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Russell Crowe ("Officer Bud White") dangling Ron Rifkin ("District Attorney Ellis Loew") out an L.A.P.D. upper floor office window. |
The time is January 1953.
In 1953 General Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as President of the United States. The Korean War ended. RCA introduced the first color TVs to the market. "From Here to Eternity" was the big war picture. Watson and Crick announced their discovery of DNA. Christine Jorgensen became the first sucessful recipient of gender reassignment surgery. Gary Cooper received an Oscar for Best Actor as "Marshal Will Kane" in High Noon. Swanson introduced its first TV dinners. Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were executed. And Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay scaled Mount Everest.
Among the millions of 1953 deaths: Josef Stalin; Hank Williams; Herman Mankiewicz; Sergei Prokofiev; Jim Thorpe; Chief Justice of the U.S. Fred Vinson; Edwin Hubble; Dylan Thomas; and Eugene O'Neill. Among the millions of births: Benazir Bhutto; Tony Blair; Paul Allen; Mary Steenburgen; Jeb Bush; John Malkovich; Tony Shalhoub; and Ken Burns.
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Both Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce were from Australia and had their actor's not-good-enough self-assessments working against them. To assist their entry into L.A. culture, director Curtis Hanson moved the two actors to L.A. two months ahead of filming, encouraged them to get to know the city and how people lived, hired dialect coaches, and arranged ride-alongs with L.A.P.D. officers.
Crowe liked his character Bud White but wasn't sure he was right for the part. Author James Ellroy described White as the biggest man in the department, but Crowe wasn't even six feet tall. He also worried he couldn't convincingly play tough. He moved into the smallest L.A. apartment he could find to help make him feel like a "giant" when he went to work. He took his character's tough-guy persona from Sterling Hayden's performance in "The Killing" for that "beefy manliness that came out of World War II."
Guy Pearce didn't like Ed Exley much, at least at first. He thought he was too self-righteous. Fortunately, Pearce's straight-laced ride-along partner offered the actor a useful model, helping him infuse rigid stiffness into the Exley character.
Ironically, the Exley of the novel wasn't so straight-laced. Whereas Pearce's Exley is a legtimate war hero, the novel's Exley passes himself off as a hero, declaring he had singlehandedly wiped out a platoon of Japanese soldiers when in fact he had staged the scene after coming across the soldiers already dead.
To fix the right mood for the movie, Curtis Hanson had his players watch Kiss Me Deadly (1955), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and a few other films noir.
Kim Basinger had to dye her hair many shades blonder than her own. The result: her natural hair was destroyed, and she had to wear a wig for filming.
Curtis Hanson used 45 different filming locations around the city.
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L.A. Confidential was nominated for five Oscars, winning two—Kim Basinger, Best Supporting Actress, and Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland, Best Adapted Screenplay.
IMDb users currently rank L.A. Confidential at #125 on the Top 250 Movies list.
