Among the few guarantees in life is that on any survey of great sports films, Ron Shelton’s name will appear more than once. The résumé of the minor-league ballplayer turned screenwriter and director boasts what is arguably the definitive baseball movie with Bull Durham (1988), along with loquacious, cockeyed looks at basketball (White Men Can’t Jump [1992]) and golf (Tin Cup [1996]). While digging into male vanity and competition, he writes nuanced roles for women—consider the performances of Susan Sarandon, Rosie Perez, and Rene Russo in the aforementioned films—and stages sex scenes with equal emphasis on character and comedy.
It makes sense that a specialist in the insular world of locker rooms would be drawn to crime stories about law enforcement. “I don’t think cop movies are a lot different” from films about athletes, Shelton told Michael Cieply of the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “It’s a lot of alpha males running around. They have miserable private lives. They drink too much. It’s the same.”
Note the year and source of that quote. Shelton directed not one but two films released in 2003 focused on the Los Angeles Police Department. (Astoundingly, Shelton had a third cop movie credit that year, as one of several writers on the Miami-set Bad Boys II.) Dark Blue and Hollywood Homicide play like two sides of one coin, appraising the City of Angels and the LAPD from vastly different perspectives. Neither fared well with critics or audiences, collectively earning a fraction of what the slam-bang Bad Boys II took home. Both deserved better. Their shared twenty-year anniversary is the perfect time for a reassessment.
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Dark Blue began as The Plague Season, the first original script penned by crime novelist James Ellroy. That version was set in August 1965 against the backdrop of the civil unrest known as the Watts riots. The film’s producers chose to update the story, so it unfolds during five uneasy days in 1992 before the verdict is announced in the trial of four LAPD officers charged with assault and use of excessive force during the arrest of Rodney King. The work of transforming the material was undertaken by David Ayer, who had already written about bad LA cops in Training Day (2001), which netted Denzel Washington an Academy Award. Producer Caldecott Chubb had read Training Day during the development of Dark Blue, telling LA Weekly in 2003 that the writer of a script that “original, powerful, shocking, with a real voice” was “the one guy who could possibly rework James Ellroy.” Ellroy, who would receive a story credit only, later said “very little” of his script remains in what he calls “a bad movie,” but then in recent years he has taken to denigrating the adaptation of L.A. Confidential (1997). He conceived The Plague Season with Kurt Russell in mind for the lead role. When Shelton came aboard to direct, Russell was also his choice. The two had worked together on the Shelton-scripted The Best of Times (1986), with the actor as a man desperate to relive his glory days as a high school quarterback. Additionally, Russell, who’d spent several years in minor-league baseball, had originally been tapped to play “Crash” Davis in Bull Durham. Russell proves the ideal leading man for both Shelton and Ellroy, combining a jock’s swagger with curdled California promise.
“I’ve been dying to do a western, but you can’t get westerns made anymore,” Shelton told the Baltimore Sun’s Michael Sragow in 2003. “I thought of Dark Blue as a western every day I was shooting it.” Of the corrupt cop portrayed by Russell, Shelton said, “Eldon Perry is a cowboy. It’s even embedded in his language.” Perry, a third-generation lawman, refers to himself as a gunfighter from a family of gunfighters. Speaking of his late father and his father’s partner, Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson)—the wily head of the LAPD’s Special Investigations Squad—Perry declares, “The only reason this city’s here is they made it possible. They built it, with bullets.”
But it’s a city that may not be standing for long. Dark Blue opens with the notorious footage of King being beaten by LAPD officers in March 1991 before flashing forward, the pending verdict in the officers’ trial a miasma hanging over the Southland. Almost every interaction with law enforcement is tainted with mistrust or outright contempt. Perry anticipates the worst. Pressed by his young partner Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman) to weigh in on the case, Perry offers a defense of the now-banned choke hold that could have come directly from the minutes of a police union meeting, then says of his fellow officers, “They get off, this city burns.”
But Perry and Keough have work to do in the meantime. Van Meter, a man they are bound to by loyalty and blood, plugs them into the investigation of a convenience store robbery turned bloody. As politically ambitious assistant chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames) targets the SIS, Keough has a crisis of conscience brought about in part by his no-last-names romance with a Black fellow officer (Michael Michele, fresh from duty on Homicide: Life on the Street) while Perry suspects that they’re being used to cover up Van Meter’s role in the crime. And the jury in Simi Valley inches closer to issuing its judgment.
