The Greatest Movies Never Made - White Jazz
The sure things that fizzled out before someone called 'action!'
February 2002 again, and it appears that LA’s ready to embrace James Ellroy once more…
It says something for the complexities of James Ellroy’s fiction that it’s taken four years for anyone to get around to adapting his follow-up to the hugely successful (not to mention, Oscar-winning) LA Confidential.
But now at last White Jazz has been given the greenlight, with Nick Nolte signed up to star alongside John Cusack and Winona Ryder as a kick-ass copper caught up in an LAPD corruption inquiry.
There’s been something of an Elroy explosion recently what with his search for his mother’s murderer, My Dark Places, providing the basis for a television documentary and the Kurt Russell police procedural Plague Season [released as Dark Blue] due to hit cinemas in the very near future.
All in all, things are looking pretty damn good for an author who was living in a dumpster 20 short years ago.
Alas, Hollywood fell out of love again with Ellroy before White Jazz made it in front of the cameras. A later effort to adapt the book with George Clooney and Chris Pine in the Nolte and Cusack’s role respectively sank after the latter signed up to play Captain Kirk in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot.