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Josh Hartnett at the premiere of "The Black Dahlia" held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Beverly Hills, Calif. on September 6, 2006. | For nearly 60 years, the unsolved murder of 22-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth “Betty” Short has captivated the horrified imagination of a city. This cautionary tale has inspired scores of newspaper, book and screenplay writers to explore its brutality, while it has served as a warning to wide-eyed starlets who come west to chase their dreams of Tinseltown.
On January 15, 1947, Betty Short was discovered in a vacant lot near Leimert Park in downtown Los Angeles, naked, cut in half at the waist, with her organs removed and blood drained from her small body in an attack so grisly that most images were kept from the public. Her killer had bludgeoned her, sodomized her and slit her mouth from ear to ear. Remembered forever as the Black Dahlia, because of the delicate flower that she wore in her raven hair, Short made such an impression on crime novelist James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid) that, even 40 years later, he wrote The Black Dahlia, a best-selling whodunit with Betty’s murder at its center. Now, master storyteller Brian De Palma (director of such classic crime dramas as The Untouchables, Scarface and Carlito’s Way, and suspense thrillers Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out) brings Ellroy’s classic to the big screen.
Weaving a fictionalized tale of lust, love, corruption, greed and depravity around the brutal murder of the fledgling Hollywood starlet that has shocked and fascinated the nation since 1947, The Black Dahlia details the obsessions that police officers Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) develop, as they are drawn into the lurid world of the Dahlia. While Blanchard’s growing preoccupation with the Dahlia’s murder threatens his relationship with his girlfriend Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), Bleichert finds himself irresistibly drawn to Madeline Linscott (two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank), the daughter of one of the city’s most prominent families, who just happens to have an unsavory connection, and resemblance, to the Dahlia.
{quote_top}Involved with the film for about three years prior to when De Palma signed on, 28-year-old Josh Hartnett wanted to play the role of Bucky, even though he knew he was too young at the time that he first read the script. “I was just about to turn 23, but I recognized how great the material was and wanted to stick with it,” Hartnett tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “The other director dropped out and Brian came on, and there was a gap there of two years, where nothing was happening. When Brian came on, he hired me, right off the bat. And then, I went and talked to him, and he didn’t seem to have any interest in talking about the character or anything. We sat down and had a cup of coffee, looked at each other and said, ‘This is going to be fun.’ He knows what he wants and he casts well. We just had a good time together.”
De Palma is the type of director who prefers to have trust in his actors and leave them to their own devices. Even so, 21-year-old New Yorker Scarlett Johansson says that he is also very supportive when his actors feel like they need something more.
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Scarlett Johansson at the premiere of "The Black Dahlia" held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Beverly Hills, Calif. on September 6, 2006. | “We talked about the character, in regard to different scenes, but Brian has a real respect for the time and space that an actor needs to prepare for something,” Johansson tells MediaBlvd. “He was never overly personal about where I was getting my inspiration from. But, we could be wrapping up the whole set and I would say, ‘Brian, I think that I need to do that take again,’ and he’d say, ‘Alright, boys, bring everything back in.’ He was really good about that, but he never went too much into the depth of the character.”
Working with someone the caliber of De Palma was exciting for a young actress like Johansson. “I was excited just hearing that Brian had a film that he was directing with two female roles. I’ve always wanted to work with him and have been a huge fan of his. I had read the script and was very attracted to the character of Kay, so I met with Brian and tried to convince him that I could play this character that I was completely, physically wrong for, and he bought it. I expected a certain kind of darkness about him, and a certain kind of roughness about him, and I was surprised to find out that he’s a very funny guy. One thing that didn’t surprise me about Brian is that he’s really cut and dry. He’s never going to beat you around the block regarding anything, and he’s never wishy-washy about anything, which was such a relief.”
“Working with directors, because film is such a director’s medium, there are certain points of negotiation, but for the most part, it’s going to be their movie, so you either get in line with them, or you end up disappointed,” adds Hartnett. “I have seen pretty much everything Brian’s done, and I felt like his work made him the perfect person to adapt this book for the screen. I thought his filmic sensibility was right in line with the novel’s sensibility. There is a certain dark, wry wit about the whole thing, and I thought his operatic filmic sense played right into the era and the grandness of the whole situation.”
Bucky and Kay have a very complicated relationship in the film. When the two first meet, Kay is Lee’s girl, but they instantly recognize the attraction that is apparent between them, and they soon develop a deep friendship. In order to make that bond believable, Hartnett says that he and Johansson didn’t really develop a back story, but instead relied on the relationship that Ellroy laid out for them in his novel.
{quote_middle}“Because the characters are so well defined in the book, and because the scenario is so clear, all we had to do, as actors, was develop a shorthand with each other,” explains Hartnett. “Same with all the actors" relationships with Brian. We just developed an understanding with each other, so that we could move through the piece because Ellroy had done most of the backstory for us. We know how we’re feeling about each of the other characters, at any given moment, because it’s in the book. As actors, we didn’t have to manipulate the situation the way that you sometimes do. We just had to act.”
 As an actor, Hartnett, who splits his time, living in New York and Minneapolis, says that he can understand and identify with Bucky’s obsessive nature. “There’s a certain obsessive tendency in actors, as I think there is with anybody who has a job that has a finite amount of time. You have to complete it in a certain amount of time, so you ultimately think you’re going to be relieved of this obsession at a certain point, and that justifies you really pouring yourself into it, heart and soul, much to the chagrin of anyone you know and love.”
In much the same way, Johansson says that she can understand the struggle that Elizabeth Short went through, trying to make it as an actress in Hollywood. “I have a lot of friends who are very talented actors and musicians, who struggle. You have a one in a million chance here. Everyone in L.A. is trying to get involved in the industry, somehow. Any time that you are involved in a field that’s revolving around vanity, with a high rate of failure, it can breed a desperation in people that doesn’t always have a happy ending. That kind of ambition, with no end, can really make for a lot of nastiness. I’ve been constantly surprised at my luck. It’s really unbelievable, especially being surrounded by a lot of artists who struggle. I think that there is a certain sort of decency and class that has somehow been eliminated over time.”
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