The USA Film Festival celebrates author James Ellroy and the release of his new book PERFIDIA: A NOVEL along with screening of L.A. Confidential
DALLAS -- The USA Film Festival, one of the nation's foremost cultural organizations dedicated to the
recognition of excellence in the film and video arts, will honor author James Ellroy in conjunction with the
publication of his new book “Perfidia: A novel” on October 8, 2014, at the Angelika Film Center Dallas.
The evening program will include an appearance from the author, a reading from his new work “Perfidia: A
novel,” followed by an on-stage conversation with the audience and book-signing. Following the signing,
Mr. Ellroy will introduce a screening of the neo-noir classic film L.A. Confidential, adapted from his novel.
The evening is co-presented by the USA Film Festival and the Angelika Film Center and will be hosted by
Chris Vognar, film critic for The Dallas Morning News.
“The Festival is honored to host author James Ellroy to celebrate his latest work,” said the Festival’s
Managing Director, Ann Alexander. “For crime fiction fans and anyone who loves film noir, this will be a
very special night.”
JAMES ELLROY — A master of noir crime fiction, James Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of
the world of crime. His life has been shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother
when he was a child. In 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy's body was dumped on a roadway in El Monte,
California, a seedy L.A. exurb. Her killer was never apprehended. Her murder unleashed a force that has
propelled Ellroy's work. Ellroy channeled his anguish and transformed himself into an outsized public
persona: an audacious, uncompromising, and unapologetic chronicler of humanity's dark side. As a young
man haunted by his mother's death, Ellroy became a thief, an alcoholic, a drug abuser, and a peeping Tom.
He served time in jail. Much of the first thirty years of his life was consumed by homelessness, alcoholism,
drug abuse, petty crime, and a period of insanity. Ellroy eventually found steady work caddying at Los
Angeles country clubs and joined AA. As he walked the golf courses while he worked, he harnessed his
narrative passion to his fascination with crime and began to daydream a novel. In 1985, he began The Black
Dahlia, an explicit attempt to marry his mother's murder to the famous case that had so obsessed him in his
youth. The novel appeared in 1987 and was dedicated to his mother. As a novelist, screenwriter, essayist,
and memoirist, James Ellroy is more closely identified with Los Angeles than any writer since Raymond
Chandler. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the
decade following the Second World War. Four of his novels -- The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A.
Confidential, and White Jazz -- are collectively known as the L.A. Quartet. They comprise a dark and
obsessive 1950s anti-history of his hometown. His novels American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and
Blood's A Rover form the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy.
ABOUT THE BOOK — It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes
for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal
Japanese-Americans, but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The
hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on
the Los Angeles Police Department. He’s superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed
by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith, Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer,
fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay
Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and
rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls
— comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you
have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at
the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly
captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great
American novel. Perfidia is published by Knopf and released in September, 2014.
ABOUT THE FILM — Curtis Hanson directed the blockbuster film adaptation of L.A. Confidential (1997)
in which (as in the book), everything is suspect, everyone is for sale, and nothing is what it seems. The
modern classic garnered nine Academy Award nominations (winning two) and stars Russell Crowe,
Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger, Kevin Spacey, James Cromwell, Ron Rifkin, David Strathairn and
Danny DeVito.