The script’s central dynamic of crooked older cop goading a younger counterpart into crossing the line feels overly familiar, particularly in the wake of Ayer’s stronger work on Training Day. Van Meter’s mastermind status and Gleeson’s malevolent performance are undermined by the character’s reliance on the knuckleheaded “science projects” who do his criminal bidding; they’re too dimwitted to close the convenience store door during the robbery, inviting the slaughter that ensues. Rhames’ hard-driving but human Holland has the potential to be a potent foil, viewing his mission in biblical terms—he compares himself to “the Lord’s fury” and tellingly announces his intent to be LA’s “first African-American police chief” during a church service—but too often his scenes feel like a B story, at a remove from the main narrative. And the climax, at a departmental promotions ceremony that’s allowed to drag on as mayhem erupts on the streets, strains credulity.
Still, Dark Blue has much to recommend it, starting with Shelton’s depiction of the nascent riots as word of the officers’ acquittal spreads. A modest budget limiting him to one hundred extras and fifteen stuntpeople, he films the escalating chaos in hazy daylight, lending it a dreamlike quality augmented by the knowledge that the reality will only grow more nightmarish. The film remains one of the few studio efforts to tackle this chapter of American history, and it’s made by a director primarily known for comedy.
Above all, there is Russell’s commanding turn as Eldon Perry, the best work of the actor’s career. Perry treats the world as a locker room, casually spewing racist and homophobic comments expecting laughter in response. He gleefully plucks a suspected gang member (played by rapper Master P) off the street at random seeking information on the robbery, pepper-spraying him then making amends by buying him a burger at his favorite LA chain. Perry’s soon-to-be ex-wife, played by Shelton’s real-life spouse Lolita Davidovich, has him figured out when she says, “You care more about the people you hate.” Perry’s slow-dawning realization is that he hates himself most of all. Russell makes that transformation believable; he even sells the dubious climactic speech. Shelton told Sragow, “For me, Eldon Perry is the cop you want in your neighborhood except when you don’t want him. You hope he’ll come in and clean things up without telling you the details.” Both aspects of the character come through in a performance that Russell called his personal favorite, telling the Los Angeles Times in 2003, “I like the way it came out. What I wanted to do, I got to do.”
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During Dark Blue’s production, Shelton regularly huddled with the film’s technical advisor, retired LAPD detective Robert Souza. Souza regaled him with tales from his twenty-five-year career, and soon the two had a deal to write another cop movie, one that Shelton jokingly referred to as Light Blue. James Ellroy had spawned the film that brought Shelton and Souza together, but their follow-up project had a different LA crime writer as its spiritual father: Joseph Wambaugh, an LAPD veteran with an eye for institutional absurdity.
The genesis of Hollywood Homicide is a quirk unique to Los Angeles law enforcement. The city can’t pay for the all the overtime accrued by homicide detectives, who are instead compensated with additional vacation time. As a result, most LAPD detectives have second jobs, the more flexible the hours the better; Souza himself worked as a private investigator, a repo man, and a security consultant while carrying a shield. Shelton could not resist the comic potential of this circumstance, as well as the many details his writing partner provided, telling Screenwriter’s Monthly, “Bob Souza has stories that are so absurd and outrageous that I had to keep them grounded.” A favorite example lays out standard procedure upon arrival at a crime scene: “First thing they did was fingerprint and photograph the refrigerator. Why? Because it’s full of beer and they want to start drinking it. They’re going to be there for thirty-six hours. Okay, this is my kind of movie now.” Early drafts of Hollywood Homicide opened with this bit of business, but it made a rough introduction to our protagonists.
The ringtones of the two detectives serve as a secondary score and set up their differences: “My Girl” versus “Funkytown.” Joe Gavilan (Harrison Ford) is the senior man, preoccupied with his realty business (another of Souza’s real-life side hustles). Gavilan doesn’t have any speeches to rival Crash Davis’s “I believe” declaration of principles in Bull Durham, but Shelton provides him with a few zesty rants, the first recounting how attending real-estate seminars at the Airport Hilton led him to buy “a smoke-damaged ranch in Tarzana,” then “a fake Mediterranean in Los Feliz” and finally a four-bedroom white elephant in Mount Olympus that Gavilan is now desperate to unload. Internal Affairs is eyeing Gavilan for alleged “commingling of funds,” but in a second choice diatribe he explains that the entirety of his existence is commingled. IA doesn’t grasp that the thrice-divorced Gavilan’s life is a house of cards constantly on the verge of collapse. When Gavilan spies two guys casing his car, he lets them steal it because he’d rather have the insurance money.
