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2006威尼斯影展開幕電影

艷屍案中案

The Black Dahlia

四大荷里活高手較量

《職業特工隊》《義膽雄心》大導演 白賴仁迪龐馬 Brian De Palma
《強戰世界》編劇 佐治費德曼 Josh Friedman
《搏擊會》監製 艾特寧遜 Art Linson
《幕後嫌疑犯》著名犯罪小說作家 占士奧特洛James Ellroy

三大魅力影星競技

《珍珠港》《黑鷹15小時》型格男星 佐殊哈尼特 Josh Hartnett
《迷失決勝分》《迷失東京》四度金球提名熱爆女星 史嘉莉祖安遜Scarlett Johansson
《擊情》《沒哭聲的抉擇》兩屆奧斯卡影后 希拉莉絲韻 Hilary Swank

驚世奇案內幕真相改編

故 事 大 綱

《艷屍案中案》(THE BLACK DAHLIA) 改編自《幕後嫌疑犯》舉世著名犯罪小說作家占士奧特洛的暢銷驚慄小說，故事源於美國荷里活一宗極度震撼的血殺案，內容全屬真人真事。

四十年代的洛杉磯，一名剛冒起的人氣美艷女星伊莉莎伯（美雅嘉絲蒂娜 飾）被肢解後曝屍公路旁，生前曾遭嚴重凌虐，死狀慘不忍睹，令人不寒而慄──由於伊莉莎伯伏屍狀態，一把烏黑長髮呈放射狀散開，像一朵盛開的黑色牡丹花，所以此案被人稱為「The Black Dahlia」。

兩名警探杜威（佐殊哈尼特 飾）及力蘭（阿朗力克 飾）奉命調查此案，他們急於知道伊莉莎伯的過去，希望從她身上尋找任何破案的線索。但這宗兇殘的謀殺案，超乎想像地撲朔迷離；此時杜威發現女友姬莉（史嘉莉祖安遜 飾）竟與伊莉莎伯的死因扯上關係，同時自己又禁不住迷上了身份顯赫的瑪德蓮（希拉莉絲韻 飾）。迷霧般的真相與線索糾纏一起，讓杜威分不清楚真實、虛幻……

10月19日 破解案內情

The Black Dahlia

HK Releasing Date: October 19, 2006

Theatre Line-up/ Running Time/ Category: tbc

MILLENNIUM FILMS PRESENTS

A SIGNATURE PICTURES PRODUCTION

For EQUITY PICTURES MEDIENFONDS GmbH & CO. KG III

and NU IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT GmbH

A BRIAN DePALMA Film

JOSH HARTNETT SCARLETT JOHANSSON AARON ECKHART

and HILARY SWANK

MIA KIRSHNER MIKE STARR FIONA SHAW

SYNOPSIS

Master storyteller Brian De Palma, known for such classic crime dramas as The Untouchables, Scarface and Carlito's Way, as well as his suspense thrillers Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, directs this adaptation of James Ellroy's (L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid) best-selling crime novel.

The Black Dahlia weaves a fictionalized tale of obsession, love, corruption, greed and depravity around the true story of the brutal murder of a fledgling Hollywood starlet that shocked and fascinated the nation in 1947 and remains unsolved today. Two ex-pugilist cops, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), are called to investigate the homicide of ambitious silver-screen B-lister Betty Ann Short (Mia Kirshner) A.K.A. "The Black Dahlia"-an attack so grisly that images of the killing were kept from the public.

While Blanchard's growing preoccupation with the sensational murder threatens his relationship with Kay (Scarlett Johansson), his partner Bleichert finds himself attracted to the enigmatic Madeleine Linscott (two-time OscarR winner Hilary Swank), the daughter of one of the city's most prominent families-who just happens to have an unsavory connection to the murder victim.

True crime meets urban legend when De Palma brings Ellroy's The Black Dahlia to the big screen.

###

PRODUCTION INFORMATION

"Looking up, I felt cold all over; my breath came in spurts.

Shoulders and arms brushed me, and I heard a jumble of voices:

'There's not a goddamned drop of blood-' 'This is the worst crime on a woman

I've seen in my sixteen years-'..."

-James Ellroy, "The Black Dahlia"

For nearly 60 years, one story has captivated the horrified imagination of a city and inspired scores of newspaper, book and screenplay writers to ponder the dark, diabolical impulses of humanity. This cautionary tale has served as warning to wide-eyed starlets who come west to chase their dreams of Tinseltown. And it all began with an unremarkable girl hungry for stardom.

In life, she was called Elizabeth "Betty" Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress from the East Coast who wore a delicate flower in her raven hair and became many things to many people-dear friend, beloved sister, estranged daughter, frequent girlfriend and accused prostitute.

On January 15, 1947, she was discovered brutally splayed in a vacant lot near Leimert Park in downtown Los Angeles. Naked, cut in half at the waist, her organs were removed and blood drained from her small body in an attack so grisly that most images were kept from the public. Her killer had bludgeoned her, sodomized her and had slit her mouth from ear to ear in a sickening, clownish grin. False accusations and confessions still abound, and Betty's remains one of the most gruesome, unsolved homicides in the City of Angels' history.

In death, she would become newly christened and forever remembered as The Black Dahlia.

Forty years after her killing, crime novelist JAMES ELLROY ("L.A. Confidential," "American Tabloid") wrote "The Black Dahlia," a best-selling whodunit with Betty's murder as its crux and boom-era L.A. as its backdrop. Weaving a story of obsession, body doubles

and those who became fixated on the brutal homicide, Ellroy hoped the book would help exorcise demons from his own mother's 1958 strangulation.

Now, master storyteller BRIAN DE PALMA, director of such classic crime dramas as The Untouchables, Scarface and Carlito's Way, and suspense thrillers Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, films screenwriter JOSH FRIEDMAN's (War of the Worlds) adaptation of Ellroy's classic. Known for his works' multi-layered themes of unrestrained passions, doppelgangers, vivid violence and ruinous obsessions-motifs and throughlines he shares with Ellroy-De Palma would become the most likely of filmmakers to finally bring the tragic, lurid tale to the screen.

The Black Dahlia weaves a fictionalized tale of lust, love, corruption, greed and depravity around the brutal murder of the fledgling Hollywood starlet that shocked and fascinated the nation in 1947 and remains unsolved today. In the film, we meet Betty Short in the heyday of post-World War II Los Angeles. Corrupt politicians manipulate dirty cops who help ruthless gangsters fund seedy filmmakers as they prey on young actresses desperate to find their place in a fantasy world.

Enter onto the scene two ex-pugilist police officers, Lee Blanchard (AARON ECKHART) and Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (JOSH HARTNETT), the poster boys for 1940's LAPD. The new partners' first homicide case starts with a call from their supervisor, Detective Millard (MIKE STARR), to investigate the slaying of the ambitious silver screen B-lister Betty Short (MIA KIRSHNER), just as they are leaving a deadly shootout.

Blanchard and Bleichert, like the rest of the fascinated city, become drawn into the lurid world of the Dahlia's L.A. While Blanchard's growing preoccupation with the Dahlia's murder threatens his relationship with girlfriend Kay Lake (SCARLETT JOHANSSON), Bleichert finds himself irresistibly drawn to the enigmatic Madeleine Linscott (two-time OscarR winner HILARY SWANK), the daughter of one of the city's most prominent families-who just happens to have an unsavory connection (and resemblance) to the Dahlia.

Blanchard spins into obsession trying to solve the case, seeing in Betty the chance to redeem himself for letting down the other women in his life that he failed to protect.

Bleichert, too, begins to question his own footing as his feelings fluctuate wildly between two disparate dames: the seemingly innocent Kay and the knowingly seductive Madeleine-whose unhinged mother, Ramona (FIONA SHAW), proves to hold more than a passing clue to the mystery.

Determined to be famous, destined to be infamous, Betty Short affected more lives dead than she possibly could alive. She dreamed of being photographed for the big screen but wound up the pin-up girl of tabloid autopsy photos. Now, director De Palma brings his signature style and sharpest directorial instincts to take us into her world and the ones that revolved around her story.

True crime meets urban legend when The Black Dahlia arrives on the big screen.

Joining De Palma behind the camera is an accomplished creative team that includes composer MARK ISHAM (Crash), editor BILL PANKOW (Carlito's Way), production designer DANTE FERRETTI (Cold Mountain) and cinematographer VILMOS ZSIGMOND (The Deer Hunter). The Black Dahlia's producers are ART LINSON (Fight Club), AVI LERNER (The Wicker Man), MOSHE DIAMANT (Tristan & Isolde) and RUDY COHEN (The I Inside).

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Possessing The Black Dahlia:

Betty's Journey to the Silver Screen

"Who are these men who feed on others?

What do they feel when they cut their name into somebody else's life?"

-Detective Bucky Bleichert

Elizabeth "Betty" Short was born July 29, 1924, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Like many young aspiring actresses in boom-era World War II, she was chasing a big dream: to make it in Hollywoodland. At the age of 19, she headed west to California, bouncing from her father's home in Vallejo to the city of Santa Barbara before heading south to L.A.

During her time in the city, her tale briefly reads like that of many an ingenue. She auditioned for a number of screen tests, lived for a time at the Chancellor Arms Apartments and was rumored to have frequented hotspots like the Pig & Whistle on Hollywood Blvd., the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Blvd. and the Biltmore Hotel on Grand Ave. Indeed, it was at this very hotel, on January 9, 1947, that Betty was allegedly meeting a gentleman friend. It was the last time she would be seen alive.

Because of Betty's raven hair, her penchant for dressing in black, habit of wearing a beautiful flower in her hair and the 1946 release of the Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake film The Blue Dahlia, she was given a nickname to tease her in life and own her in death. People became fascinated with her lurid tale, one seemingly plucked straight out of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel. Indeed, most who became involved with the case became obsessed with either saving or trashing the Dahlia's reputation.

The gruesome murder of the young girl took Hollywood and the country by storm in 1947. The entertainment capital was filled with mob bosses, dirty studio executives, corrupt cops and people willing and ready to take advantage of a young woman…and the juicy details of her murder. For months, the L.A. Examiner, Los Angeles Times and every rag that could make up or scrape up a story about Betty splashed headlines across their mastheads-from "Who Killed Betty Short?" to "Black Purse, Shoes: Hot Dahlia Leads." Hers would become a story of Hollywood legend…and occupy one young boy's imagination for a lifetime.

Betty entered the mind of novelist James Ellroy when he was just a child. Only 11 years old when he received Jack Webb's crime anthology, "The Badge," from his father, the L.A. native was entranced by Webb's 10-page summary of Elizabeth Short's demise. His mother, Jean Hilliker, had been strangled only months before in a brutal (and to this day unsolved) crime, and the boy's inability to openly grieve her death transferred into an obsession with the Dahlia.

Ellroy, like many others before and since, would chase the story of this iconic Hollywood girl for years. He recalls, "I bike-tripped to the Central Library. I scanned the Dahlia case on microfilm and gorged myself on vanished L.A. I time-tripped '59 to '47 L.A. I made L.A.-now L.A.-then. I began to live in the dual L.A. that I've lived in ever since."

In fact, Ellroy would wait to write his seventh novel-the first of his L.A. quartet-1987's "The Black Dahlia," until he "built story-telling muscle" with his earlier works, "Brown's Requiem," "Clandestine," "Blood on the Moon" and "Suicide Hill." The author admits he "needed to brace myself for life in L.A. '47."

