Noirish settings: David Lynch's Alphabet, De Palma's The Black Dahlia

Fox has officially greenlit its first event series, handing out the order to Wayward Pines and tapping Matt Dillon to star in the drama from M. Night Shyamalan and Chad Hodge.


The drama, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Blake Crouch, Pines is described as a thriller in the vein of Twin Peaks.


The drama revolves around Ethan Burke (Dillon), a Secret Service agent who arrives in the bucolic town of Wayward Pines, Id., on a mission to find two missing federal agents. But instead of answers, Ethan's investigation only turns up more questions. Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the life he knew, from the husband and father he was, until he must face the terrifying reality that he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com


Wayward Pines isn’t the first show attempting to navigate the same treacherous road of plot twists and turns – set against the backdrop of a Noir-ish setting with supernatural overtones – as Twin Peaks did in the 1990s. Source: screenrant.com


Twin Peaks Cooper Dream: The iconic dream sequence that launched a cult TV show.


This weekend, as part of BAM's Booed at Cannes film series, they'll be showing two of David Lynch's most sublime works: Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And although the former is a steamy and violent fairytale road movie about a couple on the outskirts of the law, and the latter, a psychologically terrifying mystery of sordid debauchery lurking beneath a placid facade, they both showcase different elements of Lynch's cinematic sensibility. His obsessions and auteurististic traits resound through both with the haunting tone he's known and loved for. Source: www.blackbookmag.com


Add one more film to the list – David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Early in Fire Walk With Me, an FBI chief (Lynch) presents two FBI agents (Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland) with a message in code. The message is, in fact, a woman dressed in red, with a matching red wig and a "sour" facial expression. She wears a blue rose on her lapel.


Blue flower imagery in Hollywood films goes at least as far back as 1946's The Blue Dahlia (directed by George Marshall from a screenplay by Raymond Chandler), the title of which was borrowed by the press to describe the most famous lust-crime of 1947, the murder of demi-prostitute Elisabeth Short, aka "The Black Dahlia."


The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma’s fictionalized version of the Elizabeth Short murder investigation (adapted faithfully from James Ellroy’s book of the same name), is as dark a film noir as Hollywood has produced in recent years. Maybe not as dark as 1992's Fire Walk With Me, but dark and sexually perverse enough to make the recent Hollywoodland (the conspiracy film where there is no conspiracy) look like a kiddies story. Director Robert Wise once told Bright Lights that for a noir to be truly noir, it had to be shot in black and white.


The Black Dahlia is, of course, shot in color (by Obsession cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond), but black and white cinematography is skillfully woven into De Palma’s tapestry throughout. Elizabeth Short’s screen tests are black and white. So is a stag film containing clues to the victim’s murder. Source: brightlightsfilm.com


This being quintessential noir, “Black Dahlia” is sexually explicit in depicting a romantic triangle between Bucky, Kay, and Madeleine, who may or may not have known Betty Short and who may or may not be bisexual. The sexual attraction between Bucky and Madeleine is depicted in particularly steamy way in a number of scenes. As De Palma promised during production, Hilary Swank, known until now for her tough gender-bending Oscar roles (“Boys Don't Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby”) is utterly credible as a noirish femme fatale. Source: www.emanuellelevy.com


The spiritual deflowering is all Bucky's. As he watches Short's screen tests, he becomes entranced by her ghostly image, and pursues justice in hopes of reclaiming her goodness and strengthening his. Like the heroes of other obsessive necrophiliac love stories—including Laura, Vertigo and De Palma's own Body Double—Bucky works through, and also evades, his dawning sense of helplessness by falling in love with a murdered woman and figuratively trying to resurrect her. It's a doomed quest. As Bucky burrows deeper into the city's underbelly, Short's murder begins to seem a redundant postscript —the annihilation of a woman who was already dead in spirit— and a harbinger of Bucky's own journey.


Bucky will see that dead woman as long as he lives. Justice won't bring her back to life, and no matter how diligently he tries to submerge that dreadful image—to forget and heal and move on—it will remain in his memory and erupt when he least expects it. "Nothing stays buried forever," Bucky tells us early in the The Black Dahlia; by the end, he realizes just how right he was. Source: www.slantmagazine.com

Film Noir Classics IV DVD, L.A. Confidential into TV Sequel

"Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, The Film Foundation and Turner Classic Movies again partner to present the fourth collection in this series, Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics IV. These five films, all fully restored and remastered and never before released on DVD, showcase the work of directors Joseph H. Lewis, Robert Rossen, Gordon Douglas and Alfred L. Werker—all of them masters at creating taut and atmospheric visions from morally-strained hard-boiled stories. The collection also highlights the genre-defining cinematography of Burnett Guffey and George E. Diskant, and iconic performances by film noir mainstays Dick Powell, Evelyn Keyes, Lee J. Cobb, Dennis O'Keefe and Edmond O'Brien, who excelled at revealing the raw heart that beat beneath noir's tough exteriors."


Evelyn Keyes and Dick Powell on the set of "Johnny O'Clock" (1947) directed by Robert Rossen


Johnny O'Clock (Dick Powell) is a junior partner in a posh casino with Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez), but is senior in the eyes of Nelle (Ellen Drew)—Guido's wife and Johnny's ex. This love triangle leads to a web of complications, leaving Police Inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb) to unravel the threads of deceit and a murdered casino employee's sister (Evelyn Keyes) to tug on Johnny's heartstrings before it's too late.



Dick Powell as Johnny O'Clock and Evelyn Keyes as Nancy Hobson share some intensely erotic moments in "Johnny O'Clock"


Applying Raymond Chandler's dictum that a good plot is an excuse for a series of exciting scenes, rookie director Robert Rossen strings together tense vignettes—brought vividly to life by cinematographer Burnett Guffey. Source: shop.tcm.com


Ella Raines in "Phantom Lady" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

-SF360: Who are the directors you gravitate toward and why?

Deanna Durbin in "Christmas Holiday" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

-Eddie Muller: Robert Siodmak is my favorite director because he, more than anyone else, understands the noir style. He’s a very seductive, suspenseful, atmospheric filmmaker. It really bugs me when people talk about noir as tough, violent pot boilers and they think it’s all like Mickey Spillane. The best noir films are spellbinding. That’s the word that comes to mind. It’s a style of filmmaking that completely complements stories about a person drawn into a situation almost against their will; they really shouldn’t go there but they can’t help themselves. The next thing you know they’re caught up in a whirlpool of sin and there’s no way out. I love when a filmmaker directs a film in exactly this way and that’s what Siodmak always did. His films have an inexorable pull—they’re not fast paced, there’s no slam-bang editing. Lynch’s films also have that quality. They draw you in and you can’t help yourself, you have the feeling that something dreadful is going to happen but you can’t stop going down that path.

-SF360: So, here’s pop quiz. Name the steamiest noir moment or scene.


-Eddie Muller: The after-shower, tic-tac-toe scene from Thieves Highway is the one stands that out for me. It was an early film I saw and I always cite it as an example of why old Hollywood movies, even with the Production Code, were more erotic than movies made today. Take Gilda: It’s the most perverted movie ever made.

-SF360: Your favorite/most lethal femme fatale?


-Eddie Muller: The women I’d travel back in time to are: Gloria Grahame, Ella Raines and Linda Darnell. Ella Raines was never really a femme fatale but I just really like her.



-SF360: How did you find your way into this niche?

-Muller: I like the films and particularly like that period of American history because I think it’s the time—mid-20th century, the span from victory in WW2 to the Kennedy assassination—when America lost its innocence. We were kings of the world because we saved the world and then when Kennedy was assassinated, it was if we lost our way and there was something horrible and corrupt at the center of our society. How that happened and how it’s reflected in the popular art of the time has always been interesting to me. Source: www.sf360.org


"The truth about Elizabeth Short is that she was a lost individual. She involved herself with a number of men, using their generosity for free dinners and money. The murder unfortunately was also a precursor to the decline of Los Angeles itself. The Black Dahlia murder is a symbol of change from what was once a young and innocent Los Angeles to a dark and gloomy Hollywood. The crime rate since World War II has increased in Los Angeles, and areas that were once considered middle-class neighborhoods have turned into rundown areas over a period of 20 years."


"What I have learned in the end is that the murder is not only a loss of a young life, it is also a loss of old-fashioned Hollywood. In the following years, race riots, immigration and civil rights have changed Los Angeles to what it is today; leaving all what was of 'Hollywoodland' behind, and bringing with it the unsolved case from a time that is gone but not forgotten." Source: dailybruin.com


In this respect, "The Black Dahlia" is one of De Palma’s most unflattering mirrors, its entirely uncompromised mise en scène in every way the stylistic equal of James Ellroy’s source novel. I had as much trouble getting into Ellroy’s fictionalization of the Elizabeth Short murder mystery until I recognized that he is, in part, a parodist, using hard-boiled, floridly macho prose to get at deeper psychological truths about human nature. He wields a pen in much the same way De Palma does a camera—to create, for both men, is to bear witness with a fervor approaching, if not attaining, the religious.


