A beautiful, vibrant young woman—sexually injudicious, possibly fixated on Hollywood fame and known for her ebony wardrobe—discovered in a vacant, weedy Los Angeles lot her glamorous looks slashed into a grotesque death mask, her slender body mauled, sliced and severed into two separate pieces. The unthinkably savage nature of the slaying, the lovely allure of the victim who was tagged with the evocative nickname “The Black Dahlia,” and the taunting letters to the media from the mysterious killer made the murder into a horrific sensation in 1947. And as it went unsolved over the decades, gaining myth, legend and lies in the retelling, the case has evolved into Hollywood’s own version of Jack the Ripper, shocking and entrancing anyone who delves into its mysteries.
As a youth growing up in L.A., author James Ellroy was one of the caught up by the intrigue of the case, reading of it long after it occurred in Dragnet actor Jack Webb’s book The Badge, and used his personal mania to transmogrify the tale into the basis of his fictional fever dream of a novel, The Black Dahlia in 1986. The bestselling book launched Ellroy’s famed quartet of hard-boiled crime noir novels that included the famed L.A. Confidential, which was made into the popular, much-honored film from director Curtis Hanson in 1997. Now the second of the author’s major works makes it to the big screen: The Black Dahlia, guided by the hand of veteran director Brian De Palma (Scarface, The Untouchables) and starring an enviable ensemble of acting talent including Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and double-Oscar-winner Hilary Swank. The real-life case may remain shrouded in shadows, but Hollywood.com shines a light on the film to reveal the secrets behind the scenes:
Josh Hartnett:
After a short stint as a contract killer in Sin City, Josh Hartnett has headed to the City of Angels to take hard-edged noir to the extreme for The Black Dahlia, playing a postwar detective who becomes entangled in the still-legendary murder of Elizabeth Short—and if the dead girl doesn’t bring him enough trouble, he’s caught in a triangle between his partner’s pouty paramour (Scarlett Johansson) and a shadowy sex siren (Hilary Swank). Hartnett trades jabs with Hollywood.com as he reveals the rigors of mixing fight training with three packs of cigarettes a day: Read Interview
Scarlett Johansson:
The pouty lips, alabaster complexion, va-voom voluptuousness and that whiskey-voiced whisper—when Hollywood went looking for an actress with the right retro sex appeal to play the world-weary ‘40s glamour girl of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, could the choice be any more black-and-white than Scarlett? Miss Johansson talks neo-noir, fragile Hollywood dreams and dodging the casting couch with Hollywood.com: Read Interview
Brian De Palma:
With a film resume that includes Carrie, Dressed to Kill, The Untouchables and Scarface, Brian De Palma may have spilled more cinematic crimson than slashers Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers combined—and twice as stylishly. The bloodbath continues: the veteran director is ready to up the ante with his adaptation of novelist James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, an intense fictional exploration of one of Hollywood’s most notorious unsolved mysteries: Read Interview
James Ellroy:
He is the self-proclaimed “Demon Dog of American Literature,” and he has something to howl about. One of the most praised and bestselling authors of the last 20 years, James Ellroy has crafted a vibrant, vicious, visceral literary landscape of postwar Los Angeles in his “L.A. Quartet,” epic explorations of obsession and ambition filtered through a post-modern prism of upended crime noir conventions: Read Interview