For Ellroy, the Dahlia wouldn't rest with the end of his book. He would go on to write a 1996 novel entitled "My Darkest Places," a memoir of his mother's 1958 murder. "I had to go through a very long journey with Elizabeth Short and write 'The Black Dahlia' before I could get to my mother. Elizabeth Short was always the fictional stand-in for my mother. And my mother and she transmogrified, it was quite a heady brew. They are as one, in my mind, much of the time."

Screenwriter Josh Friedman was originally tasked to hone Ellroy's 300-plus-page "The Black Dahlia" into a filmable screenplay for director David Fincher-initially attached to the project in 1997-and producers Rudy Cohen and Moshe Diamant. "David and I worked on it off-and-on it for several years," Friedman notes. "I would write a draft, and we would talk about it…then we'd work on other projects."

Eventually Fincher departed the film and, according to Friedman, "Brian De Palma came on, and it was like a locomotive. At Brian and Art's (producer Linson) urging, we made some significant changes to the script, and we were off."

Of his source material, the screenwriter offers, "I tend to not think of it as a genre book, but simply as historical fiction. I went with the way Ellroy told the compelling story…he has such a unique way of interweaving. I very much kept to the structure and the attitude of his characters engendered in the book."

"James creates a whole noir world, and the way he tells his stories are very complex," director De Palma adds. "His language is so lush. Josh was a very good barometer of what you could and couldn't do with his work. He lived and breathed Ellroy's complex, dark material for a decade, forcing the material into Ellroy-ese, never taking the simple route. Art and I worked with him for close to a year before the script was ready to go."

De Palma acknowledges that he wanted to tell not just the story of the Dahlia but explore the world of fictionalized characters in 1947's L.A.-those who were profoundly affected by the crime. He responded to Friedman's interpretation of the "triangle of Bucky and Lee and Kay. There's a history between Bucky and Lee that goes back to the Zoot Suit Riots and culminates in the first section when Bucky throws a fight in order to get the money to put his father in an old-age home."

A filmmaker known for plot-twists and switchbacks, De Palma also loved that "in the material, everybody lies. In any sensitive dramatic scenes where you think someone's revealing something, they're usually revealing the opposite of what they said before. Everybody's a compromised character, and you watch Bucky descend into this hell and get caught up in it."

Now comfortable with the screenplay (and suitably financed for overseas distribution), the director and the producers began looking for a domestic distribution partner. A meeting with the then vice chairman (now chairman) of Universal Pictures, Marc Shmuger, would clench the deal and the studio signed on for domestic rights to the film during production.

Producer Art Linson reflects, "It's a tradition in Hollywood that movies that are dark are hard to get made. What distinguished this from a traditional murder is the effect it had on everyone around it. This movie is not about just about who did it, it's about the obsession and impact it had on the lives of the LAPD and women connected to these detectives."

He offers, "There are few directors left who understand what films noir even are. Brian has the perfect grasp of this material. His sequences play to the great visual style needed for Dahlia."

Most notably after securing foreign financing for the film, the production team had but one small task: find a cadre of actors who were outstanding freshman Hollywood players, but also had the acting credentials to pull off Ellroy and Friedman's lines…and the ability to channel old souls from the films noir days gone by.

Enter five young actors named Josh, Scarlett, Aaron, Mia and Hilary.

Casting Films Noir

"She looks like that dead girl. How sick are you?

You're going to end up like Lee, you will. But I will not."

-Kay Lake

A challenge with The Black Dahlia was in finding a group of actors who could flesh out a modern film noir-and give nods to the Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall and Fred MacMurray/Rita Hayworth thrillers of the '40s and '50s-without becoming caricatures of the very roles that inspired their performances. De Palma and the producers would turn to five young-yet-established actors and a collective of seasoned performers who could play the assortment of toughs, lovers and deceivers from Friedman's screenplay and Ellroy's mind.

De Palma admits of working with certain talent, simply, "Great actors will create something that will completely surprise you."

Long involved with Dahlia's production was Josh Hartnett, cast as Bucky Bleichert, whose world begins to spin out of control the minute he becomes attached to the case. De Palma felt that the actor could easily reflect Bucky's inherent good intentions found in the script. "Even in this corrupt world, there's such a decency about Bucky," he observes. "Like in the old noir movies in which Bogart played, he has this moral weight."

"Josh is becoming a man," offers Linson. "To see him grow up from the young kid in Virgin Suicides to becoming this detective with a very complex life-in love with two women and haunted by a murder-is fantastic."

Hartnett was attracted to the challenging role because it wasn't a "morality tale after all. The characters have certain flaws that they'll follow to the end, and no one deviates from those."

Friedman's rat-a-tat period dialogue wouldn't be the only challenge for Hartnett. The physicality of the part would require the actor to train for four hours a day for seven months to play seasoned boxer Bucky (known in the ring as Mr. Ice) who happened to have a light-heavyweight record of 36-0-0.

De Palma's films are known for trios or quartets who come together in curious ways. Drawing side number two to the Bucky-Kay-Lee love triangle is actor Aaron Eckhart, someone De Palma describes as a "young Kirk Douglas." The director knew he wanted to cast a performer who could give a manic quality to Mr. Fire, Lee Blanchard. The actor chosen would need to fuel the Benzedrine-popping, hotheaded cop with an explosive sense of regret and rage…a man who could provide a strong parallel to Bucky's by-the-book detective. As the Dahlia case unfolds, we learn that Lee has had a string of women in his life that he couldn't save, including a sister who died at 15.

Eckhart chose the physically challenging role (with Mr. Fire's own boxing record of 43-4-2) because Blanchard is "a fast-talking, hard-drinking, quick-witted, no-bull kind of guy-which is very fun to play as an actor."

Discussing his interest in the films noir era of the '40s, he relates, "Their cadence was faster than they are today. If you watch Cagney or Edward G. Robinson, they have this way of speaking that was rapid-fire."

His partner-in-crimefighting Hartnett laughs, "Aaron would be a great Iago. He doesn't hesitate to go over the top in a performance. He's a big personality who has this onscreen presence that makes you believe he could bring down anyone in his path."

With the testosterone-fueled roles cast, De Palma was next on the lookout for three dames who could play anything but damsels in distress. Of his leads, the director commends "the girls are just magical, so mysterious. There's always something unsaid."

To find his Kay Lake, the wounded lady that Lee takes in and Bucky covets, De Palma decided he needed a young woman with a world-weary look in her eye. He had met Scarlett Johansson years earlier when she was in the film The Horse Whisperer. The actor had made such an impression on him, he tucked into the back of his mind the idea of one day working with her.

Producer Linson finds Johansson a reminder of an era gone by, specifically "an old soul. There's something that is a visual throwback about her. She has that look that pulls you right back in time." Giving credence to his observation, when filmed through cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond's lens, Johansson startlingly evokes an era through sheer physicality.

The actor offers, "When I read Josh's script, I just connected with the type of passion you find in Kay. She is this painfully lonesome, woefully romantic woman who just wants to be kept safe from harm. She never knew she'd find in Bucky the opposite of what she sees in her boyfriend, Lee."

Canadian actress Mia Kirshner-best known for her role as Jenny on the past two seasons of Showtime's The L Word-had actually come in early to read for the role of the duplicitous Madeleine Linscott. De Palma was so taken with the actor's performance that he and Friedman enhanced the scenes with the Dahlia and cast Kirshner in it. "She's really quite stunning," he comments. "When I saw her test, I said, 'Mia, I have to have you in this movie. We're going to build up the character of the Dahlia, and I want you to play her.'"

The actor notes that "as a kid in Toronto, I used to go to the library and pull out books of old movies and look at pictures of Vivien Leigh and Hedy Lamarr. My Dad and I would watch old movies on Saturday night, and I grew up very much having a reverence for noir."

Kirshner had heard many of the stories about the fabled actress she would play, but was keen to make up her own mind as she explored the woman who was Elizabeth Short. She felt it important to humanize the tragic Betty, believing her story a "cautionary fable for young Hollywood actresses." Kirshner offers, "I really tried to find the essence of Elizabeth. After reading as much as I could about her, I saw a very soft, romantic, intelligent woman."

For the role of devious and alluring Madeleine Linscott, De Palma would need an actor who not only could pull off a femme fatale, but one who favored Mia Kirshner in looks. Ellroy's material was quite specific about the fact that the Dahlia is killed because of not who she was, but who she resembled.

Double OscarR winner Hilary Swank was fresh off her role in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby when she signed on to play Madeleine, a woman who has no concept of the word "conscience." De Palma, a longtime fan and purveyor of femmes fatales, wanted an actor who could handle the complicated role of "a poor little rich girl who will lead these

guys right to their doom." He says, "I think Hilary's a classic spider woman-she can play a character who is extremely vulnerable and extremely evil at the flip of a switch."

Of Swank's casting, screenwriter Friedman chuckles, "If you can get someone who has won two Academy AwardsR to play onscreen in your film for 25 percent of the time, it's a dream come true for a writer."

Kudos aside, Swank was simply thrilled she was off the grueling training regimen required to turn her into boxing champ Maggie Fitzgerald. "Madeleine would never drink egg-whites for breakfast," the actor laughs.

Swank chose the role because "Madeleine was so different from anything that I've ever done. She comes from high class, affluent background-slumming along and doing whatever she wants-a spoiled, Daddy's little girl. But behind all of that, she's a very troubled person who is actually searching for love."

Playing mother to the pack of oddities known as the Linscott family is acclaimed British actor Fiona Shaw. The woman who fanatically shifts between snobbish clarity and operatic binges, Mrs. Linscott would need to be played by a performer who could, in a heartbeat, turn on (and off) her maddening charms.

De Palma recalls of one of the film's signature scenes-the dinner where Bucky is introduced to the Linscott family-"Fiona would give Josh a distasteful look that says, 'What is this policeman doing in my home?' With her tricky exposition, she reminds me of Vanessa Redgrave. She makes the character so much fun."

Doppelgangers to Dioptic Cameras:

De Palma's Take on the Dahlia

"You'll never shoot me. Don't forget who I look like.

Because that girl…that sad, dead bitch…she's all you have."

-Madeleine Linscott

While known for a signature, deft style-one of recurring Hitchcockian themes, doppelgangers, femmes fatales, explosions of operatic violence and sweeping and stalking cameras-the director is the first to laughingly admit that he doesn't consciously ask, "How can I make this more Brian De Palma?" when he starts a picture. "That's an unconscious thing. I don't know why you're attracted to certain material," he notes. "There's just something that hooks you in and intrigues you."

Still, there are themes to which he finds himself repeatedly drawn. For example, he has long explored the common threads of doubles-both internal and external-those with fractured personalities who transfer guilt onto other characters. It is not uncommon for De Palma's characters to assume complexities and personalities of others. From Body Double to Dressed to Kill and Raising Cain, he has often explored that territory.

De Palma did find it an interesting fit that many of his recurring themes were echoed in the rapid-fire words and lurid specificity of Ellroy's world. For example, Madeleine becomes fixated on knowing (and sleeping with) a girl who looks like her, and she falls into the sway and swagger of Betty, beginning to assume her characteristics to seduce others. She even uses Bucky's obsession with the case to get him to return to her bed.

But, as in all adaptations, there would be major cuts to the source material. During the first reveal of the Dahlia's crime scene, De Palma focuses the audience on an event (Lee's shoot-out with Baxter Fitch) that happens simultaneous to the body's discovery-very much the antithesis of what happens in the Ellroy book.

