FEAST OF DEATH ON SHOWTIME: The Ellroy documentary Feast of Death will be screened on The Showtime Cable network in November 2003. DETAILS HERE.
BBC-produced documentary released in tandem with the debut of Ellroy's second "Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy" installment The Cold Six Thousand.
The film, mounted by Vikram Jayanti, was tentatively being called 'James Ellroy’s Feast of Death,' "although Ellroy himself prefers 'James Ellroy’s American Death Trip'."
Reportedly, the documentary was shot "on 16mm and digital video for around £250,000 (US$360,000), provided by the BBC." The documentary's initial airing was on the BBC 2 on Sunday, May 6, 2001. Some copies were scheduled to be shown in theatres in tandem with Ellroy's American book tour during May/June 2001.
Jayanti also said in pre-release statements the documentary would mount a case against a Black Dahlia murder suspect: “What we’re actually going to do in this film is solve the (1947) Black Dahlia murder,” Jayanti said. “It’s never been solved...but someone has come up with a solution that both Ellroy and the cops feel is the first completely believable one.”
About “James Ellroy’s feast of Death”
a documentary on the life and work of James Ellroy
JAMES ELLROY’S FEAST OF DEATH is Vikram Jayanti’s new feature documentary about crime writer James Ellroy. It will be screened at selected stops during Ellroy’s forthcoming book tour launching his new novel THE COLD SIX THOUSAND. It was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for their ARENA arts programming slot, and will premiere on British television on Sunday May 6, 2001.
This 90-minute documentary is the fifth film about James Ellroy, but it’s unlike anything anyone’s seen before. Audiences will see the world through Ellroy’s eyes, a vision teeming with the victims of true-life murders that fill his waking nightmares and fuel his fiction. We reconstruct crime scene after crime scene, including his mother’s as we drive with Ellroy at night, relentlessly travelling his personal dark obsessional map of the City of Angels.
Running through the film is a series of meals at Ellroy’s favorite restaurant, The Pacific Dining Car (Raymond Chandler’s old hangout), where lifer homicide detectives from the LAPD and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department chew on rare steak and on unsolved murders.
During the feasts, the cops and Ellroy explore both the Black Dahlia case (America’s most celebrated unsolved murder) and Ellroy’s mother’s killing, and then — watched by Nick Nolte (who like several other Hollywood stars knows to drop in on Ellroy’s spontaneous crime salons at the Pacific Dining Car) — the Black Dahlia mystery is finally solved, on-screen.
The films follows Ellroy to Las Vegas and Dealey Plaza in Dallas — twin ground zeros of his “Underworld America” trilogy, which began with the AMERICAN TABLOID in 1995. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND is the second volume of the planned trilogy.
We also visit with Ellroy and his wife Helen Knode in their grand Kansas City home, and we even travel with him to search for his mother’s family’s roots in the tiny, snow-buried cemetery of Tunnel City Wisconsin, population 200 — where he has an entirely unexpected encounter with is long lost remaining family.
All the threads of the film — Ellroy’s gonzo public persona, his uncensored language and manic obsessions, his capacity for chilling, raw, visceral brutality coupled with outrageous black humor, and his unexpected and uncompromising humanity — come together at a riotous raucous reading in an L.A. bookstore crammed to bursting with his own obsessional fans.
JAMES ELLROY’S FEAST OF DEATH is a noir romp through Ellroy’s mind and his landscapes, and a meditation on the war against women, the difference between truth and fact, and what literature is for.
Vikram Jayanti’s recent documentary credits include: THE MAN WHO BOUGHT MUSTIQUE, which starts a US theatrical run at New York’s Film Forum in May, 2001; TRIPPING (Ken Kesey’s film archive, narrated by Marianne Faithfull and Hunter Thompson); and the 1997 Academy Award winning WHEN WE WERE KINGS, about Muhammad Ali’s 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman. The Mustique film won an Indie for best documentary in March 2001, and has been nominated for this year’s British Academy Award (BAFTA) for Best Documentary.
Producer & Director: Vikram Jayanti
Maryse Alberti (WHEN WE WERE KINGS, CRUMB, PARIS IS BURNING, Michael Apted’s recent documentaries, VELVET GOLDMINE, etc)
Sound: Alan Barker
Editor: Emma Matthews
Original score: Rob Lane
Executive Producer: Anthony Wall
• Knopf Teaser/Film excerpts HERE.
• Read a review HERE.
• Another review HERE.
• More news HERE.
• Scotsman article HERE.