Their shared vessel is the young warrants detective Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert, a model of first-person arrogance in the novel, cast as something of an androgynous specter in De Palma’s adaptation. Embodied by a never-better Josh Hartnett, Bleichert wanders through a falsified period landscape, recalling his loss of innocence (or acknowledging his always-present corruption) through a precisely employed voiceover that casts each and every event (save for the film’s brilliantly nonredemptive final sequence) within the deceptive realm of memory. Source: www.reverseshot.com


Within 90 seconds of taking the stage, the author of "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia" had referenced sex, drugs and physical anatomy, a warm-up for the searing commentary on liberals and hipsters that was to follow. It was a refreshingly unabashed articulation of a unique worldview that has produced one of the most distinctive voices on the local literary scene. In other words, Ellroy was a perfect fit for the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series, some of the best programming currently taking place on the Glendale campus. Source: articles.glendalenewspress.com


James Ellroy’s 1990s novel L.A. Confidential was turned into an acclaimed feature starring Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger and produced by Regency. Now Ellroy and New Regency are shopping an L.A. Confidential sequel targeted for the small screen, Deadline said. Ellroy wrote the project on spec as a TV drama series, which is being pitched to broadcast and cable networks as well as emerging distribution platforms, with multiple outlets interested. The project is reportedly eyeing a straight-to-series commitment.


The sequel continues the themes and stories from L.A. Confidential, a murder mystery which examined the intersection of organized crime, police corruption, celebrity and tabloid journalism in 1950s Los Angeles.


The 1997 film, co-written and directed by Curtis Hanson, earned nine Oscar nominations, winning two awards, for best screenplay and best supporting actress (Basinger). The L.A. Confidential sequel is one of the first major projects to come out of the TV division of New Regency, which was re-started last year with the hire of Syfy’s Andrew Plotkin. It combines the company’s strategy of mining its movie library for TV series adaptations and bringing in new material.


Meanwhile, Ellroy just sold another LA-set period drama. Based on Ellroy’s 2012 novella Shakedown, the project, which has been set up at FX as a pitch, is set in the tabloid world and underbelly of Los Angeles circa the late 1950s. Source: www.panarmenian.net

"Starstruck" (2013), "The Black Dahlia", Josh Hartnett's evolution

Who Is The Black Dahlia (1975): Dramatization of Elizabeth Short's story. Starring Brooke Adams & Lucie Arnaz. In 1947 Los Angeles, a police detective tries to solve the shocking and grisly murder of 22-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose nude body was dumped in a lot after being bisected with surgical precision. The detective interviews people who knew Short, who was called "The Black Dahlia" because of the black outfits she wore. "She's a ghost and a blank page to record our fears and desires," says James Ellroy. "A post-war Mona Lisa, an L.A. quintessential." It's a real-life mystery that's inspired countless moviemakers and writers from "Double Indemnity," "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential."


Elizabeth Short was herself starstruck with her childhood idol actress/singer Deanna Durbin who passed away ten days ago. "Dottie [Elizabeth's sister], Bette and I were going to be movie stars. We were all entranced with movie stars, star struck. Spent hours talking about movie stars, about going to Hollywood. We performed using the Short's front porch as a stage. Every Friday as soon as the song sheets came out, we'd pool our money, get the latest sheets, and spend hours singing."


"Bette imitated Deanna Durbin. Walked like her, talked like her, and in my eyes sang like her." -Eleanor Kurz, Elizabeth Short's Medford neighbor and friend.


She was Elizabeth Short from Medford, Mass. Friends called her Betty. But in the headlines of the day, and ever after, she would be the Black Dahlia, inspired, it would be said, by the way she wore her hair.


She became a tabloid sensation, hot copy in a five-newspaper town. Now she has been incarnated on screen in "The Black Dahlia," a ferociously imagined fictional take on the brief life and cruel death of Elizabeth Short.


"The Black Dahlia" (2006) stars Josh Harnett and Aaron Eckhart as cops on the case, Scarlett Johanssen as the siren they both love, and as the Black Dahlia herself, Mia Kirshner.