De Palma thought it would be ironic if the big crime was actually behind the smaller one. "I wanted to completely throw the Dahlia's reveal away in the background of all those other things going on," he states. "We had to compress a number of storylines, and we got it down to four herrings. Because most of the story is told through indirection, you think, 'This is the important thing.' But in reality, we moved a few of them off the playing field."

While it was important to the screenwriter and director to bring both Ellroy's words and intricate subplots into the film version of The Black Dahlia, they knew that the visual medium of film would require some tricks that weren't available to the novelist. For example, Ellroy's poses that Betty's killer was inspired to carve a grotesque smile onto her face by the story of Victor Hugo's tragic character Gwynplaine. In Hugo's1869 novel, "L'Homme quit Rit" he writes of a man who has a permanent grin carved upon his face by the King, in revenge for the treachery of Gwynplaine's father. This haunting character has inspired many a film interpretation since the early 1900s (as well as serving as inspiration for Batman cartoonist Bob Kane's evil antagonist The Joker).

The director notes, "In Ellroy's book, the image of 'The Man Who Laughs' is very much on the murder's mind…and the Dahlia is scarred in precisely that manner." He next asked his team, "What's the best way to show it? Was there a movie? Sure enough…there was." De Palma found that showing Bucky, Lee and Kay watching German director Paul Leni's 1928 film The Man Who Laughs would tie together his loose ends nicely. (Coincidentally, the film was produced by Universal Pictures and became one of the studio's first transitional talkies, incorporating sound with cards for the first time).

Few American directors have opted to use the palette of colors and complex camera movements for which De Palma is known. Up until the fight scene between his two supercops, De Palma uses saturation coloring. Then, he moves on to very strong contrasting colors to tell the bulk of his story, complete with desaturated flashbacks. The director notes, "The whole movie is basically a descent into hell. With noir, you try to use high contrast, a lot of shadows and low angles."

De Palma chose to work with a team-including longtime collaborators, former opera set and Fellini designer Dante Ferretti and renowned cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond-to design specific sequences in service of the story. The director relates, "I look at a scene, and then I figure out what's the best position for the camera for a particular piece of action. Then, I maximize the visuals and design the locations for sequences." Notably, De Palma is known to create three-dimensional models to understand exactly what he wants to film before he starts rolling camera.

Of his directing style, he shares, "It's not interesting to me unless it speaks to me visually," he says. "Most directing is quite simple. If you have good taste and know how to direct actors, then you'll shoot either a medium shot or medium close-up quite well. Unfortunately, most people have been brought up on TV, and many directors offer dialogue with two and three and steadicam shots."

In the film, De Palma keeps images of the Dahlia in the background until the very end, purposefully holding his camera off of close-ups of the body and building the audience's morbid curiosity and anticipation for what the deceased Betty looks like. He, instead, introduces us to Betty-very much alive-through onscreen camera tests.

De Palma continues, "It was as if someone was displaying a grotesque work of art, then saying, 'look what I've done.' Those pictures make you think someone was sculpting in flesh. They just seep into your subconscious. My concept was to hold that image back until the end of the film."

Producer Linson states, "Brian sees the sequences of things visually, and the dialogue is the icing. He brings in the back-story of the Dahlia through screen tests, and he has his own cameo (a la Hitchcock) in there."

The voice of the off-screen filmmaker who is trying to direct Betty during her test was actually De Palma, originally done as a temporary track, but kept once the production team noted how well Kirshner and the director sparred. De Palma notes, "What you see with Mia during her screen tests was very much ad libbed. We explored the relationship of my

playing a callous, insensitive producer and Mia, a delusional star-struck, desperate girl. We did a whole series of things on camera, then Vilmos put it into black-and-white. This makes Elizabeth Short a real human being and made the movie much more emotional."

Continuous takes with the audience-as-participant, another mark of the director, would also be used in The Black Dahlia. The first time the audience is allowed into the Linscott mansion, Swank plays right into the camera in a first-person shoot as we are welcomed in as her date, Bucky. "It's an old convention of the war," says De Palma. "This was the place to do it. Let her play her nuttiness right to camera and suck in the audience." Equally as jarring, as soon as Bucky/audience member sits at the dinner table, the camera switches back to a third-person shot.

It was always De Palma's intention to use Ellroy's lines in this scene, noting, "I directed it underlining his intention. This is the craziest dinner one could ever be at, but everybody seems to think everything's quaint, the way things should be. Only later do we see the deadly consequences of this Addams Family. But when we're introduced to them, it's like a Restoration comedy."

Ground-level camera angles would be used, allowing the audience to look straight from the corpse's perspective into Bucky's face when Detective Millard calls him over to view the Dahlia's body. Switched-up again, the audience is Bucky when D.A. Loew dresses down the detective when he's sitting at his desk.

De Palma and Zsigmond's choices draw us in even further into Betty's world, pre- and post-mortem. The complicated camera work needed to follow the fight between Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice would prove not only a physical challenge for Hartnett and Eckhart, but one for cinematographer Zsigmond. As Bucky throws the fight, dropping his right and taking a left hook from Lee-followed by a fast right upper-cut that takes out his two front teeth-the camera and choreography work blend beautifully. In this scene and others, De Palma would make much use of his signature split-screen and split-diopter shots.

"In an anamorphic (traditional lens) movie, you see a big face in the foreground and someone 30 feet away, then both of them out of focus," notes cinematographer Zsigmond. "Optically, it's impossible to make both clear, so we use a split diopter lens that hides the split and makes the image seamless." This is also a trademark De Palma imprint, used in films like The Untouchables, Blow Out and Carrie.

Finally, for the Dahlia herself, the production team decided to save sharing the visuals of her body bisected, lying in the lot that would become Leimert Park, until the end of the film. De Palma notes, "We discovered we had to create a living image of the Dahlia. All of the images of her are her dead outside or on an autopsy table. It was a very close replica of the body, and I was always shooting away from it. We only really brought it out in all its glory in the last scene on the lawn.

For audience and filmmaker alike, "the images of her are the things that keep her alive in our imaginations, dreams and nightmares," he says. "Bucky will always be haunted with this image, much like in my others where something subconscious grabs you-like Carrie grabbing you from the grave."

Recreating Hollywoodland:

Locations, Costume and Music for the Film

"I'm told that I'm very photogenic."

-Elizabeth Short

Ellroy best describes the dark side of Los Angeles as "crime and sex and outre pathology."

To capture that look for The Black Dahlia, in April 2005, the production team traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, to recreate Hollywood of 1947. Linson shares, "It was great to have a production crew who maintains the control of duplicating Hollywood. You actually see the Hollywood Hills, but they're really the hills of Sofia."

Production designer Ferretti built Hollywood and streets infamous during the Zoot Suit Riots in the Lic Pier/Venice area…locations that no longer exist in L.A. The director adds that he wasn't concerned about shooting in a location so far from the real Los Angeles, noting, "Much like Scarface, for which we only shot two weeks in Miami, you will never have a sense that you are not in L.A."

In the book, Lee Blanchard disappears for a time in Mexico, much to the chagrin of Kay and his partner, Bucky. To handle that additional challenge, but still keep elements of the story in play, De Palma brought Lee's disappearance back to Los Angeles, the city he was recreating deep within Europe.

The production would actually wrap by shooting key sequences in Los Angeles. During June 2005, the team would film across sections of the city to get just the right look for the backdrops, capturing images indigenous only to L.A. Finally, the production headed to City Hall on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles to film sequences of the two detectives while they battle with the LAPD to stay on the case. There, they would conclude principal photography.

To dress the cast in period fashions, costume designer Jenny Beavan would bring costumes in from London to Bulgaria-specifically, multiple outfits for Swank, Johansson and Kirshner. Beavan succinctly states of the women who wore the fashions of the period,

"They defined glamour…even when their lipstick was smeared."

Swank, often found in Alexander McQueen, Giambattista Valli-even accepting her 2005 OscarR in a backless Guy Laroche-was in love with fashion before she came onto the set. Having worked with Calvin Klein as a lingerie model, she knew which designs she loved and was very fond of Beavan's costumes. "Jenny paid such attention to the details," Swank offers. "I felt so glamorous in the outfits…like Judy Garland or Rita Hayworth."

The director celebrates that his leading ladies were reminiscent of the glamorous era. "Scarlett, Mia and Hilary are dressed to the nines and made up to be as seductive as possible," De Palma says. "They're dressed (and photograph) beautifully. You're defenseless against them."

Silk flowers, black satin dresses and torn stockings were Beavan's costumes of choice for the Dahlia. Quite the clotheshorse, Kirshner is known for her love of French clothing from Louboutin to Lanvin.

Johansson found that Kay Lake was indeed a woman with a collection of beautiful clothing. Commenting on her short-sleeve sweater sets, pearls and antique hairpins, she laughs, "How can you not feel like a sexy dish in that?" Specifically, when Bucky comes home to Kay, she opens the door like an angel in white-cut against the disparity of the Dahlia's black-stained body on the ground with a menacing crow, attacked in death as she was in life.

The men would not be left out. With their wide ties, double-breasted suits and Miller Raider-style teardrop hats, Eckhart and Hartnett were the height of period fashion…even for underpaid flatfoots. Director De Palma adds, "It's what I loved about The Untouchables. The suits, the hats, the cars and language…everything was so stylized."

Period-appropriate music was just as vital to De Palma as location or costume choices. From the trumpets that bump in the first time Bucky and Madeleine make love to the slow jazz band sequence when Bucky reveals a difficult truth to Kay, the score was the evocative creation of composer and jazz trumpet player (and a student of noir films) Mark Isham.

"The key to Mark Isham is that he's a great trumpet player," compliments the director. "I always heard a mournful trumpet in this blues-type of movie. It was like the voice of Bucky." He adds, "You know you have a really great composer when he can replace the temp score and you've forgotten it completely.

To underscore the Dahlia's hideaway, Laverne's, where she would cadge drinks "off the sisters," the team would turn to unique country and pop-artist belter k.d. lang, whom producer Linson convinced to sing 'Love for Sale' for the soundtrack. "We created this kind of Busby Berkeley number," shares De Palma. "We spent a whole night shooting, and it was the last thing shot in Sofia."

And what would a sexy, underground '40s nightclub be without leggy showgirls? Mia Frye, the same choreographer De Palma worked with on Femme Fatale, brought in French, Bulgarian and English dancers to bring Laverne's to life. "Those girls danced 'til dawn," laughs the director.

****

August 30th, 2006, marks Brian De Palma's fifth premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The Black Dahlia will open the annual event in the Sal Grande of Venice's Palazzo del Cinema. And the inspiration for the story he tells will finally find herself on the silver screen, almost 60 years after her murder.

Elizabeth Short's journey to the movies was a bittersweet one. All her life, she dreamed of being an actress who touched others. She had no idea just how much of a nightmare that would become. A beautiful Hollywood wannabe at the end of the Second Great World War, Betty's life was snuffed out prematurely. Yet, the impact of her story will be felt for centuries.

The director concludes, "How does that beautiful girl you've seen pin-ups of become this? Who did this to her and why? The Black Dahlia has lived on for decades. It's one of those mysteries that will go on forever."

We close this chapter of The Black Dahlia's saga with Ellroy's summations on Betty and his own mother, Jean: "They rest dead as L.A. opportunists, and I have ceaselessly worked to recast them as L.A. immortals." Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Cherchez la femme.

Universal Pictures In Association With Millennium Films Present A Signature Pictures Production For Equity Pictures Medienfonds GmbH & Co. KG III And Nu Image Entertainment GmbH: A Brian De Palma Film Starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank-The Black Dahlia-with Mia Kirshner, Mike Starr, Fiona Shaw. The casting is by Johanna Ray, CSA; music is by Mark Isham. The costume designer is Jenny Beavan. The film is edited by Bill Pankow, ACE. The production is designed by Dante Ferretti; the director of photography is Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC. The line producer is Michael P. Flannigan. The co-executive producers are Samuel Hadida and Victor Hadida. The film's executive producers are James B. Harris, Danny Dimbort, Boaz Davidson, Trevor Short, John Thompson, Andreas Thiesmeyer, Josef Lautenschlager, Henrik Huydts and Rolf Deyhle. The Black Dahlia is produced by Art Linson, Avi Lerner, Moshe Diamant and Rudy Cohen. It is based on a novel by James Ellroy, from a screenplay by Josh Friedman. The film is directed by Brian De Palma. c2006 Universal Studios. www.theblackdahliamovie.net

AFTERWORD

HILLIKERS:

AN AFTERWORD TO
THE BLACK DAHLIA

BY

JAMES ELLROY

Motion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. It's a quick-march progression of advance publicity and saturation screen-time. My signature novel is now an exceptional film in wide release. The film will possibly expedite book sales in career-unprecedented numbers. More people may read this afterword than have read all my other books to date. This affords me a narrative opportunity of stern moment. I will gratefully capitalize on it here. A personal story attends The Black Dahlia, both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged eleven years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life. I want this piece to honor them. I want

this piece to redress imbalances in my previous writings about them. I want to close out their myth with an elegy. I want to grant them the peace of denied disclosure and never say another public word about them.

My mother's name was Geneva Hilliker. She dropped the name Ellroy when she renounced my father. I laud her repudiation and commend her desire to live without a male surname appendage. She haunts me in deep and unfathomable ways. I often travel her life at a brisk or painstakingly slow mental speed. I start in rural Wisconsin and end on an access road in L.A. The in-between stops are often filled with conjecture. I lived with her for ten years. The passage of time marks my childhood memories suspect. I later granted her a rich dramatic status and further distorted my memory. I did not know her in life. I am determined to know her in death. Summaries of her forty-three years often provide insight. Brevity enhances my process of refraction.

She grew up near the Minnesota border. Tunnel City was summer green and winter dead-tree barren. Her father was an alcoholic game warden prone to violent fits. Her mother was frail and lovely. Her younger sister worshipped her flat-out. A cemetery sits near her birthplace and the now-boarded church she attended. I've visited it several times. My ancestry is framed in the bulk of the gravestones. Hilliker, Woodard, Linscott, Pierce, Smith. Farmers and Protestant clergy. A British-American bloodline of longing and hurt that I will never know and will always sense in genetic code.

She had striking dark-red hair. She was the most beautiful girl in Tunnel City. Her aunt Norma Hilliker was the most beautiful woman. She blew out of Tunnel City at nineteen. She looked back only at leisurely whim. Aunt Norma put her through nursing school in Chicago. She took to city life and succumbed to fleshpot temptations. She drank to excess. She had youthful liaisons. She won a beauty contest and waltzed through a Hollywood screen test. She returned to Chicago. She learned she was pregnant. She tried to abort herself and hemorrhaged. She had an affair with the doctor who patched her up.

She went from "Geneva" to "Jean." She tied her hair back in a frumpy do and wore it with imperious confidence. She married and divorced a sporting-goods heir in fast measure. She traveled with a much older lesbian sidekick. She moved to L.A. and broke up my father's first marriage. They moved in together. They lived three miles from the Black Dahlia dumpsite in 1947. They read about Betty Short and thought about Betty Short and talked about Betty Short in ways that I will never discern.

I was born in '48. My mother held down nursing jobs and provided support through my father's feeble stabs at employment. They divorced in '55. She considered my father weak, fanciful, and duplicitous in small ways. She was right. He considered her a drunk and a whore. He failed to acknowledge her competence and dutiful nature. She was Midwestern-Calvinist rectitude and Saturday night cut-loose girl. She lived in that misalignment. It engendered a desperate unhappiness and killed her.

She met a man. She met him that Saturday night or knew him from before. She was drunk. She said "yes" or "no" or "maybe" or some encoded combination. She said, "No," finally. He raped her and killed her. It was June 22, 1958.

My bereavement was complex and ambiguous. I lived in her sensual thrall and doted on my permissive father. She was strict. Church was a firm mandate. I caught her in bed with men. I lived for naked glimpses. I hated her and lusted for her and got my wish of her dead.

Her death corrupted my imagination. My reading focus turned to crime stories. My father bought me Jack Webb's book The Badge for my eleventh birthday. It contained a piece on the Black Dahlia murder. Jean Hilliker and Betty Short-one in transmogrification.

I could not openly grieve for Jean. I could grieve for Betty. I could divert the shame of incestuous lust to a safe lust object. I could dismiss Jean with a child's callous heart and grant a devotional love to Betty.

Jean led me to Betty. Betty led me to Jean. The initial fusing was sharply brief. The sustained process has been attenuated. It's a torch song with no crescendo and diminishing chords. It's a near-fifty-year transit that demands these final words of explication.

I spent the next seven years with my father. I defamed my mother to please him. I grew up hungry for women. I stalked rich neighborhoods and spied on happy families in big houses. I spun Betty Short fantasies. I cast myself in savior and avenger roles. I broke into houses and scoured lingerie drawers. I was born to think singlemindedly and live obsessively. Jean. Betty. Sex. Crime and all its social corollaries. The astonishing conjunctions of deep romantic love-hopeless and hopeful-in fierce men and women.

My father died in '65. I spent the next twelve years in a near-insane spiral. I cleaned up at twenty-nine. I wrote six good novels and crashed Betty and Jean with The Black Dahlia.

It was a salutary ode to Elizabeth Short and a self-serving and perfunctory embrace of my mother. I acknowledged the Jean-Betty confluence in media appearances and exploited it to sell books. My performances were commanding at first glance and glib upon reappraisal. I cut my mother down to sound-bite size and packaged her wholesale. I determined the cause of my ruthlessness years later.

She owned me. Her claim rankled. I wanted to portray myself as a man above all Oedipal constraints. I had created a fictional Elizabeth Short to usurp my mother's claim and upstage her. It worked in the novel. It sold a great many books. It left Jean Hilliker still dead on that roadside, unblessed with love.

My moral debt to Jean remained. My moral debt to Betty, too.

I saw my mother's homicide file in 1994 and wrote a magazine piece about it. I expanded the piece into a memoir entitled My Dark Places. The book was my mother's biography, my autobiography, and the story of my unsuccessful search to find her killer. I addressed my exploitation and gave her to the world with diligence and blunt finesse. It was candor as expression of love and a long-delayed bestowal of honor. I erred only in one manner. I possessed no prophetic gifts. I could not predict the extent to which my mother would shape-shift inside me. I could not predict the influence of two extraordinary women.

They changed me. They constellated and derailed my obsessiveness. They taught me to love with a lighter touch. They convinced me to pull Jean back from my personal dramatic arc and let her rest still in my heart.

"Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that. "

A prophecy. An obsessed cop's words to a friend and rival. An indictment and celebration of male ardor. A soft breath in ellipsis.

Jean. Betty. Helen and Joan. Slow, now-go at this softly.

o o o

Baby, who were you? How would you grow and who would you love?

Elizabeth Short was born in Boston in 1924. She had four sisters. Her home life shattered early. She left town a la Jean Hilliker and rarely looked back.

She roamed south and west. She landed in postwar L.A. She nursed widespread and undiscerning crushes on young servicemen. She was a more decorous James Ellroy crouched outside bedroom windows.

She was not a porno-film actress or a film-noir succubus. She was not promiscuous by any sane standard. She was a pie-faced Irish girl with bad teeth and asthma. She died at twenty-two. The L.A. Herald-Express called her a "romance seeker. " Her last months were a disordered grasp for selfhood and love. I revere her for that. I underestimated her love-hunger in my book. I couldn't feel it then. My own love-hunger blunted me to the real her. I failed to comprehend the force of her pure and headstrong youth.

I survived my youth. Betty didn't. That gap defines my debt to her. My gender and native street circumspection spared me the abyss. Betty led with a callow heart. Yearning and a silly girl's trust took her down. I tried to poise my book between sordidness and goodness. Readers will decide the balance for themselves, in ways I can never assess. I think I know Betty more completely now. I believe her balance tips to goodness in a most fulsome way. A disproportion exists in my portrayal. I filtered the fictive Betty through my own urgent lust. That lust has raged and diminuendoed in the 20 years from book to film. Betty Short was indestructibly hopeful. Her destruction resulted from it. That stands as her tragedy.

Motion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. Betty was movie-mad and might have sensed this. She had actress dreams. She dressed and coiffed herself with dramatic intent. She killed time in Hollywood movie theatres and subsisted on snack-bar food. She told whopping lies with no small flair. She concocted grand love affairs with doomed army pilots and stillborn babies. Her stories showed her as the focal point of big lives in duress. She achieved prophecy in that manner. She practiced the conjuror's art. She envisioned herself as storm center and made her lies come true.

I followed her own lead thusly. I culled physical facts and embellished them. I structured L.A. '47 as a passion zone subsumed by Elizabeth Short. Every life touches the Dahlia. Betty rocks definitive. Obscurity defined her life. Celebrity defines her death. Her short time span and narrow purview expand and eclipse great public events. Her ghastly end tells us there is no surcease from human horror. She ramifies in obsessive circuits. She bids artists to fuse truths and lies. I followed her lead. Brian De Palma brilliantly followed mine. My novel. His film. My world as his visual record. The Dahlia as lodestone and magnetic field and arbiter of ambiguous redemption.

De Palma's films circumscribe worlds of obsession. They are rigorously and suffocatingly formed. No outer world exists during their time frame. Colors flare oddly. Movement arrests you. You forfeit control and see only what he wants you to see. He manipulates you in the sole name of passion. He understands relinquishment. The

filmgoer needs to succumb. His films are authoritative. He controls response firmly. His hold tightens as his stories veer into chaos. He stands and falls, coheres and decoheres, succeeds and errs behind passion. He was the ideal artist to film "The Black Dahlia."

Now Betty Short's world and my world are his world. It's a world that no other filmmaker could have created. It's casually dangerous and invasively corrupt. It's a boomtown populated by psychically maimed misfits running from World War II. It's a fiend habitat. The Dahlia was meant to die here and nowhere else. The players in her drama knew relinquishment. They understood that she was bigger than they were, and that by touching her spirit she granted them transcendence. The dynamic applies to me and to Brian De Palma. She's bigger than us. She tempted us and seduced us and beckoned us to submission. She gave us this grand strain of her endless story.

She touched two men and gave them her world and one man's journey through it. Bucky Bleichert is a fictional cop and a doppelganger/writer-filmmaker. He's the man writing out the great adventure of his life and the voyeur viewing sex with a camera. Bleichert is me. Bleichert is De Palma. He's standing outside momentous events. He's

lost in scrutiny. He wants to control. He wants to capitulate. His inner life is near-chaotic. He needs to impose external order to countermand his mental state. It's Homicide Investigation as Art. He needs to take malignancy and render it something his own.

Here's where Bleichert is solely me. He's a torchbearer. He carries a consuming hurt and tenderness close and doesn't care if he gets burned. Someone's out there. It's a She. I feel her stirring. I need to solve this crime and unlock this riddle and mark this web of circumstance as my own-so she'll love me.

Crazed. Magnificently fatuous. Hurtful, hopeful, enraged. The reason why I wrote this novel. Misogynistic fury codified. The reason why Betty Short was killed and why I tell redemption tales aimed at women.

And why I'm a Hilliker much more than an Ellroy.

"Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that. "

Josh Hartnett understood the precept. His filmic Bucky Bleichert packs that torch for someone out there. The physical Harnett is my described Bucky and me. He's tall, lanky, and dark-haired, with small brown eyes. Hartnett's performance nails Bucky with no histrionic excess. He excels at projecting cognition. Bucky Bleichert is always measuring and thinking. He's circumspect, intelligent, watchful. He's persistent, self-protecting, and reluctantly decent. He retains a tenuous dignity as Dahlia mania consumes him. The novel is phrased as a young man coming of age in a hell of his own making. Bucky Bleichert is

solely responsible for his own descent. He made specious moral choices early in life and brought a grievously flawed soul to the Dahlia. Hartnett captures that. He appears in every scene and narrates the film. He carries the film's moral vision. He embodies a positive strain of the Hilliker code: you're fearful, but you always go forward.

The film spins off the axis of De Palma and Hartnett. It's a three-mode constellation: thriller/film noir/historical romance. The design is near-German Expressionist. It's L.A./it's not L.A./it's L.A. seen by Dahlia fiends in extremis. The cinematographer was Vilmos Zsigmond. The production designer was Dante Ferretti. The costume designer was Jenny

Bevan. The film commands you to savor every scene and revel in your visual entrapment. This textual richness symbolizes the Dahlia's hold on us. We can never look away. She won't let us.

Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, and Aaron Eckhart backstop Hartnett. They tweak him and crowd him and push him toward his destiny. They meet him in force of performance and somehow retreat-as if they know that he had to take the ultimate fall for Betty and the story is his to tell in the end. Josh Friedman made my story Hartnett's story and De Palma's. The essence of my book was forcefully and luminously captured. Friedman knows that obsession is a self-referential madness commonly known as love. It liberates in the short run and finally destroys. Love requires self-sacrifice and deference. Bucky Bleichert learns that and achieves a tenuous peace.

I knew that twenty years ago. I shaped the book around that theme. Knowledge is quite often not power. Dramatic portent does not constitute the will to change. I'm circling back to the lesson of a book I wrote at the tail end of my youth. The lesson is change your life now.

I've had splendid teachers. Betty, Jean, those two other women. This essay and the film it celebrates note a conclusion. Betty and Jean continue with me. I want them to remain sans public dialogue. They'll flourish in silence. It's a hush they've earned.

My mother was nine years older than Betty. Her life span stretched twenty-one years longer. She knew more than Betty. She was a big sister. She had things to teach her. They could have been Saturday night cut-loose girls together, before Saturday nights cut them down.

That makes Betty a Hilliker. That assigns her a plot in the cold Wisconsin graveyard where I'll rest one day. It's my bloodline in repose. Love God. Fear God. Seek goodness as dark forces assail you.

The novel ends with Kay Lake Bleichert pregnant. Bucky travels east for an almost certainly troubled reunion. The year was 1949. Their daughter was born in 1950. She's fifty-six now. She's a sturdy and dutiful woman with narrative gifts. She's Jean and Betty and me. She's a Hilliker assuredly.

I won't state whether Kay and Bucky are still alive. I created them, so it's my determination. I know, but I'm not telling. The Black Dahlia case continues to unfold in my silence. In that sense, it's your call.

I would like to thank the many people who served to make my novel such a fine film. I would like to thank Helen and Joan for their great kindness and generosity.

"Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that. "

I do. It's God's great gift to me and my moral bedrock. I will never forsake that pure thought.

-James Ellroy, San Francisco, 02/27/06

About the Cast

JOSH HARTNETT (Bucky Bleichert) was born in San Francisco and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He first came to audiences' attention as Michael "Fitz" Fitzgerald in the television series Cracker. He made his feature film debut in 1998, co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween: H20 for Miramax. That same year, he received an MTV movie award nomination for Best Breakthrough Performance. Also in 1998, again for Miramax, Josh starred in Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty. In 1999, he starred opposite Kirsten Dunst in Paramount Classics' critically acclaimed black comedy The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola's directorial debut.

In 2001, Hartnett hit a stride by starring in three features. He portrayed the antagonist in the Lions Gate Film O, a modern-day version of Othello. His portrayal of the dark and dangerous character Hugo earned him widespread praise. He then landed a role in the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster Pearl Harbor, which earned over one billion dollars worldwide for Disney. He segued to Morocco, where he starred in Sony's Black Hawk Down for director Ridley Scott-again, a Jerry Bruckheimer production. The film, which was based on Mark Bowden's 1999 nonfiction novel of the same name, told the story of an

ill-fated U.S. humanitarian mission in Somalia which took place on October 3, 1993. In 2002, the National Theater Owners awarded him with the ShoWest 2002 Male Star of Tomorrow Award.

Hartnett starred in MGM's Wicker Park, opposite Diane Kruger and Rose Byrne, for director Paul McGuigan; Miramax's Frank Miller's Sin City, for director Robert Rodriguez; and Mozart and the Whale, a love story between two people with Asperger's Syndrome, written by Ron Bass. Most recently, he starred in Lucky Number Slevin, with Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis for The Weinstein Company. The film re-teamed him with Wicker Park director McGuigan.

Hartnett recently completed Resurrecting the Champ, opposite Samuel L. Jackson and directed by Rod Lurie, which is now in post-production. Later this year, he will begin filming Sony's 30 Days of Night, for director David Slade.

Additional film credits include Hollywood Homicide, 40 Days and 40 Nights, Blow Dry, Town & Country and Here on Earth.

With more than a decade of work under her belt, four-time Golden Globe nominee and BAFTA winner SCARLETT JOHANSSON (Kay Lake) has proven to be one of Hollywood's most talented young actresses. Johansson received rave reviews and a Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival for her starring role opposite Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, the critically acclaimed second film by director Sofia Coppola.

Johansson portrayed the title character in Girl with a Pearl Earring, a film adapted from the novel of the same name about the painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth).

She may currently be seen in the new Woody Allen film Scoop, opposite Hugh Jackman. Following Scoop she will be seen in The Prestige, for director Christopher Nolan and opposite Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, on October 27, 2006. She just finished shooting the lead role in The Nanny Diaries, based on the highly successful book of the same name. Johansson's latest project, The Other Boleyn Girl, begins production in September, opposite Natalie Portman and Eric Bana.

At the age of 14, Johansson attained worldwide recognition for her performance as Grace MacLean, the teen traumatized by a riding accident in Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer. She went on to star in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, garnering a Best Supporting Actress Award from the Toronto Film Critics Circle. Johansson was also featured in the Coen brothers' dark drama The Man Who Wasn't There, opposite Billy Bob

Thornton and Frances McDormand. Her other film credits include the critically acclaimed Weitz brothers' film In Good Company, as well as opposite John Travolta in A Love Song for Bobby Long, which garnered her a Golden Globe nomination (her third in two years). Recently she was seen in Woody Allen's Match Point, which garnered her fourth consecutive Golden Globe nomination in three years, and opposite Ewan McGregor in The Island, for director Michael Bay.

Her additional credits include Rob Reiner's comedy North; the thriller Just Cause, with Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne; and a breakthrough role in the critically praised Manny & Lo, which earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Female Lead.

A New York native, Johansson made her professional acting debut at the age of eight in the off-Broadway production of Sophistry, with Ethan Hawke, at New York's Playwright's Horizons.

Johansson currently divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.

With numerous credits to his name, AARON ECKHART (Lee Blanchard) has positioned himself among the industry's finest. He has earned considerable acclaim for his roles including Erin Brockovich, opposite Julia Roberts, for director Stephen Soderbergh. However, it was his portrayal of a love-scorned, vengeful man in Neil LaBute's controversial film In the Company of Men that first catapulted him into stardom. Notably, this incendiary film became one of the highest-grossing independent films of 1997.

Eckhart was recently seen starring in Jason Reitman's directorial debut, Thank You for Smoking, for Fox Searchlight and will next be seen in Conversations with Other Women for Fabrication Films.

He is currently shooting the untitled Scott Hicks remake of a 2001 German film, opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Eckhart also starred in Paycheck, John Woo's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's short story, opposite Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman; Ron Howard's The Missing, in which he starred alongside Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett; The Core, opposite Hilary Swank; and Suspect Zero, with Ben Kingsley and Carrie-Anne Moss.

Originally from Northern California, Eckhart studied theater and film at Brigham Young University, where he met Neil LaBute and appeared in many of his plays. In addition to In the Company of Men, he has starred in three other LaBute films. These

include Possession, alongside Gwyneth Paltrow; Nurse Betty, opposite Renee Zellweger; and Your Friends & Neighbors, in which he starred with an ensemble cast that included Jason Patric, Amy Brenneman, Ben Stiller and Catherine Keener.

Eckhart's other film credits include Sean Penn's The Pledge, opposite Jack Nicholson; Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday; and Molly, opposite Elisabeth Shue. He also worked and studied in New York, and his theater credits include Michael Cristofer's Amazing Grace, opposite Marsha Mason.

Eckhart currently resides in Los Angeles.

HILARY SWANK (Madeleine Linscott) is the third youngest woman in history to win two Academy AwardsR for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role.

In addition to the OscarR for her performance as Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry, Swank won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama and Best Actress prizes from the New York Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics and the Broadcast Film Critics associations. She also won the Breakthrough Performance prize from the National Board of Review.

Swank then appeared in supporting roles opposite Cate Blanchett and Keanu Reeves in Sam Raimi's The Gift and opposite Al Pacino and Robin Williams in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia. Swank next starred as Alice Paul in HBO's Iron Jawed Angels, which tells the story of the women's suffragette movement. She was honored with both SAG and Golden Globe nominations for her performance in this film.

Swank was most recently seen starring opposite Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman as the title character in Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby: the story of a young woman's quest to realize her dream of becoming a professional boxer. For this performance, she was honored with her second Academy AwardR for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and garnered Best Actress prizes from the National Society of Film Critics, the Screen Actors Guild and the Broadcast Film Critics, as well as a Golden Globe for Best Lead Actress in a Drama.

She will next be seen starring in The Reaping, for Warner Bros. Swank recently wrapped production on Freedom Writers, the true story of Long Beach schoolteacher Erin Gruwell.

This fall, she will reunite with her Freedom Writers writer/director, Richard LaGravenese, to star in the film adaptation of Cecelia Ahern's novel, "PS, I Love You."

MIA KIRSHNER (Elizabeth Short) currently portrays Jenny on Showtime's hit drama The L Word. She began her acting career at the age of 17, playing a clairvoyant dominatrix in Love & Human Remains. Her performance earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination for a Genie Award (Canada's OscarR).

In 1994, Kirshner starred in Atom Egoyan's Exotica, alongside Victor Garber, Bruce Greenwood and Sarah Polley. She also co-starred with Kevin Bacon and Christian Slater in the Warner Bros. drama Murder in the First. Kirshner also appeared in the critically acclaimed independent feature Party Monster, with Macaulay Culkin and Chloe Sevigny.

Kirshner is known to television audiences for her role on the popular Fox series 24, in which she portrayed a mysterious would-be presidential assassin.

Kirshner was born in Toronto, Canada, and studied English and Russian literature at the prestigious McGill University. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

MIKE STARR (Russ Millard) was recently seen performing on Broadway in the hit revival of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. A well-known veteran of over 50 feature films, Starr was recently seen opposite John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton in The Ice Harvest. He has performed twice with Robert De Niro-in Goodfellas and in Mad Dog and Glory, with Bill Murray and Uma Thurman.

Always an impact player, Starr has had memorable roles in films opposite Johnny Depp in director Tim Burton's Ed Wood and with Jim Carrey in the Farrelly brothers' Dumb and Dumber. Sidney Lumet directed Starr in the remake of John Cassavetes' Gloria, with Sharon Stone, and Brian De Palma directed him in Snake Eyes, in which Starr works with Nicolas Cage. Other major films include The Bodyguard, with Kevin Costner; Billy Bathgate, with Dustin Hoffman; Lean on Me, with Morgan Freeman; The Natural; Uncle Buck; Two if by Sea, with Denis Leary; and Miller's Crossing, directed by the Coen brothers. Other releases include director Spike Lee's Summer of Sam and a starring role in the independent film for Showtime The Deli. Additional releases of Starr's include The Next Big Thing; Monkeybone, with Brendan Fraser; 3 A.M., with Danny Glover; and Jersey Girl, with Ben Affleck and directed by Kevin Smith. Starr continues to work with the top artists in American film.

On television, Starr recurred as the Bookstore God on the CBS hit Joan of Arcadia. His numerous television appearances include a role as series regular on NBC's ED, as well as a memorable turn as Sen. Anthony Marino on The West Wing. Starr starred opposite

Gene Wilder in Murder in a Small Town and The Lady in Question, for A&E. He appeared in an arc on Falcone and he was a series regular on the highly acclaimed EZ Streets. His other television appearances include the pilots Jersey, The Doyles and the series Hardball. His MOWs include The Last Don, and he is a veteran of many comic and dramatic series including 3rd Rock From the Sun, Karen Sisco, The Handler, Scrubs and Frasier.

Starr made his Broadway debut in The Guys in the Truck, with Elliot Gould. He is a graduate of Hofstra University and currently lives in Chicago with his wife, pediatric heart surgeon Joanne Starr. He is proud of his three children: Cassie, John and Nicole.

FIONA SHAW (Ramona Linscott), whom worldwide audiences will recognize for her comical characterization as Harry's wicked Aunt Petunia in the smash box-office hits Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, recently portrayed Roman matron Fulvia, an unusual, politically ambitious woman during Caesar's time on ABC's miniseries Empire.

Her other big-screen appearances include starring as a criminal profiler in the U.K. film Mind Games; the crime thriller Doctor Sleep, with ER's Goran Visnjic; the Daniel Day-Lewis drama My Left Foot; The Avengers, opposite Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery; Three Men and a Little Lady; London Kills Me; Super Mario Bros.; Undercover Blues, co-starring Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid; Jane Eyre; Anna Karenina; The Butcher Boy; The Last September; the Italian romantic comedy The Triumph of Love, co-starring Mira Sorvino and Ben Kingsley; Sacred Hearts; The Man Who Shot Christmas; Mountains of the Moon, by director Bob Rafelson; and Persuasion, directed by Roger Michell.

Shaw's previous U.S. television appearances include Hedda Gabler, Richard II, and the fantasy miniseries Gormenghast. She has acted in numerous television films, including the Orson Welles HBO biopic RKO 281, in which she played Hedda Hopper; Love Song; For the Greater Good; Maria's Child; The Waste Land; and the series Great Britons. Additionally, she has appeared on the British series' The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Shaw has repeatedly been recognized for her work in the theater. She has been honored with four Laurence Olivier Awards (Electra, As You Like It, The Good Person of Sichaun and Machinal), three London Critics Awards (Electra, The Good Person of Sichuan and Hedda Gabler) and two London Evening Standard Awards (Machinal and Medea). In 2001 she was awarded an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and

she has been presented with doctorates from the National University of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin, where she was also named Honorary Professor of Drama.

Additional stage performances include Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Philistines, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Mephisto, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Hyde Park, The Taming of the Shrew and New Inn. She has also been seen on stage in The Powerbook, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Waste Land, Love's Labours Lost, The Rivals and Bloody Poetry. Shaw also directed the NT Education Tour of The Widower's Houses and the Abbey Theatre Dublin's production of Hamlet.

About the Filmmakers

BRIAN DE PALMA (Directed by) has showcased his filmmaking talents in diverse films ranging from thrillers such as Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Body Double and Snake Eyes to the blockbuster action film Mission: Impossible, the acclaimed police dramas Scarface, The Untouchables and Carlito's Way to the unique visions in Carrie and Phantom of the Paradise. De Palma, a director without limits on his range, has also directed war films, comedies and science fiction.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 11, 1940, De Palma grew up in Philadelphia, where his father was an orthopedic surgeon. Early on, De Palma became fascinated by physics and went to Columbia College to study the subject. He soon changed paths and began studying first theater, then cinema. In 1960, he made his first mid-length feature, Icarus, followed by 660124: The Story of an IBM Card and Woton's Wake, for which he received several awards.

De Palma undertook his first full-length feature, The Wedding Party, while studying at Sarah Lawrence College. The Wedding Party, a semi-improvised comedy, would be Robert De Niro and Jill Clayburgh's film debuts. After this first film, De Palma went on to do several documentaries and short films, including The Responsive Eye, and put on an exposition of Op Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1967, he made his second full-length feature, Murder a la Mod, a sophisticated thriller packed with Hitchcockian references. The anti-establishment fever of the '60s led him to make the satirical comedies Greetings (honored with a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) and Hi, Mom!, which lifted him into the ranks of young American filmmakers.

The big Hollywood studios began paying attention to De Palma, but it was his modest independent production Sisters which brought his first big success. Breaking away from the semi-improvisational style of his previous films, he made it apparent that his talent for writing, his sense of construction, his framing and rhythm were worthy of the best Hollywood directors.

Two years after his success, De Palma made the musical thriller Phantom of the Paradise, which came away with the Grand Prize from the 1975 Avoriaz Film Festival. In 1976, he (with Paul Schrader) wrote and directed Obsession, a romantic thriller starring Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bujold, followed by Carrie, which triumphed worldwide and earned Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie OscarR nominations. The film, which also featured Nancy Allen, John Travolta and Amy Irving, remains one of the most brilliant adaptations of a Stephen King novel. Its famous last scene, as well as others, has been widely imitated over the years.

In 1977, De Palma directed Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes and Amy Irving in The Fury, a spy film that combined the occult with political fiction. In 1978, he made Home Movies, a semi-autobiographical comedy starring Kirk Douglas and Nancy Allen, with the assistance of fellow film students from Sarah Lawrence. In 1980, De Palma returned to suspense with Dressed to Kill, starring Michael Caine, Nancy Allen and Angie Dickinson, then went on to write and direct Blow Out, which explored two of his major themes: voyeurism and politics.

In 1982, De Palma directed a baroque, hyper-violent remake of Scarface, from an Oliver Stone screenplay, starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. In 1984, he made Body Double, which gave Melanie Griffith her breakthrough role. Leaving behind the film genre which had made him famous, De Palma went on to direct The Untouchables, a huge, spectacular saga about Prohibition which earned its star, Sean Connery, an OscarR, and launched the careers of Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia. In 1989, De Palma directed Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn in the war film Casualties of War; in 1990, he adapted Tom Wolfe's satirical novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, which starred Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis.

In 1992, De Palma returned to thrillers with Raising Cain, which starred John Lithgow and Lolita Davidovich, and directed Al Pacino in Carlito's Way. In 1996, he brought together Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Beart and Jean Reno in Mission: Impossible, a tribute to the cult television series. Mission: Impossible became an enormous

international success and was followed by Snake Eyes, starring Nicolas Cage and Gary Sinise, as well as his first science fiction film, Mission to Mars, which starred Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle and Connie Nielsen. Prior to The Black Dahlia, the director helmed the thriller Femme Fatale, starring Rebecca Romijn and Antonio Banderas.

JOSH FRIEDMAN (Screenplay by) is also the author of the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's 2005 film War of the Worlds. His screenplay Orphan's Dawn is currently in development at 20th Century Fox.

A graduate of Brown University, Friedman lives in Los Angeles with his wife and child.

JAMES ELLROY (Based on a Novel by) was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels-"The Black Dahlia," "The Big Nowhere," "L.A. Confidential" and "White Jazz"-are international bestsellers. "American Tabloid" was Time magazine's Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir, "My Dark Places," was a New York Times Notable Book and a Time Best Book of the Year for 1996; his novel "The Cold Six Thousand" was a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year for 2001. He lives in Los Angeles.

In the 31 years since he produced his first motion picture, ART LINSON (Produced by) has distinguished himself in Hollywood by developing scripts and stories that attract the highest caliber talent, resulting in some of the most admired and successful motion pictures of the last two decades. Linson's credits range from such commercial and critical hits as The Untouchables (winner of the Academy AwardR for Best Supporting Actor Sean Connery), Heat (Robert De Niro and Al Pacino), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Sean Penn), Car Wash and Scrooged, to unusual classics such as Melvin and Howard (winner of two Academy AwardsR, for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress Mary Steenburgen), Fight Club (Brad Pitt and Edward Norton), The Edge (Anthony Hopkins), Heist (Gene Hackman), Casualties of War and This Boy's Life (Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio).

Born in Chicago, Linson grew up in Hollywood. He attended the University of California at Berkeley in 1960 and finished his degree at the University of California at Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA Law School in 1967.

In 1995, Linson published his first book, "A Pound of Flesh: Perilous Tales of How to Produce Movies in Hollywood." His second book, "What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line," was published in 2002. It is currently being developed as a film by Robert De Niro's Tribeca Films.

In 2004, Linson worked on the film Imaginary Heroes, with Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels. He followed this by executive-producing Lord of Dogtown, with Heath Ledger and Emile Hirsch.

AVI LERNER (Produced by) was born in 1947 in Haifa, Israel, and studied economics at the University of Tel Aviv. After a short period in the banking industry, Lerner entered the film business in 1972, when he established the first and only drive-in cinema in Tel Aviv. He went on to develop a chain of six movie theaters in Israel, and in the late 1970s, was the first to recognize the potential of the home video market. He effectively cornered the Israeli home video market, acquiring rights to over 7,000 pictures for Israel. He sold his home video and cinema company in 1984, and between 1980 and 1984, Lerner produced six pictures in Israel. In 1984, he went to South Africa to produce the remake of King Solomon's Mines, starring Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone, for the Cameron Group.

Between 1984 and 1992, he produced over 40 pictures in South Africa for his company Nu Metro Production and sold them all over the world.

In 1986, Lerner acquired the Metro cinema chain in South Africa from CIC International and the South African Home Video operations of Thorn EMI. Over the next four years in South Africa, Lerner built the Nu Metro Entertainment group, which developed into one of the largest and most aggressive entertainment companies in Africa. Nu Metro Entertainment included four different companies that covered theaters, video, distribution and production. The cinema chain, under the name Nu Image Theatres, developed from 33 screens in 1986 to 160 screens in 1992.

Nu Metro Distribution licensed film distribution rights for Southern Africa-which were then exploited through its own cinema chain, its own video distribution operations and thereafter licensed to Southern African pay (TivM-Nett) and free television broadcasters that represented companies like Warner Bros., Disney, Fox, MGM and most of the independent distributors.

In 1991 and 1992-partly as a result of the political instability facing South Africa and partly because of a desire to establish an LA-based production/distribution company-Nu Metro Ltd. (excluding the film production operations) was sold to CAN Gallo Ltd. The proceeds of the sale were used partly to produce the first five pictures for the new group and partly to establish Nu Image in Los Angeles. In 1992, Lerner moved to America and established Nu Image with Danny Dimbort and Trevor Short.

Today, Lerner is one of the most respected and prolific independent film producers in the industry. He is a member of the board of directors of both the Independent Producers Association and the American Film Marketing Association. His company, Nu Image/Millennium Films, currently produces 14 to 15 independent pictures a year, and he has produced over 230 pictures in his illustrious movie career that spans three decades. In addition to The Black Dahlia, recent credits include Edison, 16 Blocks, Lonely Hearts, Mozart and the Whale, Wicker Man, Home of the Brave and King of California. Nu Image/Millennium is now planning to produce movies such as Rambo IV and Day of the Dead, which will have theatrical release dates for the U.S. and the whole world.

MOSHE DIAMANT (Produced by) has produced and executive produced an

extensive list of films including Kansas, starring Matt Dillon; Full Moon in Blue Water, starring Gene Hackman and Teri Garr; Night Game; Men at Work, starring Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen; Curtis Hanson's Bad Influence; John Woo's Double Team; Maximum Risk, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme; Hard Target; Timecop; Men of War; Sudden Death; The Quest; The Body; and The Musketeer.

Following 2002's release of Extreme Ops with Devon Sawa, Rufus Sewell and Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Diamant also produced David Mamet's Spartan, starring Val Kilmer. Additional feature productions include Tristan & Isolde, starring James Franco; Funky Monkey, starring Matthew Modine and Roma Downey; and A Sound of Thunder, featuring Edward Burns, Ben Kingsley and Catherine McCormack. December 2004 saw the release of Imaginary Heroes, with Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels. Diamant just wrapped shooting the police drama Til Death in New Orleans.

Award-winning producer RUDY COHEN (Produced by) began his career in Israel, where his popular and controversial film Beyond the Walls won the Venice Film Festival International Critics Award, opened the Seoul Olympic Arts Festival and was

nominated for an Academy AwardR as Best Foreign-Language Film. Arriving in the United States, he co-produced the 10-part series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, narrated by Abba Eban, which won three Emmys as well as the prestigious Peabody and Christopher Awards.

Cohen went on the produce The Island on Bird Street, a coming-of-agestory set in Poland during World War II that was honored with two Silver Bear Awards at the Berlin Film Festival and won three Emmys. In the past five years, Cohen has produced the spiritual and political thriller The Body, starring Antonio Banderas, and executive-produced Universal Pictures' The Musketeer, Paramount's Extreme Ops and Warner Bros.' Fear Dot Com.

He also produced The I Inside, a thriller by Michael Cooney starring Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Polley and Stephen Rea for Miramax Films, and executive-produced Imaginary Heroes, directed by Dan Harris, and starring Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch and Jeff Daniels for Sony Classic.

Filmmaker JAMES B. HARRIS (Executive Producer) has worked in Hollywood for more than 50 years. He began his film career as a producer on 1956's The Killing and 1957's Paths of Glory and went on to produce Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial Lolita in 1962. He also produced 1977's Charles Bronson-thriller Telefon.

As a writer, director, producer, Harris created 1973's Sleeping Beauty, 1982's Fast-Walking and 1988's Cop (both of which he also produced), as well as 1993's action-thriller Boiling Point, which starred Wesley Snipes.

As a director and producer, he created 1965's The Bedford Incident.

DANNY DIMBORT (Executive Producer) was born and educated in Tel Aviv, Israel. He entered the film industry in 1964 as a distribution executive for Golan Globus Films in Israel, where he was responsible for the marketing and exploitation of the company's film rights in the Israeli market. Within two years, he was appointed managing director of the company, a position he retained for 14 years and in which he responsible for all facets of film distribution.

In 1980, Dimbort moved to Los Angeles, where he became head of international sales for Cannon Films, one of the most prolific and flamboyant film production-distribution companies of the home-video era. At Cannon, Dimbort held the title of executive vice president and developed his reputation as one of the most successful international film salesmen in the business.

With the merger of Cannon and Pathe in 1988, Dimbort became head of international sales for the expanded company. When Cannon/Pathe took over MGM in 1990, he became president of international distribution for MGM-a position he held until 1992, when he left MGM to start and co-chair, with Avi Lerner, Nu Image Inc., an international distribution company.

Nu Image, since its inception, has developed and maintained a solid reputation as a producer and distributor of high-quality action pictures for both the international and domestic markets. Nu Image titles include several extremely successful creature, sci-fi and disaster films, as well as a number of action-hero titles starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren.

In 1996, Dimbort and Nu Image formed Millennium Films to address the market's growing need for quality theatrical films and higher-budget action features, while Nu Image continued to cater to the lucrative world home-video market. Between the two divisions, over 200 films have been produced since 1992. Under the Millennium Films label, Dimbort and his partners have produced and distributed numerous titles including theatrical-quality films such as 16 Blocks, starring Bruce Willis and Mos Def under the direction of Richard Donner, and The Wicker Man, starring Nicolas Cage under the direction of Neil LaBute.

Dimbort and Nu Image/Millennium Films currently develop, finance, produce and distribute approximately 15-18 pictures a year, with budgets ranging from $3 million to $60 million, while shooting in locations all over the world.

BOAZ DAVIDSON (Executive Producer) is a prolific filmmaker who has produced some 75 motion pictures, written over 30 and directed more than two dozen. His many credits include directing such movies as Looking for Lola, Outside the Law, Solar Force, Salsa, Going Bananas, Dutch Treat and The Last American Virgin. Born in Tel Aviv, Davidson began his association with Nu Image/Millennium Films in 1995, and he currently serves as the company's head of production and creative affairs.

TREVOR SHORT (Executive Producer) was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, and he

obtained his bachelors of law degree from the University of Rhodesia and an MBA from the University of Cape Town. In 1980, he entered the merchant banking industry with Standard Chartered Merchant Bank in Zimbabwe, where he became head of the corporate finance department, responsible for takeovers, mergers and IPOs. In 1984, he moved to South Africa and joined Hill Samuel Merchant Bank in Johannesburg.

Short developed a tax-based financing scheme for movies in South Africa that was successful in raising over $200 million from South African private investors to fund the production of international feature films in South Africa.

In 1986, Short moved from Hill Samuel to Investec Merchant Bank as head of corporate finance. He was responsible for eight IPOs on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, numerous mergers and acquisitions, and continued to secure private financing for motion pictures-most of which were produced by Avi Lerner's Nu Metro Productions for international film companies. He also became the primary consultant to the government of South Africa regarding film investment and taxation legislation.

In 1989, Short left the banking sector and joined Avi Lerner as a shareholder in and chief executive of the Nu Metro Entertainment Group in Johannesburg. He continued to arrange financing for the group's film production activities and was directly involved in the planning, design, financing and construction of the group's growing cinema chain. In 1991, Lerner and Short negotiated the sale of the Nu Metro Group to CNA Gallo.

Since 1992, Short has been one of the three principals and the CFO of the Nu Image Group. In 1995, he moved to Los Angeles, where he is primarily responsible for the legal, financing and administrative operations of Nu Image, including the use of various tax and subsidy schemes in many parts of the world, and relations between Nu Image and its domestic and international banks.

JOHN THOMPSON (Executive Producer) grew up in Rome, where his fine body of work in the Italian film industry throughout the '80s and '90s included Franco Zeffirelli's Otello (two OscarR nominations, Cannes main competition, American Critics Award); Claude d'Anna's Salome (Cannes main competition); Lina Wertmuller's Camorra (four Donatello Awards, Berlin film fest official entry); Liliana Cavani's The Berlin Affair (Donatello Awards, Berlin official selection); Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers (Cannes official selection); Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer (Venice Film Festival official selection); Jerzy Skolimowski's Torrents of Spring (Cannes official selection); and Giuseppe Tornatore's Everybody's Fine (Cannes official selection).

Thompson returned to Los Angeles to helm production for Avi Lerner's Millennium Films in 1998. With Millennium, he has produced or co-produced Paul Chart's American Perfekt (Cannes official selection); Susanna Styron's Shadrach (Venice official selection); Rory Kelly's Some Girl (L.A. Independent Film Festival Audience Award winner for Best Director); Audrey Wells' Guinevere; George Hickenlooper's The Big Brass Ring; as well as

Prozac Nation, Nobody's Baby, Replicant, Try Seventeen, Undisputed and other successful productions.

Recently, he produced Richard Donner's 16 Blocks, starring Bruce Willis and Mos Def. He also produced Jon Avnet's 88 Minutes, starring Al Pacino, as well as The Wicker Man, a remake of the '70s classic, written and directed by Neil LaBute and starring Nicolas Cage.

Currently, he is working with Sylvester Stallone on the upcoming Rambo

IV, which will shoot in Thailand.

ANDREAS THIESMEYER (Executive Producer) started his career as a

distribution and artist & repertoire manager for the music record company Deutsche Grammophon/Polydor (Polygram).

From 1981 through 2001, Thiesmeyer was with Bavaria Film, Munich, as a managing director of subsidiary company Bavaria Entertainment and producer of television features and series. He developed and produced a stream of highly successful music shows as well as variety, sitcoms, quiz and game shows for German television.

In 2001, Thiesmeyer-with Manfred Speidel, Josef Lautenschlager and Gerd Koechlin-founded the Equity Pictures AG.

Equity Pictures has partnered with Avi Lerner's Nu Image/Millennium Films on a number of pictures including The Wicker Man, 16 Blocks, Lonely Hearts, Rambo IV and Brilliant.

JOSEF LAUTENSCHLAGER (Executive Producer) can look back on many years of experience in the field of closed funds and financial management.

His career began in the mid-'80s as a management consultant for various media, real estate and ship-building fund initiators and, since that time, he has worked for and with several leading investment companies.

In 2001, he joined Equity Pictures AG as CFO. As a result of his fund management expertise, he was instrumental in developing Equity Pictures' mediafund investment framework. Due to this solid and financially sound concept, the Equity Pictures media fund, in the last four years since its incorporation, has seen a healthy and steady investment growth.

In addition to his work on The Black Dahlia, HENRIK HUYDTS (Executive Producer) is currently serving as an executive producer on the action film The Shooter, starring Wesley Snipes stars as an ex-CIA agent asked to take out a terrorist, only to realize he's been set up by his former employer. The film is set for release in 2007.

ROLF DEYHLE (Executive Producer) has served as executive producer on The Shadow with Alec Baldwin, Exquisite Tenderness with Malcolm McDowell, Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain with Christina Ricci and Two Bits with Al Pacino and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

In television, he won-with David Korda Kim Magnusson, Tivi Magnusson and Rudy Cohen-a Daytime Emmy Outstanding Children's Special for The Island on Bird Street in 1997.

Deyhle is currently in post-production as an executive producer on the action film The Shooter, in which Wesley Snipes stars as an ex-CIA agent asked to take out a terrorist, only to realize he's been set up by his former employer. The film is set for release in 2007.

