planned to have Beth meet an associate of actor Bob Steele, who was producing at an independent studio. Sherman, too, advanced Beth some cash for expenses and some additional clothes that were requested for a possible photo session. There was no hope for Hal McGuire, who found that following Beth around was as hectic as “jumping like a fast bouncing ball in a pinball game — that’s how she was living.”

“She was smart, an intelligent girl,” Phillip Jeffers (the 'war bond boy wonder') says, “but she seemed content to just float.” One night they were laughing and joking and Beth became very quiet. A sadness came over her that he did not understand. “What is it that’s bothering you?” Phillip Jeffers asked. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” She stared for a moment. Her eyes were watery. “Let’s enjoy today, right now,” she said. “Enjoy what we have in life!”

Actor Kevin Wilkerson remembers when Beth moved into Mark Hansen’s and started showing up at the Florentine Gardens. “She was being called the Black Dahlia, but my girlfriend said that Mark was calling her the black-haired eight ball. Mark Hansen was planning the Beautiful Girl Revue for 1947 and Ann said he’d promised Beth a part in it, featured in a gardenia or a big flower opening and she’d be in the heart of it, wearing a thin G-string, and a flesh colored flower in her crotch. She should be a stripper, Mark was telling her. He talked about the Flesh and Fantasy revue, where she’d wear high heels and ankle straps like Ann Jeffreys in the Dillinger movie.” Hansen gave a lot of big show business names their “break” and he was quick to publicize the beauties he’d made —Yvonne deCarlo and Betty Hutton, Jean Wallace, Gwen Verdon, Marie ‘the body’ McDonald, and Lili St. Cyr.

Red-haired Robert Manley was soon to find himself in the worst predicament of his life. It began casually enough; he hadn’t been intending to pick up a girl. But there she was — and there was no avoiding it. He was driving on San Diego’s Broadway in his old Studebaker coupe on a business trip from L.A. Stopping at a signal, he glanced to his right as a car turned the corner. When it passed, he was looking at a very pretty blackhaired young woman standing on the corner near the Western Airlines window.“You think I’m very attractive?” she asked. He said sure, and that she knew it herself without having to ask. Then he laughed a little, too, as though they’d shared a joke. She directed him to the Frenches’ house where he parked and shut off the motor. He then asked if she wanted to have dinner with him. “I don’t have anything else to do until I make some calls in the morning,” he said. “We can have a few drinks and maybe dance.”

Myth: She worked at the Hollywood Canteen. Fact: The Hollywood Canteen closed in 1945, while Elizabeth Short didn't get to Los Angeles until late July or early August 1946, according to a time line of her life prepared by the district attorney's office, among many other sources. "Severed" claims that Elizabeth Short worked at the Hollywood Canteen as part of its attempt to link this killing to the 1944 murder of Georgette Bauerdorf. The claim in "Severed" that she met Gordon Fickling at the Hollywood Canteen is even more ridiculous. As an officer, Fickling wouldn't have been allowed inside because it was strictly for enlisted men, as any photo of the front will prove. As I say many times throughout this Web site, "Severed" is 25% mistakes and 50% fiction. For the record, when I interviewed Fickling in 1996, he said they met in Florida. Source: lmharnisch.com

Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short in "The Black Dahlia" (2006) directed by Brian De Palma

"The novel is written from Bleichert’s point of view. His whole world and seemingly all of LA eventually revolves around the Dahlia. She becomes the only motivating factor in his life. He is not the only detective in the novel who talks to Elizabeth Short (the Dahlia’s real name) and swears they will find who killed her."

"Even though the book is set in Los Angeles in 1947 with period slang and dialog, the characters were very relatable. I never felt a disconnect with their motivations. Then Ellroy makes more and more of a point that Bucky is trying to both protect and possess the Dahlia. His obsession becomes overtly sexual in nature. His desire to have sex with Elizabeth Short is so central to his motivation that other characters admit to his face that they are using it to manipulate him. He is powerless in the face of it. Reading the afterword it becomes obvious that Ellroy was projecting his Oedipal desire onto Bucky and the Dahlia. It was a disservice to the character. Instead of letting him develop in a more organic fashion, Ellroy pushes too much of himself into Bleichert. Bucky does eventually solve the Dahlia’s murder." Source: www.pajiba.com