Neil Calloway looks at a previous attempt to bring the acclaimed film to the small screen…
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.
Originally published September 17, 2017. Updated April 17, 2018.
