One Of The Most Infamous True-Crime Cases Became An Equally Infamous Film
Aka the case of the Black Dahlia.
The case of the Black Dahlia seems like it was tailor-made for the big screen.
On January 15, 1947, the body of Boston native and aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was found dead in a field in a South Los Angeles neighborhood known as Leimert Park. Short, who was given the name “the Black Dahlia” by the press, had been drained of blood and cut in half at the waist. Her intestines were removed and other parts of her body — including her face, which had been sliced into a “Glasgow smile” (think the Joker in The Dark Knight) — viciously mutilated.
Despite a massive investigation and sensationalized coverage by the press, Short’s murder was never solved. Her life before arriving in Hollywood, her allegedly sordid activities once she got there, mysterious letters to newspapers from people claiming to have killed her, and a list of suspects that never yielded the killer’s identity all deepened the eeriness and mystery surrounding Short’s death. Crime writer James Ellroy was inspired to pen a novel based on the murder, The Black Dahlia, which was optioned for the screen by producer James B. Harris, who recruited Seven and Fight Club director David Fincher behind the camera.
Fincher wanted to adapt Ellroy’s sprawling story not as a feature, but as a miniseries. Short’s murder was only one (loosely factual) element of Ellroy’s book, which — like his other works, such as L.A. Confidential — dealt with a larger canvas of police corruption, scandal, and political intrigue in the City of Angels in the 1940s and ‘50s. The screenplay by Josh Friedman retained the core of the book’s narrative, focusing on two cops (played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart) trying to solve the Dahlia case and discovering the more insidious story behind it.
But the limited series idea was apparently a non-starter with both producer Harris and Universal Studios, which was backing the project. Fincher nevertheless stuck around for a while to develop the film, and even started casting. Hartnett was attached from the start, Mark Wahlberg took the role eventually essayed by Eckhart, and several actresses lined up not just for the role of Short but two other (fictional) female leads, Kay Lake and Madeleine Linscott.
In the end, however, Fincher left — perhaps he couldn’t see how Ellroy’s complex tale could be whittled down to feature length, or maybe the more haunting aspects of Short’s tragic demise appealed to him more than the inner workings of the L.A. police department in the ‘40s. He instead went on to make 2007’s Zodiac, an acknowledged masterpiece that shared a number of similarities to the Short case — a phantom killer, letters to the press, unusual suspects — yet focused squarely on the case and not a labyrinth of subplots.
Enter Brian De Palma, the legendary director of classics like Carrie, Scarface, and The Untouchables, and both a master of suspense and a striking visual stylist. Although it had been nearly a decade since his last big hit (1996’s Mission: Impossible), De Palma seemed as natural a fit for The Black Dahlia as Fincher. Retaining Hartnett, replacing Wahlberg with Eckhart, and recruiting Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, and Mia Kirshner as the three key female leads (the latter as Short herself), De Palma shot the movie — and turned in a three-hour initial cut.
The leads watching this movie, probably.
According to James Ellroy himself (who was displeased with the final release), the studio and producers forced De Palma to cut an entire hour out of the movie, which makes sense when you watch it. Despite some terrific cinematography, great period details, and a handful of sequences that recall De Palma at his visual best, The Black Dahlia simply does not work. The performances are uneven (verging on camp), and the plot is nearly incomprehensible, with significant chunks of baffling exposition laid out in voiceover by Hartnett (never a good sign).
The movie is stuffed to the breaking point with tangential matters, like Hartnett and Eckhart’s amateur boxing rivalry, that go nowhere. Accuracy is beside the point: the movie takes extreme liberties with the Short case, although to be fair, so did Ellroy’s book. While The Black Dahlia ostensibly aims for the same nexus of murder, sex, and corruption as gems like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, it instead slogs through its truncated two hours like a zombified parody of both — or, as we might say these days, an AI-generated version.
After opening to critical disdain and audience indifference, The Black Dahlia became De Palma's last effort for a Hollywood studio (he’s directed three indie features in the two decades since, and is now semi-retired). But was his uncut version of the film, as Ellroy suggested, much better and more coherent? Conversely, had Fincher stayed on the project, could he have wrangled it into the true-crime epic that Zodiac ended up being? We’ll never know for sure, but 20 years after this troubled movie’s release, the mystery of the Black Dahlia remains the modern noir that got away from two of the premiere psychological thriller filmmakers of their generations.
