The search for her destructor bears bitter fruit in the film. Kirshner as Elizabeth Short, the indestructibility of her hope, in context with her imminent hopeless destruction.' De Palma overruled me, and there are breathtaking moments of Ms. 'I was initially against the idea of having mock screen test footage of Elizabeth Short,' Ellroy said. 'I wanted to break her down and show her vulnerability.' In this film, the obsession comes to life courtesy of imaginary screen tests with Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short and DePalma as her unseen director. Things I like to make movies about.'įrom 'Dressed to Kill' to 'Scarface,' obsession is familiar DePalma territory. He writes obsessive stories, very intense characters, worlds of greed and corruption. 'He writes books about beautiful women and I like to photograph beautiful women. 'We have similar obsessions,' DePalma said. Those feelings and their intensity made a partnership with DePalma seem ideal. Confidential,' he'd explicate those feelings in 'My Dark Places,' for which he tried to find his mother's killer. Years later, a writer of renown via the Dahlia and 'L.A. I had been waiting so many years to write that book.'

When I finished my novel - and the last word in the novel was 'love' - I wrote the dedication page: 'To Geneva Hilliker Ellroy 1915-1958 Mother: Twenty-nine Years Later, This Valediction in Blood' and I wept for hours. The obsession transformed as Ellroy got older and became a writer with a capacity to craft mesmerizing prose turbocharged by tabloid argot, 40s copspeak, and profound heartbreak.Īsked how much what had happened to his mother played into how he had imagined Elizabeth Short in The Black Dahlia, Ellroy says, 'It was the emotional subtext of my novel. 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 was Elizabeth Short from Medford, Mass. 'It's like a human body displayed for you to look at and go 'Oh, my God.'' she's displayed in like a horror show,' DePalma said. 'What's amazing about the Black Dahlia, besides the fact that her body is in two parts, and the way her mouth is slashed. The body had been ravaged, drained of blood, sliced in half, brutalized in a manner that stuns even DePalma, no stranger to candid crime-scene photos. And as one of the detectives said, cut up in a real bad way,' he said. and then about a foot and a half apart, her legs were straight, sort of spread out, hands over her head. The victim's body was 'cut in the middle. 'She saw the mutilated and dismembered body of Elizabeth Short,' said Harnisch, an expert on the case.

That woman, as Larry Harnisch of the Los Angeles Times knows only too well, would be only the first to be horrified by what she saw there.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy