Casting American Tabloid

[Ed. - I suppose there might be spoilers in here for the novel American Tabloid by James Ellroy. If you haven't read it, you might want to turn off your computer and punch yourself in the face.]

American Tabloid is about the bad men who write history. Its supporting cast? JFK, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover and Jimmy Hoffa. Its stars? Three shady characters who think they can use violence, coercion and lies to manipulate the mafia, the CIA, the President, Cuba and the media itself. But at the end, Pete Bondurant, Ward Littell, and Kemper Boyd find they aren't nearly as powerful or as clever as they'd believed.

It's a book that begs for a movie or a miniseries. But like Blood Meridian and Winter's Tale, it may be unfilmable. (Yeah, I know they made Winter's Tale into a movie. Did you f'ing see it?) Partially, that's because of its sprawling plot. And partially it's because if you mess up the casting, even a bit, the whole thing would be doomed.

But the Internet has made a game of it. And I want to play.

Boyd's the easiest. Smooth, cool and charismatic, he's also capable of extreme violence. He's narcissistic. He has an unhealthy obsession with JFK. Oh, and he's handsome enough to make women weep. Sounds like a lot of Hollywood. But Christian Bale showed he can do shallow in American Psycho, violence in The Dark Knight, and sleaze in American Hustle. Matthew McConaughey is an equally brilliant and obvious pick, with the added bonus of having Boyd's Southern accent.

Too easy. Let's move on.

Littell is trickier. At the beginning of the book, he's idealistic and intelligent. But by the end, the world has dragged him into its gutters. And while he's a runt compared to the other two guys, he's no wallflower. He's bold enough to burgle a crime boss's home and cold enough to commit murder. Dream pick? Edward Norton. Runner up? Aidan Gillen. (No one who's seen The Wire is going to disagree with me.)

Finding a Pete Bondurant is just a nightmare. The man's a wrecking ball, a shakedown artist, a brutal killer whose sheer size terrifies everyone around him. There just aren't a lot of huge actors in Hollywood who can, you know, act. Vince Vaughn is an intriguing choice; we'll know soon enough if he has enough darkness inside him to pull it off. Alexander Skarsgard is big and scary, but he's too pretty to be Bondurant. I know this'll be controversial, but I think Vin Diesel might be able to do it.

The wildcard? Timothy Olyphant could play any of the roles. The guy makes everything he's in better.

But the best choice is to be patient and let a couple younger actors age up into the roles. How about Ryan Gosling as Boyd, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Littell, and Tom Hardy as Bondurant? Yes, we'd have to wait until they all get into their 40s, but that cast would be worth it.

So there it is. Anybody got any other ideas?

Take that, Agatha Christie

[Ed. - This post will totally spoil A Perfect Getaway for you. It's a fabulous flick and you should stop reading now if you haven't seen it it yet.]

Of course you'll see the second-act twist of A Perfect Getaway coming. The script tells you flat-out at least three times that it's on its way. And only one twist is really possible. Of the four potential couple-killing couples in the film, one is obviously a "red snapper," one is arrested mid-film, and one practically screams, "We're the killers! Over here! Us!" The killers therefore must be the sweet and dopey fourth couple. Duh.

Those are the rules of the murder mystery as laid out by Agatha Christie, who in her forward to Cards on the Table wrote that often finding a murderer is as simple as identifying the least likely suspect.

Except that the twist in A Perfect Getaway is actually two twists that are revealed at once. The first is that mild mannered Cliff and Cydney are the killers. Like I said, that one is a bit of a duh, and it's really a clever ending, not a proper twist.

The second and truer twist is that Cliff and Cydney aren't Cliff and Cydney at all, but a pair of meth-addicted sociopaths who have killed them and stolen their identities. This second turn of the screw is a lot more fun, because it demands you hit the rewind button. Didn't you see Cliff and Cydney in their wedding videos? (You didn't.) Didn't Cliff and Cydney share a fearful conversation in their tent? (Watch it again. Their lines still make perfect sense.) Wasn't Cliff terrified of the killers? (No, he was worried about getting caught.)

A Perfect Getaway is a funny, scary, well-crafted thriller, with terrific performances by charismatic actors, especially Timothy Olyphant, whose presence saved Scream 2, The Girl Next Door and even Go. And Cliff and Cydney are an interesting metaphor for what it's like to be a newlywed, as two different wholes suddenly find themselves merely halves of a new, bigger enterprise, and must learn to act, speak and function in new ways.

In her writing, Christie pointed out the fundamental problem with whodunits. Creating characters like these means limiting your cast, which necessarily makes it easier to solve the mystery. A Perfect Getaway accepts her challenge, asking, "The audience will figure out 'who,' so can we instead build a twist around 'why?'" The answer is hell yes.