Screenwriter, director, and producer Curtis Hanson died at home on Tuesday at the age of 71, Variety reports. His career spanned more than 40 years, beginning with co-writing the screenplay for the 1970 Lovecraft adaptation The Dunwich Horror. He made a wide variety of films, from female-led dramedy In Her Shoes to Eminem-led drama 8 Mile. But it was his 1997 James Elroy adaptation L.A. Confidential that secured his place in the pantheon, earning him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (shared with Brian Helgeland) and Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Picture.
L.A. Confidential’s success is the clearest example of one of Hanson’s great talents: In his heyday, he didn’t just make good movies; he knew which movies to make. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, while hardly a masterpiece, hit a genuine nerve with upper class working mothers; Hanson made 8 Mile during the vanishingly small window when America was ready to embrace a rap battle drama starring Eminem. But no Curtis Hanson film was better timed than L.A. Confidential, which hit theaters right between the O.J. Simpson trial and the Rampart scandal, when America’s white citizens were suddenly discovering, yet again, that their police departments weren’t especially beloved by minorities for some reason. L.A. Confidential, with its centerpiece restaging of 1951’s Bloody Christmas, has as much to say about the relationship between the Los Angeles’ government and its citizens as the Christopher Commission—and takes a lot less time to do it.
The scene is a model of staging and pacing: The static shots of the drunken Christmas party cut to a classically composed shot of Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey before Graham Beckel rolls down the stairs like a boulder and things go handheld. The rapid cuts that pull from a one-on-one stare between Pearce and Beckel to wider and wider shots showing more and more cops headed toward the jail are equally efficient, as is the still shot of Russell Crowe at the typewriter before the camera careens back into motion as Beckel barrels down the hallway. In the fight itself, Hanson achieves an astonishing claustrophobia with shots framed so the cell bars sketch perfect vanishing points—to say nothing of the fast tracking shots with the camera on the other side of the bars. The entire scene, like the film itself, is a rapidly accelerating pulp nightmare. That’s the heart of L.A. Confidential, a film that slathers its candy-colored palette over a genuine rottenness that we find it convenient to keep forgetting.
But there’s one thing Hanson deliberately got wrong: that clever cut from a surreptitious photo of the riot to an outraged Los Angeles Times front page. It’s a smart way to make the Rodney King connection explicit to the audience while moving the plot quickly along, but in the actual event—50 cops beating 6 prisoners for an hour and a half, snapping bones and rupturing organs—there wasn’t any public outcry for months.
The Times did have a photographer there, though. The paper ran a photo the next day of the six victims propped against a wall, hands pressed to wounds, clearly barely able to stand. Officers Julius Trojanowski and Nelson Brownson—the policemen whose rumored injuries sparked the beating—are taking in the handiwork of their brother officers like generals reviewing troops. The caption doesn’t mention that the prisoners are injured. The headline reads “Officers Beaten in Bar Brawl; Seven Men Jailed.” Hanson—who moved fluidly between genres his entire career—knew that some things were too dark even for noir. He will be missed.
