| 23 October 2011
Based on a story by James Ellroy
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. – Edward R. Murrow
Early morning.
The sun throws gold light onto deserted South Central Avenue. Faded pink and yellow and white Spanish style houses squat next to empty parking lots and Baptist churches and auto body shops with beaters up on lifts.
Burdette and Lynley's black and white cruises.
Lynley: SLA'll be the only thing in this neighborhood up before noon.
Off Burdette's look,
Lynley: Mostly white outfit.
We pass Mex laborers trudging to work by foot and bicycle, groggy pimps in boat-length rides heading home after a long night's macking,
Stopped at a light,
Lynley: (incredulous) The fuck...?
Off his look,
Burdette: (adamant) Hell, no.
Lynley: Fuck you. First lead we've got.
Reveal Burdette and Lynley's POV:
A formation of a dozen Black Panthers running Karate drills in an empty parking lot. A line of black kids stretches out the doorway to a run-down storefront.
Lynley gets out, slides his billy-club into his belt-loop, walks toward the building. Burdette burns. Jams the cruiser into park and gets out.
INT. Black Panther Headquarters – Moments later
Burdette and Lynley, being led down a narrow hallway by a steely black man, Cochese Pierce.
They move through the line of kids snaking into the building. At the front of the line, we see that the kids are filing into a makeshift cafeteria.
Cochese: Army fights on its stomach... we give out a hundred breakfasts a day... What don't you see in here?
Burdette taps his canvassing sheet,
Burdette: Brother, all we wanna know is--
Cochese: What you don't see here is a bunch of honkies and bitches in blackface playing revolutionary. When we dismantle the system you trying to maintain... won't hear nothing... won't see it coming... like sundown: one minute shit'll just be dark.
Cochese leads them further into the building,
Burdette: So you ain't seen Cinque, or any SLA--
Cochese: (to Lynley) -- Pig... 'brother' Cinque is of no more concern to us than your presence here, right now.
Lynley: Far as I can tell... only difference between you and the SLA is a continental breakfast. The trio entering a small, bare room outfitted with gymnasium mats and a heavy bag hanging from the ceiling.
A few Panthers work self-defense moves on the mats. Off in a corner, some Panthers lift weights, jump rope.
Lynley lobs a pointed yawn Cochese's way: he's not impressed.
Burdette: Well... thanks for your time...(to Lynley) Let's roll.
Cochese holds Lynley's stare. Smiles
Burdette: (more insistent) Officer Lynley... let's go.
Cochese: (a nod to Lynley's service revolver) SLA uses M-1's... .45 autos... why the department still issues 38's I'll never know... some people say .45's got a jamming problem.
Cochese pulls a .45 auto from behind his back. Burdette and Lynley's hands go to their sidearms.
Burdette: Easy... don't make a mistake.
Cochese: (unconcerned) But that's just with the old Brownings... this here's the officer's Colt...
Lynley backs up,
Lynley: I'm gonna need you to put that weapon on the deck...
Cochese ejects the magazine, pops it back in,
Cochese: See... eight rounds, 'stead of six like they give the LAPD...
Burdette: Everybody nice and easy...
Cochese calls out to a Panther doing bench-presses across the room,
Cochese: What's the magazine on the HK?
The Panther rips a Heckler & Koch MP5 machine-pistol from its duct-taped hiding space beneath the weight bench.
Panther: (racking the sliding pin) Thirty...
Cochese: See what I mean? Kinda sent you boys out unprepared.
Lynley takes in the room:
The Panthers so unfazed by Police presence that they've gone back to working out, shooting the shit. Burdette catches his eye: let it go. Lynley eases up-- hip to the fact that he has no power here.
Cochese slips his .45 back into his waistband.
Cochese: (to Lynley) Pig... I think your partner mentioned you had other engagements?
A Continued Conversation with the Writer
Neely: Going back to “77,” I’m especially interested in the characters. Both Burdette and Lynley grow and grow toward one another. Burdette comes to recognize Lynley’s version of justice and Lynley comes to a greater understanding of what “protect and serve” means. Facilely speaking, they both approach the gray areas from their black and white perspectives (from the good and evil as well as the racial standpoints). This scene was close to a turning point.
Interestingly, I think subtly effective character growth is harder to portray in features than it is in television.
David: Agreed, TV gives you 20 hours to delve into character. But movies have the luxury of scope and adherence to a vision, especially ones that skew darker, that TV simply can’t match.
Neely: Do you think Wolf Films ever considered adapting something like this for television?
David: Not really. This is a pretty self-contained story. I think. It’s always been a movie. I love TV and think that some of the best drama is on TV now, but I don’t think this story lends itself to that.
Neely: Have you considered adapting something like this for television? I, for one, am really tired of “good cops” and one-dimensional “bad cops.” The era is especially interesting and there’s an opportunity here to do something that might erase some of the “Starsky and Hutch” clichés.
David: Yes, I’m gonna do a pilot one day, but about bad guys. There will be cops, but they won’t be the focus. But I’m not telling anyone what it is. It’s with my agents. It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that every time I think of an idea and I go into a pitch meeting, someone goes, “Oh, well that movie was just written two years ago.” And, of course, I never knew. I’m sure that even though I think it’s an original idea, there are 10 versions of it already out there. So I’m trying to mitigate my fear by not telling anyone what it’s about.
Neely: You bring up an interesting point because ultimately this is probably the limitation of development executives that hear these pitches. There may not really be any more original stories out there. There may not have been any original stories to begin with because the Bible has probably covered them all.
But it’s all about the execution. It’s all about this particular story, not the one that was done 2 years ago. Because if it’s done well, it doesn’t matter if it was done yesterday.
David: That’s true. And I do think my idea’s fairly original, I’m just superstitious, if that’s the right word. I’m just keeping it close to the vest.
I’m also not really allowed to do anything in the TV world unless and until something changes with “Law and Order SVU.” Contractually I can’t do anything right now, so it’s something I’m keeping in my back pocket. But I may turn on the TV in 6 months and that exact idea will be on and I’ll have to start from scratch.
Neely: Well, as I said. If you do it better than someone else, it doesn’t matter if it was done yesterday.
David: That’s true… I hope (Neely laughs).
Neely: Well I say it’s true and everyone listens to me. (still laughing)
Even I admit, though, that it would be an uphill battle because the airwaves are overflowing with the color blue. Still, with the demise of “The Wire,” there’s room for complex character, conflict and different perspectives. And quite frankly, this is something that you excel at.
David: You’re very kind, thank you. Never been a better show than The Wire. (Justified comes close, though. Impossibly good.)
Neely: One thing that we agree on is that some of the most wonderful things that have done on TV are being done now. I share your opinion of “The Wire,” as do all the writers I have interviewed. And I’m so pleased you chose “Justified” as something that comes close. It’s my favorite show right now and I was thrilled that Margo Martindale got the Emmy for her performance in the 2nd season of “Justified.”
Neely: How about you? What brought you to LA? No, you’re actually Baltimore based, weren’t you?
David: I was raised in Baltimore but I left in ’93 for DC to go to college at American University. And then I came to New York in ’99 and I’ve been here ever since.
I live and work in NYC. But I love LA.
Neely: What did you study at American University?
David: I studied filmmaking. I got to do a lot there, but I left a couple of credits shy of graduation.
Neely: Arrggh! Wouldn’t it be easy to go back and just finish?
David: Why? I went there to learn to be a filmmaker and now I’m a filmmaker.
Neely: Was writing something you always wanted to do?
David: I hate writing. It’s like pushing water up a hill with a rake for me. But I have to do it. There are voices in my head clamoring to get out. And it’s less wet than bartending.
Neely: When were you finally able to support yourself as a writer?
David: Sometime around 2006.
Neely: What kind of jobs have you held while waiting for that proverbial break?
David: (slyly) I was in the Food and beverage arts (i.e., the aforementioned bartending). But I always wrote. Bartending just allowed me the time in my schedule to do it. And then there are the stories…
Someone told me once that ‘no one with talent doesn’t not make it. They only give up before they have a chance to make it.’ Double negative aside, I’ve found that to be true.
I also avoided the kind of situations which would have made it harder to keep on the path. No marriage, no kids. I only had to look after myself, which made it easier to do the time while I waited for things to move forward a bit. If I’d had kids or a mortgage or something, who knows how long I’d have hung in there before taking a ‘real’ job.
Neely: Have you written any theater?
