WEIRDLAND: James Ellroy's legacy, Kyle Chandler (Homefront, Mulholland Falls, FNL)

Wednesday, March 05, 2014

James Ellroy's legacy, Kyle Chandler (Homefront, Mulholland Falls, FNL)

World War II is finally over & the boys are coming home (River Run, Ohio). However, the world around them is changing & life will never be the same again. Everything appears to be rosy for Hank Metcalf though, as he is coming home to marry his sweetheart Sarah (who is secretly in love with Jeff, Hank's brother).

Kyle Chandler as Jeff Metcalf and Alexandra Wilson as Sarah Brewer in ABC's "Homefront" (1991–1993)

Charlie Hailey promised to marry is girlfriend Ginger Szabo (Tammy Lauren) when he came home, but instead married Caroline while he was in England. He's convinced that Caroline wants the same things out of life he does, a large family full of kids & a middle class life.

Kelly Rutherford plays bartender/widow Judy Owens. The conniving Caroline never wants to have any children & loves money above all else. In its two season 'Homefront' covered topics such as: racism, the fight to unionize, divorce, the fight for equal rights for African Americans, women trying to break the glass ceiling in the work place, interracial marriage, the Holocaust, prejudice between the social classes, & of course what life was like for the veterans who had made it back to the home front.

-What can you tell us about your new project, the second LA Quartet?

-I’m about to finish the first volume, called Perfidia –my biggest book– which will be published in Britain this fall. The new quartet takes characters both fictional and real, major and minor, from the first quartet and the trilogy, but places them in LA during the Second World War. It’s the month of Pearl Harbor, 6-29 December 1941.

-Will you ever write a TV drama?

-I think Deadwood and Mad Men were intermittently quite wonderful, but often shoddy and veered into incoherence. I saw one or two episodes of The Wire and thought it was bullsh*t. Bad writing. And I have no sympathy for the underclass. I was hired to adapt LA Confidential for TV last summer, but it didn’t sell.

-You sound like you’re thinking about your legacy…

-I want to leave a great literary legacy. I will leave legal documents so no one can ever co-opt my characters or write an Ellroy knock-off book, like when Robert B Parker finished a Raymond Chandler novel. I came of age when being a writer was a big deal. Now everyone’s a writer, due to the internet. Half the people in LA are writing screenplays that’ll never get made. I want to secure my literary legacy despite being more and more flummoxed by cyberspace, the internet and the dissolution of the civil contract. Source: m.shortlist.com

Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Kyle Chandler and Treat Williams in 'Mulholland Falls' (1996) directed by Lee Tamahori

-"I had recently become a fan of James Ellroy. And I thought what if we could put some of that Ellroy feel into this story... but it seems like Americans really don't dig that kind of genre anymore. Sort of like the western. I think if you want to do that kind of genre now, it's got to be reinvented as a modern film, with a modern spin on it to attract an audience..." -"Along Came A Filmmaker - New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori for Venice Magazine" (2001) by Alex Simon

Although it supposedly takes place in the 1950s, and although it seems vaguely influenced by James Ellroy’s historical novels about Los Angeles, 'Mulholland Falls' is visually indistinguishable from the world imagined by Towne and Polanski. Like 'Chinatown', it deals with police violence and official corruption (the murder is committed inside the United States Army’s nuclear testing program), but it nevertheless remains sympathetic toward the Los Angeles Police Department— especially toward the “hat squad,” an elite quartet of plainclothesmen who drive around the city in a convertible, beating up gangsters. Aside from administering vigilante justice, the chief function of these four tough guys is to light cigarettes with Zippos and model a peacock collection of suits and accessories. -"More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts" (2008) by James Naremore

Kyle Chandler thwarts 'Mad' man Jon Hamm (2011): 'Mad Men' star Jon Hamm lost previous Emmy races for being too emotionally reserved, but in 2011 he submitted 'The Suitcase,' in which he weeps, gets drunk, and mourns.

It seemed like it would finally be his year, but 'Friday Night Lights' coach Kyle Chandler staged a come-from-behind victory nobody saw coming. Source: www.goldderby.com

And out of nowhere came “Friday Night Lights” leading man Kyle Chandler, whose work episode after episode, season after season, established Coach Eric Taylor as the best on-screen dad since Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, to win the thing.

Chandler was so unprepared for the win that he didn’t write a speech (and, as a result, forgot to thank co-star Connie Britton until after his microphone was turned off). Source: www.hitfix.com

"I’d watch all these old black-and-white films on TV, whether it was John Wayne, Cary Grant, or Clark Gable, and get completely lost in them. My father died when I was 14. Once he passed away, I lost that father figure, but I had those figures on the screen. Most of those old movies are based on the good guy versus the bad guy, so I’d go out there and play the good guy." -Kyle Chandler

-On 'Early Edition' you averted disasters thanks to a prophetic newspaper. If you got the tabloids a day early, which celebrities would you try to prevent from making a fool of themselves?

-Kyle Chandler: God almighty. I don’t check on the tabloids, so I only know of the big ones that are always interrupting my news. Maybe I’d give some marital advice to some of ’em.

Kyle Chandler's Got Game: -"I get to bring so much of my own experience as a husband and a dad — the love and the anger, the conversation and cooperation, the knowing when to take the lead and when to give in — it's all there. But it's still pretend. Oh, man, if in real life I was as cool and suave as Coach Taylor and had all the answers, things would be easier."

-How is being in a marriage like being part of a football team?

Kyle Chandler: -You can't just have one star — it's a team effort. To make it work, you've got to be honest and keep a dialogue going. My wife Kathryn, we trust each other to the nth degree. Hmm, unless she's been lying to me this whole time. Marriage is hard work period. My greatest concern in life is my relationship to my wife and my kids. One way I differ from my character, Coach Taylor, is that I never would have taken this faraway job without my wife’s consent.

-Does it ever get tiresome to play such a good, decent guy? Do you sometimes wish that Eric would just do something totally terrible and bad-guy for once?

-Yes, most definitely. Every actor wants to be everybody — play all the roles. Eric’s not supposed to do any wrong. But I like it when he fouls up and does wrong. And I’ve got plenty, just plenty, of background in that — in real life. Source: www.redbookmag.com

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