To which granny replies, "Maybe if your agent weren't such a schmuck he'd wouldn't have negotiated away your screen rights, asshole" then stomps on his instep with her orthopedics.

Yeah I kind of want to watch the rest of this.

Cheer up, Jim! I bought your book...

...for 20c at the thrift store.

Oh boy. This is a little close to home.
I have not seen this but I'm going to watch the fuck out of this tonight.

Your book didn't have Kim Basinger or James Cromwell.

Fuck your book and fuck you.

It's a pretty cool documentary, I didn't really know anything about him before I saw it.

Well, that's a book I'll never read.

5 viciously bitter stars.

To those who are unfamiliar with James Ellroy, the central fact of his life was that his mother, who was drawn to booze and sleazy men, turned up dead after a Saturday night in 1958, when Ellroy was ten. His memoir, MY DARK PLACES is about his attempt to come to terms with that event, first through booze and drugs, and later by investigating the unsolved crime 30 years later. I had the abridged audiobook, which was read by Ellroy himself,. and no one reads his prose like he does.

Going up to an author and talking about the movie based on his book is a pretty ignorant thing to do. I suppose I would have handled it differently. LA Confidential is a great movie, but the book is a completely different animal. Remember the corrupt cop Dudley Smith, played by James Cromwell? In the book, he wins. Can't remember much else.

Also, I'd say that there's maybe a one in three chance that this never happened, and Elroy is telling this story so he can 1) come off as a badass 2) stop people from asking him about Kim Basinger