Meanwhile, KC Calden (Josh Hartnett), he of the “Funkytown” ringtone, is awed by both his new partner Gavilan and the legend of his father, who was killed in the line of duty. An LA product through and through, Calden orders vegetarian food at crime scenes and supplements his income as a yoga instructor; Gavilan is impressed by the willowy beauty of Calden’s clientele, but there is authentic respect in his voice when he says of the payments the kid receives, “Unreportable? Cash?” Worse yet, Calden is contemplating chucking police work to follow his bliss, prompting Gavilan to ask, “Why do you want to do something stupid like acting?” Calden is determined to set up a showcase of scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire and Gavilan vows to support him, yielding the remarkable sight of Harrison Ford absently playing Blanche DuBois while driving (“May I have a drag on your cig?”).
Hollywood Homicide’s crime plot—a rap impresario (Isaiah Washington) orchestrates a hit on one of his own independent-minded artists to intimidate others on his roster—could barely sustain an episode of the short-lived Law & Order: LA, serving as the hook on which to hang wry observations about Los Angeles and shenanigans of all stripes. Before Gavilan has even established what happened at the opening crime scene, he’s pitching the club’s owner (Master P again) on the Mount Olympus house. A chase sequence in and around the canals of Venice (Southern California, not Italy) involves pedal boats and a very slow-moving car, with one of the participants grousing that he’s “knee-deep in duck shit.” There are several playful love scenes between Gavilan and his radio psychic paramour played by Lena Olin; this being a Ron Shelton enterprise, they are amusingly accessorized, with a scarf, boxes of takeout Chinese food, and—hey, it’s a cop movie—a donut.
The film’s third act is an extended chase that starts on Rodeo Drive before taking off for various Tinseltown landmarks, Shelton hellbent on delivering on the title Hollywood Homicide. You’ve got Gavilan fielding calls mid-pursuit trying to close the real estate deal that will get him out from behind the eight ball, an agent doggedly continuing to negotiate deal points for his client as bullets whiz overhead, even an interrupted handprints-in-cement ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre featuring honorary mayor of Hollywood Johnny Grant and Hart to Hart’s Robert Wagner—all the havoc naturally broadcast live by a fleet of TV news choppers. The bombast is anchored by Harrison Ford at his loosest and most irascible, never more so than when, thwarted in an attempt to commandeer a vehicle, he seizes a little girl’s bicycle and rejoins the hunt, balloons streaming behind him.
Ford was eager to try a broader style of comedy and signed on without a completed script, trusting in his director. “Ron Shelton is a good observer of men and the world they live in, which is not necessarily the natural world,” Ford told Hugh Hart of the Boston Globe in 2003. “Ron knows what the pressures are, and pressure is the fount of all comic opportunity.” Ford by all accounts got on less well with his costar, a situation possibly exacerbated by Hartnett being behind the wheel during a stunt sequence gone awry, with both actors sustaining minor injuries. Hartnett told the Globe, “Harrison tested me to the limit, so I hated him for a while.” This perceived lack of chemistry was cited in many reviews, but the case can be made that it suits the relationship perfectly; Gavilan and Calden, decades apart in age, are only four months into their partnership, still feeling each other out. That was certainly Ford’s intent. Sounding like Gavilan, he said, “I didn’t actively initiate any trouble, but neither did I dress (Hartnett’s) wounds. I just leave it lay like Jesus flung it. These two guys are not buddies. I did nothing to disturb that. Or Josh’s discomfort. Or his questioning of whether or not I thought he was adequate.”
Mismatched partners, antic action: Hollywood Homicide seems like an artifact from another era, a 1980s film for a new generation. Alas, the would-be crowd-pleaser found no crowds to please, opening in fifth place then sinking like a stone. I like and respect Dark Blue. But I am an unabashed Hollywood Homicide partisan. I have an irrational degree of affection for this movie, even enjoying its excesses. It’s a bighearted, character-driven comedy with compassion for its motley crew of misfits. In short, it’s a Ron Shelton movie.
If there is a movie jail, Shelton was sentenced there after the one-two failure of his LAPD films. He would not direct another feature for fourteen years, and when he did it proved a disappointment. Just Getting Started (2017) squanders both a potentially engaging premise—a relocated federal witness who has become the kingpin of his retirement community must contend with a new romantic rival at the exact time someone is trying to kill him—and a game cast (Morgan Freeman, Tommy Lee Jones, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Rene Russo, and Glenne Headly in one of her final performances). Still, as long as there are fans of sports films, Shelton’s place in Hollywood history is secure. And those willing to accompany him on a ride-along down both sides of the mean streets of LA will find the trip worth taking.
