The news that CBS are developing a TV adaptation of L.A. Confidential is great idea –
James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet is a series of novels that covers over a thousand
pages, with characters also appearing in Ellroy’s other books. Ellroy said that
Curtis Hanson’s 1997 film version only used about 20% of the material from the
original book, so there is certainly scope for development.
It’s such an obvious choice for a TV series that
it’s surprising that nobody has tried before. Well, they have. In 1999 a series
was developed for HBO, they passed on the script, Fox picked it up, shot a
pilot, then decided that they didn’t
want it either, and it sat on a shelf until it was shown on TV in 2003 and
later emerged as an extra on the Blu-ray of the film version.
Like most pilots that failed to launch, it was a
combination of factors that led to it being shelved. Primarily, as in the case
of the stalled Wonder Woman series from 2011, it was one of timing.
First, high-end, film quality television wasn’t as widespread in 1999 as it is
now – The Sopranos, which
really kicked off the TV revolution, debuted that year, and Breaking Bad and Stranger Things were a long way
off. It’s not only about the climate of the industry at the time, it’s about
who is available. The film was directed by Curtis Hanson, who won an Oscar for
the script he co-wrote with Brian Helgeland. The TV show was also written by an
Oscar winner. Sadly Walon Green’s Oscar was not for his writing, but for
producing the 1971 insect documentary The
Hellstrom Chronicle. The pilot was directed by Eric Laneuville, a
solid TV director whose credits range from 80s hospital drama St Elsewhere to an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D from earlier
this year. A decent choice at the time, but nowadays, when every feature
director is trying their hand at TV, you’d expect them to get a higher profile
name.
Timing also played
a part in casting the show; now an L.A.
Confidential show will attract a top-notch, suitable cast, but in
1999 that wasn’t the case. Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack Vincennes, the role
played in the film by Kevin Spacey. They may share initials and have starred
together in the 1996 John Grisham adaptation A
Time To Kill, but there the similarities end. You can imagine Spacey
as a suave, fame hungry cop in 1950s Hollywood, you can’t do the same with a
pre-24 Sutherland. There’s
something a bit too modern about Sutherland that makes him difficult to believe
in the role. It’s repeated throughout the cast. Eric Roberts may be a passable
actor in straight-to-video action movies, but he doesn’t have the
charm-with-an-underlying-hint-of-menace that David Strathairn brings to the
part of Pierce Patchett.
The pilot uses the same newsreel-as-exposition
as the film does, but there the similarities all but end. It might be an
obvious statement to say that it looks like a TV show from the 1990s, but it
doesn’t look like a high-end HBO style drama from the late 90s; it looks more
like a reconstruction from a 1994 episode of Unsolved
Mysteries.
Everyone involved is probably grateful the show
was never picked up; it allowed Sutherland to go on and appear in 24, the role that remade his career,
and the forthcoming show isn’t sullied by having this sub-standard version
appear earlier. Like most canned pilots, it’s a curio, and better off kept on
the studio shelf.
Neil
Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here
every Sunday for future instalments.