The Elusive Film Adaptation of White Jazz

White Jazz is the concluding novel of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet. Structured as the first-person reminiscences of the feverous ex-detective and Mob enforcer Dave Klein looking back on his violent career in the LAPD, White Jazz is a difficult and controversial novel. While the material may be alienating to some readers, if you can tap into the rhythm of Klein’s thinking and the apocalyptic noir tone, then you will find White Jazz to be an extraordinary, visceral experience. David Peace once said ‘White Jazz was the Sex Pistols for me. It reinvented crime writing and I realised that, if you want to write the best crime book, then you have to write better than Ellroy.’

It should come as no surprise that there has been talk of a film adaptation of White Jazz for years, and it should be equally unsurprising that no adaptation has ever come to fruition. While this is a stunningly visual novel, the plotting is complex and the characters brutal. Perhaps not standard material for your average Hollywood studio. Then again, note Ellroy’s own words about L.A. Confidential:

Now if Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland could go ahead and make a critically and commercially successful adaptation of L.A. Confidential, gloriously proving Ellroy wrong in the process, and only missing out on the Best Picture Oscar because the gutless Academy shamefully gave that bauble to Titanic instead, then perhaps there was hope we could see White Jazz on the silver screen. In fact, the idea of a film adaptation of White Jazz had been gestating prior to the triumphant 1997 release of L.A. Confidential, and its genesis lay in the production of a now forgotten film.

Mulholland Falls is a tough and competent noir thriller. Set in early 1950s LA, Nick Nolte plays the leader of the ‘Hat Squad’, a four man LAPD detective team who use rough justice to deter organised crime figures from gaining a foothold in the City of Angels. If this seems vaguely familiar to Ellroy readers, then be aware there are many more similarities between the film and his writing (which I won’t go into here). But if anyone wants a thorough breakdown of how Ellroy’s work has been shamelessly plundered for the screen, do follow this Reddit thread on the similarities between the second season of True Detective and The Big Nowhere (1998). Nolte’s assistant on Mulholland Falls was the future film producer Greg Shapiro. In this interview for the LA Times, Nolte cheerfully discusses how he and Shapiro ‘stole’ Ellroy material for Mulholland Falls:

“We got into Ellroy’s books,” he says. “But after a while we had stolen so much that I said, ‘Greg, call Ellroy.’ Ellroy answers the phone and says, ‘Dog, here.’ ‘Cause he calls himself Dog. Greg explained who he was and what we were doing. Ellroy said, ‘Well, what are you taking?’ Greg had the quotes down. This line and this line.

 “And I said, ‘Give me the phone. James, it’s Nick Nolte. Here’s what we’ve taken so far. I think we’re right at the edge of taking too much.’ Ellroy said, ‘Look, I’ll meet you at the Pacific Dining Car in three days at eight o’clock.'”

Ellroy never received a writing credit for Mulholland Falls and the film never garnered much critical attention, although Roger Ebert was one of a minority of critics who admired it. Even in its title it was unlucky, as it would be eclipsed a few years later by David Lynch’s critically lauded Mulholland Drive (try typing Mulholland into your search engine and see what the predictive text gives you). Nevertheless, the meeting of Ellroy, Shapiro and Nolte would prove productive. Shortly thereafter, the three men were in discussions to do a film adaptation of White Jazz, with Nolte in the role of Dave Klein. Nolte briefly appears with Ellroy in the documentary Feast of Death (2001). He can be seen walking into the Pacific Dining Car, while Ellroy is holding court with his contacts in the LAPD. We can assume it was during this period that Nolte and Ellroy were working on White Jazz, and reports from back then suggest the project was developing strongly. Acclaimed cinematographer Robert Richardson was due to make his directorial debut with the film. John Cusack and Uma Thurman joined the cast. In the production notes of The Rules of Attraction (2002), Shapiro’s bio confidently states that the film was finished! However, in reality, the project soon ran into difficulty. In the brief glimpse I saw of various drafts of the screenplay and correspondence about the film at the Ellroy archive in South Carolina, I could tell there was tension between Shapiro and Ellroy. Shapiro raised issues about the financing and stated that everyone would have to work for less money. Ellroy responded irritably by scribbling obscenities next to Shapiro’s name in the letters he received. In any event the film was not well-conceived; several drafts had a contemporary setting which was confusing and robbed the story of much of its texture. Although he had been keen to adapt his novel at first, Ellroy eventually left the project. But the film did not die with his departure. The screenwriting/directing siblings Joe and Matthew Carnahan began developing the script for Warner Independent Pictures with George Clooney set to star (Clooney as Dave Klein really?). Joe Carnahan said of the adapted screenplay, ‘It’s, to me, what that book always was – the point of departure from the Eisenhower ’50s to the psychedelic freakshow, Manson ’60s. It’s a total combination of the two with a heavy, heavy voice-over narration, this kind of classic noir.’ The Carnahan script was available on SimplyScripts for a while. After downloading and reading a copy, I have to hand it to the Carnahan’s, they really did capture the essence of the novel. Although neither Dudley Smith or Ed Exley appear in the script to avoid confusion with a separate film project (L.A. Confidential 2 which thankfully never saw the light of day), the Carnahan’s seemed to take inspiration from a scene in the novel where Klein is heavily drugged and awakes to find himself watching a snuff film in which he is the star. To his horror, Klein sees his intoxicated onscreen self commit a grisly murder. In this film within a novel, Klein uses technical screenwriting terms, ‘Cut to’ and ‘Zooming in’, to describe what his character is doing onscreen. In the Carnahan screenplay, all of the action is described by the first-person narration of Klein. Take the scene below where Klein murders the witness Sanderline Johnson by throwing him out the window of a hotel room:

Through present tense and unusual ‘ME’ cuing of dialogue, the Carnahans brilliantly convey Klein’s nightmarish, surreal viewpoint in their metafictional writing which in its innovative style pays tribute to another classic film noir. However, as much as I admire the Carnahan’s script, it seems unlikely that this experimental work made the film adaptation more likely to happen (quite the opposite I suspect). The project floundered and all that remains is White Jazz’s threadbare ‘in development’ entry on IMDB, waiting to come alive again one day.

Still, if there’s a happy ending to be gleaned from this catalogue of missed opportunities and unfinished projects, it is that Carnahan’s overlooked but wonderfully bizarre, dazzling script is, in its unique way, a fine tribute to Ellroy’s novel.