David: No, no, no. I mean I like theater, but it’s not something that really moves me. If I go see something, it’s great, but dramaturgy isn’t really my bag when it comes to live theater. Just the whole mechanism of raising money for that and producers… it just seems heartbreaking. It’s like people have to sell their kidneys in order to do it.
What little taste I’ve had of mainstream entertainment biz, it’s kind of nice. It might sound like my “art” has been corrupted but it’s nice being on a set and having a teamster drive you home, knowing your hotel is covered if you go somewhere. I don’t know if I would want to go trod among the saw dust in the world of theater. At my age, I don’t think I have that much passion for the struggle.
Neely: It sounds to me like TV is seducing you.
David: (laughing) It’s much better than bartending and you get to connect with a great many people, which is both good and bad. When we go out on the street and people come up to Mariska Hargitay, it’s pretty great to see that many people affected and to think that you had a hand in it. That part is cool.
TV has seduced me since I was young. It was what raised me when I was 5 years old. I calculated in high school that I watched… I don’t remember the number but basically from age 6 or 7 on, I watched 9 hours of television a day, every single day.
Neely: A man after my own heart!
Tell me some of those TV shows that kept you company and influenced you when you were a kid.
David: In terms of drama, stuff like “Starsky and Hutch,” “Police Story,” “The Blue Knight,” “Columbo;” maybe a little bit of “McCloud,” but I didn’t really dig that show. A little bit of “Streets of San Francisco,” and then the rest was all comedy.
“Barney Miller,” “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times.” I loved “Get Smart.” Those are the big ones that I’m remembering. I’m sure there are more that I’m forgetting but I think… Oh! “Three’s Company” was huge for me; I don’t know why exactly. “All in the Family” a little bit. I think that’s it.
Later I liked “Hill Street Blues” although I found it a somewhat plodding at times and little grim. But that was certainly an important show, “Hill Street.” “Remington Steele” was kind of fun; “Moonlighting” was always great.
Neely: This is interesting because you’re going down the Memory Lane of the late 70s and 80s of popular culture.
David: That was my coming of age in those years – probably ’76 to ’88-89. A lot of it was reruns. I wasn’t around for the first run of “Get Smart” and some of the others but they were syndicated every day after school, so that’s what I watched.
Neely: I’m really happy that two of the shows you mentioned were by Wambaugh.
David: “Police Story” and “The Blue Knight.”
Neely: “Police Story” was groundbreaking in its story telling and it’s tragic that David Gerber, the producer, never licensed the show for either syndication or DVD release.
Even though it seems as if your TV watching is all over the board, it all makes sense to me, another product of a television-upbringing. Even “Starsky and Hutch” makes sense (and I, too, loved it at the time).
David: I was actually crest-fallen that they decided to remake “Starsky and Hutch” as a comedy feature because I found nothing funny about it. At the time, I thought the show was gritty and heart-forward. I loved the male relationships in it. It seems like the only reason it was turned into camp was based on the fact that it happened to be set in the ‘70s. Viewed from our present day vantage point, it’s a show and an era that feels kind of corny, but at the time it felt like a gritty world of hookers and junkies and criminals to me.
Neely: …and undercover cops. And by the way, how well did that movie turn out (she said, dripping with irony)?
David: It was terrible! If I had made it, it would have been a little bit more Joe Carnahan-esque. I don’t know why I just pulled his name out of a hat because he hasn’t done anything good in years. Still…
Neely: (laughing) Joe Carnahan of “Smokin’ Aces?”
The choice to camp it up based on male platform shoes and pimps in fur coats was a rather shallow way of looking at the show.
David: Completely.
Neely: Have you been lucky enough to find a mentor or mentors in this business?
David: Yes. David Simon, George C. Wolfe, Warren Leight, Gail Mutrux and Tony Ganz. I’ve been very, very lucky.
Neely: Tell me a little about how each one has influenced your life.
David: Obviously David Simon for creating “The Wire” and “The Corner.” Those are two of the things that affected me most. And he was an early fan of my books, especially my first book – my memoir. A producer asked him to write a movie, the one that wound up “not being the Ben Stiller one” but at the time it was going to be the Ben Stiller one. I had sent Simon a spec “Wire” script and he had read my book, so when they asked him to write this movie, he told them, “I’m not the guy you need for this, but I just read the guy.” So they called me and hired me sight unseen based on David Simon’s recommendation.
And Gail Mutrux was that producer and I walked the long hard road with her trying to get that movie up to speed. That led me to working long hours with George C. Wolfe. And if you’ve got to work on your first movie script, someone like George C. Wolfe is pretty great because you’re thrown into the deep end with a guy who has a ton of awards and is an amazing writer himself. That was an education that not many people get.
Tony Ganz, who is Gail’s husband, read the script that I’d written for George and Ben. He loved it and asked me to rewrite the James Ellroy script that he’d been trying to get made. So it’s a very tightly knit circle that just happened to be lucky. I worked for months and months and months with Tony, flying back and forth to LA and holing up in hotels and really tightening up the script.
Then I got a job with LOLA (“Law and Order Los Angeles”) last year because Dick Wolf really dug the work I had done on “77,” which he owned. Because of that, Warren Leight, who had just become the showrunner of “Law and Order SVU,” read my stuff via Dick, who had said he should check me out. And Warren’s great –he has a Tony and a Pulitzer. He’s a really serious artist working in mainstream TV, which is kind of what I want to do. I’d like to maintain some artistic integrity but go out there and reach people, if possible. That’s how the mentors have intersected and affected me.
Neely: Who are some of your other influences?
David: Apart from the mystery writers I’ve already mentioned, there’s also Hubert Selby, jr., Robert Louis Stevenson, James Baldwin, Scott Frank, Lem Dobbs, David Mamet, Nabokov, Salinger, Poe, Fred Exley, HL Mencken... about a hundred more, but that’s the core...
Neely: What are you reading right now?
David: To my dismay and eternal shame, nothing. I’m so swamped that it’s all outgoing, with no time for incoming. I will remedy that as soon as I come up for air in mid ’12. As a kid, and straight through my 30’s, I averaged two or three books a week. So I have some fumes in the tank to hold me over until I get a beach chair and a chance to re-up.
Neely: What was the last book you read?
David: Hmmm. It may have been a biography of Elvis by Peter Guralnick – and I hate Elvis. I’m not interested in him at all. Someone had left a copy of it in the apartment I took over from a friend. One of the previous tenants had left some of his books and I read it because it just happened to be around. I wouldn’t really count that because it wasn’t really nutritive, it was about a subject matter that I didn’t really care about.
Neely: And yet you finished it.
David: I don’t really start books and not finish them unless they suck and I try never to pick up a book that sucks. I knew it would be good. Peter Guralnick is a serious journalistic music critic, so I knew that it would be a quality book. I just wasn’t particularly interested in the subject matter. But once I got started it wasn’t hard for me to finish. And I love music, so even if it’s Elvis…
What else? I think that’s it. I have stack of stuff I want to read like Matterhorn (Karl Marlantes) and Dog Soldiers (Robert Stone) and Lush Life by Richard Price (I definitely have to read that one). And I’m researching a movie that we’re trying to put together for Denzel Washington, so Hell Hound on his Trail (Hampton Sides) I’m trying to finish. That’s pretty much it. I’d like to read heavier weight stuff, but I always come back to the mysteries.
Neely: Reading is good, even if it’s something as banal as romance novels. It’s something that engages you in some way outside of yourself.
David: Agreed. Although if I ever had kids, which I probably won’t, I think seeing a romance novel would make me…
Neely: …it would kill you!
David: Yeah. I’m a complete and unrepentant snob. I’m not shy about being a snob and that’s probably one of the reasons I don’t have kids because I know that I wouldn’t be the most understanding if they listened to shitty music and watched shitty movies and read shitty books.
Neely: Well they all do.
David: I know. And I’m not saying this to be a dick, even though I am a dick, but I didn’t. I didn’t have time for it. My taste is only my taste, but I feel like that it’s stood the test of time. I was only attracted to stuff, for whatever reason, that later I found out was good. It’s not like I went to it knowing… I didn’t know anything about Hubert Selby, but once I read him I knew that anyone who didn’t agree with me about it, it was their opinion but it didn’t have any cultural, artistic or intellectual heft. It was just an opinion. (Neely laughs)
Neely: (still laughing) I have to say that in reality, and it’s only something you can come to later in life, when I railed on my son as a young teenager for reading Robert Jordan…
David: I don’t even know who that is.
Neely: He was a very popular Fantasy writer. I hammered him about wasting his time, so he just stopped reading entirely and it was a long time before he ever picked up a book that wasn’t required reading.
David: Oh!
Neely: There are things that are worse than reading “bad” books.
David: You’re absolutely right and that’s why, luckily, I don’t have kids because I’ve spared them that.
Neely: Have you seen any current films?
David: “The Town,” “The Fighter”... I dug “Planet of the Apes”... I don’t see a ton of new movies, as they are mostly shit nowadays. I also just saw “Warrior,” which I thought was great. It’s a lighter weight “The Fighter.” I do want to see “Drive.”
Neely: Me too. I’m a huge fan of James Sallis. Drive was the one book totally different from everything else he’s ever written (and the most commercial). He wrote a wonderful atmospheric series about a former black PI turned novelist and French literature professor (it sounds implausible but it works) in New Orleans who cannot escape his semi-criminal past. As a writer, Sallis is thoughtful, understanding of the racial undertones that are always present for a black man trying to live in the rural “New South” and the not surprising difficulties that still exist. Sallis is a master at character depth and development.
I hope “Drive” is successful because Sallis is someone more people should know about.
David: I don’t actually keep up with these things, but I think the movie’s done pretty well.
Neely: I don’t go to the movies very often, although that may change because I’ve just started reviewing movies for one of our local weeklies, The Easy Reader. I just saw a fabulous documentary that’s being released on Oct. 7 called “Thunder Soul” about a high school funk/jazz stage band in the 70s and the reunion concert that some of the alums staged in honor of their teacher in 2008. ("Thunder Soul" review)
I also just screened a wonderful British Indie feature called “Toast,” based on the memoir of Nigel Slater, a famous British food writer. It’s getting a one week run in LA at the Nuart also beginning Oct. 7. I think it opened in New York at the end of September ("Toast")
David: I’ll check them out.
Neely: What about past favorites and films that have influenced you and/or your writing?
David: Too many to mention... but... “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Le Samourai,” “A Man Escaped,” “Last Temptation of Christ,” “The Trip to Bountiful,” “Out of Sight” (the greatest movie nobody saw), “Pulp Fiction,” “The Long Good Friday,” “The 39 Steps,” “Billy Jack,” “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Searchers,” “8 Million Ways to Die,” “Taxi Driver,” “Glen Garry Glen Ross,” “Fresh,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Pope of Greenwich Village”... there are hundreds more, those are just off the top of my dome...
Neely: “Billy Jack”??? Really?!
David: Billy Jack set the mold for what we know of as the stoic, physical man of violence. By physical, I mean someone who could literally take you apart, as opposed to relying on a gun. And he was an intellectual – violence to him was a rational response to a world that had shown itself to be incapable of humanity. There would be no “Dirty Harry,” no “Rambo” without him. The movie was terrible, but the impact of the character was lasting. At least for me. But the movie was really awful in some ways.
Neely: I’ll have to digest that for a while. But I love so many of the others on your list.
Most people will be unacquainted with “Le Samourai,” a film by cult favorite Jean Pierre Melville starring Alain Delon at the height of his fame playing a hit man. Melville, understood the value of silence. There’s so little dialogue in the film that it can be understood even without subtitles.
Why don’t you give me a summary of your upcoming projects.
David: Turning my book—Kicking Ass and Saving Souls—into a movie that lives up to the title, a couple of other feature projects I can’t talk about, “Law and Order SVU,” and “77.” I need an 8th day of the week. Or a bigger brain.
I wrote the season opener for “Law and Order SVU” called “Scorched Earth.” It premiered on September 21.
Neely: I just watched it. It was everything I used to love about the original franchise because it was so ripped from the headlines. It was the Dominique Strauss Kahn case played straight according to the known facts. But unlike the real life case, they brought him to trial despite the inconvenient wrinkles with the accuser. It was juicy, dramatic, realistic and pretty satisfying in its ending (no spoiler alert here).
David, I truly believe in “77” and can’t wait to see it on the big screen. It’s hard to capture Ellroy with his toughness and crushed optimism and you really did. Thanks so much for taking the time with me.
David: Thanks so much for your kind words.