SAMUEL HADIDA (Co Executive Producer) is one of the most successful producers and distributors in the worldwide film business today. From his home base in Paris, he and his brother, Victor, have grown Metropolitan FilmExport, founded in the early 1980s by the brothers and their father, David, into the largest and most successful independent all-rights distribution company of English language pictures in France. Metropolitan has distributed hundreds of successful films in France, continuing through The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Through the growth of this distribution business, Hadida has developed a keen understanding of distribution and marketing. It was then an easy step for Hadida to move into producing his own films. His first production was True Romance, the first film produced from a Quentin Tarantino script and his first collaboration with director Tony Scott. Hadida now produces or co-produces several films each year through Davis Films, the production company owned and operated by himself and Victor. These productions encompass the best of the French industry, European productions and co-productions, and American productions. Hadida most recently produced Tony Scott's Domino with Kiera Knightley and Mickey Rourke and Christophe Gans' Silent Hill with Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean written by

Roger Avary. Hadida is also the producer of Resident Evil and Resident Evil: The Apocalypse starring Milla Jovovich, The Bridge of San Luis Rey with Robert De Niro, and Fabian Bielinsky's thriller El Aura. He was co-executive producer on George Clooney's Academy Award nominated Good Night and Good Luck. Hadida has had a long collaboration with writer-director Roger Avary, having produced Avary's first directing venture, Killing Zoe (with Jean-Hugues Anglade and Julie Delpy) and executive producing his Rules of Attraction. It was natural that Hadida reached out to Avary to write the screenplay for Silent Hill. Hadida has a long association with Christophe Gans. He produced Gans' first film, Necronomicon, his next film Crying Freeman, as well as the phenomenally successful Le Pacte des Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), one of the highest grossing French films of all time and nominated for four Cesar Awards and eight Saturn Awards. The decision to make Silent Hill together solidifies their successfully enduring relationship. Other Hadida productions include David Cronenberg's acclaimed psychological thriller Spider starring Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson, Sheldon Lettich's Only the Strong (the first Capoeira/martial arts film, and the film which introduced both Mark Dacascos and the famous score music now popularized in the United States in the "zoom zoom zoom" Mazda car commercials), Michael Radford's Dancing at the Blue Iguana, Steve Barron's Pinocchio with Martin Landau (one of the first films to combine computer-generated images and live action), Matthew Bright's Freeway (winner of the top award at the Cognac Festival and Reese Witherspoon's first role), and Gabriele Salvatores' Nirvana. Upcoming projects include Russell Mulcahy's Resident Evil: Extinction staring Milla Jovovich, Onimusha, the adaptation of the successful Capcom video game, and Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane written and directed by Michael Bassett.

VICTOR HADIDA (Co Executive Producer) served as executive producer of David Cronenberg's acclaimed psychological thriller Spider, starring Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson, chosen as an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival. Furthermore, Hadida was the executive producer of the Resident Evil franchise and Christopher Gans' Crying Freeman. He also served as executive producer on Tony Scott's Domino, Mary McGuckian's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, based on the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Thornton Wilder, and Avi Nesher's Turn Left at the End of the World. He is co-executive producer of George Clooney's Academy Award nominated Good Night and Good Luck.

VILMOS ZSIGMOND, ASC (Director of Photography) was born and raised in Szeged, Hungary. He was barely in his teens when World War II ended, and communist politicians backed by the military might of the Soviet Union grabbed control of the country and cut it off from the West. Zsigmond was denied an opportunity to enroll in a state university to pursue a career in engineering because his parents were bourgeois. Instead, he was required to work in a rope-manufacturing factory in Szeged.

Inspired by a book written by Eugene Dulovits, Zsigmond became a self-taught still photographer. That led him to an opportunity to study cinematography at the state film university. The year after he graduated, Zsigmond was working as a camera operator on a feature film in Hungary when the populace spontaneously revolted against the communist regime in October 1956. Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, ASC-who was a student at the film school-documented the revolt on 35 mm film. When the Russian army crushed the revolution, Zsigmond and Kovacs carried their film across the border into Austria so "the world could see the truth."

They made their way to the United States as political refugees the following year and subsequently followed their dreams to Hollywood. It was a long and often discouraging journey. Zsigmond worked in still film labs and other odd jobs, while he gradually learned to speak the English language. He began shooting on 16 mm film for UCLA students and eventually that led him to an opportunity to work on industrial films and documentaries for $2.50 an hour.

One of his first breakthroughs was an opportunity to work as a staff cinematographer on low-budget commercials at Film Fair, a Los Angeles production company. During the mid-to-late 1960s, Zsigmond compiled a series of credits on ultra-low budget films with titles like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies and The Nasty Rabbit. In 1971, Zsigmond shot The Hired Hand for a new director named Peter Fonda, and later that year, he collaborated with Robert Altman on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. John Boorman recruited Zsigmond to work with him on Deliverance the following year, and he encored with Cinderella Liberty, The Long Goodbye and The Sugarland Express.

Twenty years after arriving in the United States, Zsigmond earned an OscarR for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There were other nominations for The Deer Hunter and The River. Zsigmond also collected an Emmy for Stalin, a television miniseries filmed in Moscow and Hungary. His incomparable body of work also includes such classics

as The Rose, The Last Waltz, The Witches of Eastwick, Sliver, The Ghost and the Darkness and the ASC-awarded The Mists of Avalon.

Zsigmond received the Camerimage Career Achievement award in 1997 and the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. His recent projects include Life as a House and Melinda and Melinda.

OscarR-winning designer DANTE FERRETTI's (Production Designed by) career spans more than 40 years and encompasses more than 40 films. The former opera set designer has designed for some of the most memorable films of the past few decades and worked with directors from Jean-Jacques Annaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Franco Zeffirelli, Anthony Minghella, Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan, among others. In addition to his impressive record as a production designer, Ferretti's resume includes credits in set decoration, art direction, costume design and musical arrangement.

Ferretti recently completed work on John Irvin's The Fine Art of Love: Mine Ha-Ha and will soon commence working on both Martin Scorsese's next film and Tim Burton's Sweeny Todd. His team's work for Scorsese's The Aviator won Ferretti an Academy AwardR for best set design.

Notably, he recently worked on Cold Mountain, Gangs of New York, Il Trovatore, Titus, Bringing Out the Dead, Meet Joe Black, Kundun, Casino, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, The Age of Innocence, Hamlet, Dr. M, La Voce della luna and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

As an art director, set director and costumer, Ferretti has created some of the most notable films in Italian theatrical history. From his early work in the masterpieces El Greco and Medea to Pianoforte and Le Bon roi Dagobert, the filmmaker has constantly worked to create designs for superior artists.

BILL PANKOW, ACE (Edited by) has enjoyed a long collaboration with renowned director Brian De Palma. Born and raised in New York City, the New York University Film School graduate first worked with De Palma as associate editor on his 1980 homage to Hitchcock, Dressed to Kill, and his 1983 gangster epic, Scarface. Pankow graduated to editor on De Palma's 1984 thriller Body Double and continued his affiliation with the filmmaker on The Untouchables (1987), Casualties of War (1989), The Bonfire of the

Vanities (1990), Carlito's Way (1993), Snake Eyes (1998) and Femme Fatale-for which he received the Seattle Film Critics Best Editing award for 2002.

Pankow has also worked with such noted filmmakers as Abel Ferrara (The Funeral and 'R Xmas), Robert Benton (Still of the Night) and Paul Schrader (The Comfort of Strangers). Other feature credits include The Tic Code; Parents; Naked in New York; Money Train; Once in the Life, for director Laurence Fishburne; Whispers in the Dark; The Guys; and films for acclaimed Hong Kong filmmakers Tsui Hark (Double Team) and Ringo Lam (Maximum Risk), as well as work on director Charles Stone III's Paid in Full, Drumline and Mr. 3000. Most recently, he edited Assault on Precinct 13, for director Jean-Francois Richet.

Pankow's television work includes Tales from the Darkside; the critically acclaimed FOX series Tribeca; The Equalizer; and the HBO miniseries The Corner, for which he received an American Cinema Editors Eddie Award nomination. In 2003, he worked with director John Leguizamo on the HBO feature Undefeated.

MARK ISHAM (Music by) is one of the busiest and most successful film composers working today, amassing an astounding 85 feature credits since 1983, along with many major awards and award nominations.

He was nominated for an Academy AwardR for his score of A River Runs Through It, a Golden Globe for the score of Nell and a Best Film Soundtrack Grammy for Men of Honor.

In recent years, Isham's music has been heard in such movies as What Women Want, Save the Last Dance, Life as a House, Don't Say a Word, The Majestic, Moonlight Mile, The Cooler, Miracle, Twisted, Crash, Racing Stripes, Kicking & Screaming, In Her Shoes, Eight Below, Running Scared and Invincible.

Previous feature credits include Never Cry Wolf, The Moderns, Reversal of Fortune, Mortal Thoughts, Point Break, Little Man Tate, Billy Bathgate, Short Cuts, The Getaway, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Quiz Show, Miami Rhapsody, The Net, Afterglow, Kiss the Girls, Blade, Varsity Blues, October Sky, Rules of Engagement and many more.

Isham has composed extensively for television as well and won an Emmy Award for Individual Achievement in Main Title Theme Music for the acclaimed series EZ Streets. He was nominated three other times in the same category, twice for Chicago Hope and once for the show Nothing Sacred.

Other television credits include scoring the series Family Law, the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon and three Defenders telefilms.

In addition, Isham is an established classical trumpeter, jazz stylist, solo instrumentalist and rock guest artist. He has appeared as a guest musician on albums for the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Willie Nelson; won a Grammy for his Virgin Records release, "Mark Isham;" and received Grammy nominations for his solo albums "Castalia" and "Tibet." More recently, he recorded "Miles Remembered: The Silent Way Project," a reinterpretation of the late 1960s music of jazz great Miles Davis-awarded Best Jazz Album of the Year by the London Times.

JENNY BEAVAN (Costumes by) studied theater design at the Central School of Art and Design in London. During the 1970s, Beavan designed sets and costumes for a variety of ballet, opera and theater companies throughout Europe-ranging from Covent Garden Opera, the Netherlands Opera and the Netherlands Dans Theater to the smallest fringe theaters in London. In 1976, she was introduced to Merchant Ivory Productions and started work with them-first as an assistant and later as a costume designer.

Beavan and John Bright of the London costume house Cosprop formed a design partnership and worked on 12 films together, while pursuing their individual careers. Their designs for A Room with a View (which won Beavan and Bright the 1987 OscarR for costume design) and The Remains of the Day were both made for Merchant Ivory.

Beavan has been nominated many times for awards and, as well as the OscarR, she has won a BAFTA for Gosford Park and an Emmy for Emma.

During the last five years, Beavan has begun working in theater again. She designed Private Lives for Howard Davies, which was produced in London and on Broadway, as well as plays produced at the National Theatre and in the West End.

Beavan has had the good fortune to work with some of the greatest directors in cinema: James Ivory, Franco Zeffirelli, Robert Altman, Oliver Stone and Lasse Hallstrom on their films, respectively Howards End, Tea with Mussolini, Gosford Park, Alexander and Casanova. Most recently, Beavan has designed for Michael Apted's Amazing Grace. She is currently working with Andrei Konchalovsky on a film version of The Nutcracker.

-the black dahlia-

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