8 Movies Where The Worst Version Got Made

3. The Black Dahlia

Brian De Palma and James Ellroy should have been a match made in heaven.

De Palma, one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation, had developed a reputation for fusing lust and violence in a number of erotic and psychological thrillers, while Blow Out, released in 1981, is itself a neo noir classic. Ellroy, whose L.A. Quartet had masterfully grappled with the socio-political landscape of post-war Los Angeles and had touched on similar subject matter in the process, should've been the perfect launching pad for De Palma to make a late career marvel.

2006's The Black Dahlia, adapted from the first of Ellroy's Quartet, was anything but. Poorly cast and muddily shot, Josh Friedman's script failed to condense Ellroy's weighty source into a two-hour runtime, excising large swathes of the novel and losing much of its horror and tragedy in the process.

In retrospect, adapting a work as dense as Dahlia into a two hour film should've been a non-starter. While Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland had achieved wicked results with 1997's L.A. Confidential - the third entry in the L.A. Quartet - it's kind of miraculous that they managed to do just that. L.A. Confidential lost much of the grim nuance of the original text, but still managed to maintain its spirit. Dahlia, which is more of a slow burn, had so many disparate moving parts that any film adaptation was always going to struggle.

Interestingly, before De Palma became attached to The Black Dahlia, Se7en filmmaker David Fincher had proposed a mini series adaptation of the novel.

Having read Ellroy's books, this really seems like a no-brainer. I'm a movies guy first and foremost, but Ellroy's prose is so sprawling and ambitious that it's difficult to condense into a 90 minute or two hour picture. A mini-series would've made much more sense, particularly as it could have been a springboard to adapt the full L.A. Quartet, with The Big Nowhere and White Jazz still waiting on their own adaptations.