"The myth of Elizabeth Short is this is what happens to star-struck girls from... little towns back East... who come out to big bad Hollywood with ideas of getting into movies," Harnisch said. "Terrible things happen." "Don't, don't, don't come to L.A. to become a movie-star," Ellroy said. "Fatuous dreams die hard." Source: abcnews.go.com


Josh Hartnett plays detective Bucky Bleichert in "The Black Dahlia" (2006) directed by Brian De Palma

"She needed to be here. She needed to be where it had all begun. It was late, still the store was unusually empty for a Friday night. All the Hollywood hangers-on who made Schwab's their headquarters, the has-beens and never-weres and still-to-bes who set the air abuzz with their jabber and complaints , their gossip and gloats, were nowhere to be seen. Margo made her way down the quiet main aisle and sat down at the horseshoe-shaped lunch counter in the back, which was empty apart from a man in a trenchcoat reading the late edition of the newspaper over coffee and apple pie. He had on one of those soft felt hats that were worn only by undercover detectives or men who played them in the movies, and for once in her life Margo wasn't interested in guessing which one he was." -"Starstruck" (2013) by Rachel Shukert


"The Golden Age of Hollywood –and its gritty underside– is captured with real flair in this novel... this novel evokes late-1930s Hollywood with panache. Characters are well drawn, representing common archetypes but with a twist." -School Library Journal, May 2013.


In Starstruck, novelist Rachel Shukert paints an alluring portrait of Hollywood in the 1930s: Glamorous muses in designer gowns swan around on the arms of handsome men in tuxedos. It’s all very nice until you look a little closer to notice that no one is smiling. While the view might look beautiful from afar -- much like an Impressionist painting -- up close it’s just a big, incoherent mess. In no time at all, Margaret Frobisher becomes Margo Sterling, a promising, young ingénue who is destined for stardom. But, like clockwork, unsavory rumors begin to swirl, connecting her to the missing starlet, Diana Chesterfield. There's no denying that Margo bears an uncanny resemblance to Diana -- she was even cast as Diana's replacement in the upcoming film. Some begin to speculate that Margo is looking to replace Diana altogether.


Starstruck is a clear nod in homage to Jacqueline Susann’s pulp novel, Valley of the Dolls, a seminal work that depicts the horrors of Hollywood and drug abuse. But while Dolls ultimately ends in tragedy, Starstruck has Margo rising straight to the top. The only question remains: At what cost did she get there? Shukert’s Starstruck reads like a cross between a film noir mystery novel and celebrity tabloid fodder. The ambiguity of characters’ intentions, along with the mystery behind a starlet's disappearance, will keep audiences captivated until the very end. Source: www.everydayebook.com


Josh Hartnett: "I'm not going to say that I'm a saint, that I've never done anything wrong in my life, but if you're going to find something out about me personally, at least find something that's remotely true." Hollywood actor Josh Hartnett has won 20,000 pounds ($30,000) in libel damages from a British newspaper that claimed he engaged in "steamy shenanigans" in a public area of a London hotel. The tabloid Daily Mirror claimed in a September article that Hartnett and an unknown woman had a steamy encounter in the library of the Soho Hotel that was caught on CCTV. Hartnett's lawyer says the actor plans to donate the damages money to charity. Source: seattletimes.com


Josh Hartnett's Evolution (Forever Young) video from Kendra.
Josh Hartnett's Evolution (A Look at All of His Filmography).
Soundtrack: "Forever Young" by Bob Dylan, "Someday Soon" by Wilco, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" by Elvis Presley, "Lady" by Eugene Kelly, "Ooh Wee Baby" by Darlene Love, "Just Like Honey" by The Jesus & Mary Chain, "Lady Midnight" by Leonard Cohen, "Breathless" by Jerry Lee Lewis and "Baby, Baby" by The Vibrators.

Jake Gyllenhaal attends 'Words Of War' Benefit by The Headstrong Project

Jake Gyllenhaal attending 'Words Of War' Benefit Hosted By The Headstrong Project on May 8, 2013 in New York City




Jake Gyllenhaal attended The Headstrong Project's first Words of War event in NYC last night. Along with his support, he lent his voice to the cause by reading the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen. The Headstrong Project aims to improve mental health care for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and Jake also made a monetary donation by bidding $5,000 in the auction. He was joined by pregnant Veep star Anna Chlumsky, as well as the chairman of the Headstrong Project, Zach Iscol, for the charitable night. Source: www.popsugar.com


The actor who star in 2005 war drama Jarhead, which is based on the real life experiences of US Marine Anthony Swofford, read the poem Dulce et Decorum Est by British soldier and leading World War I poet Wilfred Owen at the inaugural Words of War event for the Headstrong Project.


Gyllenhaal also presented the foundation, which provides mental healthcare and support for war veterans, with a donation of $5,000 for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing training, a psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Source: www.starpulse.com