Or the vengeful, forgetful amateur sleuth in Memento, trying to solve the mystery of his own blood-soaked past. Consider the Midwestern squares in A Simple Plan, whose discovery of stolen loot leads to a series of gut-punching murders.
But their embittered heroes-if you can even call them that-all shared a lust for money or sex (or both) and a malleable code of ethics: By the end of most ’90s noirs, there are no winners, just survivors. Some neo-noirs took place in a teeming corrupt metropolis others played out underneath the scorching desert sun. Confidential was one of the most beloved entries in a genre beloved by executives and audiences alike: the neo-noir.įor a remarkable stretch from roughly late 1989 to early 2001, Hollywood eagerly churned out dozens of neo-noirs: salacious, deeply satisfying dramas featuring shifting loyalties and twisting turns, often with titles that could have been ripped straight from the pulp-paperback racks.
But the rejection is especially surprising when you consider that, 24 years ago, L.A. The studio’s veto made for a downbeat, think-what-coulda-been ending-much like the conclusion of L.A. “We worked the whole thing out,” Helgeland says. Confidential novelist James Ellroy, one that would be set in the mid-’70s. Helgeland had already secured a top-tier cast, including returning Confidential costars Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, alongside Chadwick Boseman, who’d be playing a young police officer.
Confidential, the 1997 Hollywood cop drama he cowrote with director Curtis Hanson.
with what seemed like a dynamite movie pitch: a sequel to L.A.
Over the next six months, join The Ringer as we revisit the surprising reemergence, unexpected fracturing, and profound impact of the neo-noir movement in the ’90s.Ī few years ago, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Brian Helgeland went to Warner Bros. Confidential, from Devil in a Blue Dress to Basic Instinct. From late 1989 to early 2001, noir made a stunning return to Hollywood, splitting off into different subgenres and producing some of the most compelling films of the era-from The Usual Suspects to L.A. And no-we’re not talking about the film noir era of the 1940s and ’50s. There were dead bodies, stolen goods, knotty plots, amoral protagonists, and irredeemable villains.