Production Notes to "The Black Dahlia" | Betty's Journey To The Silver Screen

For nearly 60 years, one story has captivated the horrified imagination of a city and inspired scores of newspaper, book and screenplay writers to ponder the dark, diabolical impulses of humanity.  This cautionary tale has served as warning to wide-eyed starlets who come west to chase their dreams of Tinseltown.  And it all began with an unremarkable girl hungry for stardom.

In life, she was called Elizabeth "Betty" Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress from the East Coast who wore a delicate flower in her raven hair and became many things to many people—dear friend, beloved sister, estranged daughter, frequent girlfriend and accused prostitute. 

On January 15, 1947, she was discovered brutally splayed in a vacant lot near Leimert Park in downtown Los Angeles.  Naked, cut in half at the waist, her organs were 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 had slit her mouth from ear to ear in a sickening, clownish grin.  False accusations and confessions still abound, and Betty's remains one of the most gruesome, unsolved homicides in the City of Angels' history.

In death, she would become newly christened and forever remembered as The Black Dahlia. 

Elizabeth "Betty" Short was born July 29, 1924, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts.  Like many young aspiring actresses in boom-era World War II, she was chasing a big dream: to make it in Hollywoodland.  At the age of 19, she headed west to California, bouncing from her father's home in Vallejo to the city of Santa Barbara before heading south to L.A. 

During her time in the city, her tale briefly reads like that of many an ingénue.  She auditioned for a number of screen tests, lived for a time at the Chancellor Arms Apartments and was rumored to have frequented hotspots like the Pig & Whistle on Hollywood Blvd., the Formosa Café on Santa Monica Blvd. and the Biltmore Hotel on Grand Ave.  Indeed, it was at this very hotel, on January 9, 1947, that Betty was allegedly meeting a gentleman friend.  It was the last time she would be seen alive. 

Because of Betty's raven hair, her penchant for dressing in black, habit of wearing a beautiful flower in her hair and the 1946 release of the Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake film The Blue Dahlia, she was given a nickname to tease her in life and own her in death.  People became fascinated with her lurid tale, one seemingly plucked straight out of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel.  Indeed, most who became involved with the case became obsessed with either saving or trashing the Dahlia's reputation.

The gruesome murder of the young girl took Hollywood and the country by storm in 1947.  The entertainment capital was filled with mob bosses, dirty studio executives, corrupt cops and people willing and ready to take advantage of a young woman…and the juicy details of her murder.  For months, the L.A. Examiner, Los Angeles Times and every rag that could make up or scrape up a story about Betty splashed headlines across their mastheads—from "Who Killed Betty Short?" to "Black Purse, Shoes: Hot Dahlia Leads."  Hers would become a story of Hollywood legend…and occupy one young boy's imagination for a lifetime.

Elizabeth Short's demise.  His mother, Jean Hilliker, had been strangled only months before in a brutal (and to this day unsolved) crime, and the boy's inability to openly grieve her death transferred into an obsession with the Dahlia.

Ellroy, like many others before and since, would chase the story of this iconic Hollywood girl for years.  He recalls, "I bike-tripped to the Central Library.  I scanned the Dahlia case on microfilm and gorged myself on vanished L.A.  I time-tripped '59 to '47 L.A.  I made L.A.-now L.A.-then.  I began to live in the dual L.A. that I've lived in ever since."

In fact, Ellroy would wait to write his seventh novel—the first of his L.A. quartet—1987's "The Black Dahlia," until he "built story-telling muscle" with his earlier works, "Brown's Requiem," "Clandestine," "Blood on the Moon" and "Suicide Hill."   The author admits he "needed to brace myself for life in L.A. '47."

For Ellroy, the Dahlia wouldn't rest with the end of his book.  He would go on to write a 1996 novel entitled "My Darkest Places," a memoir of his mother's 1958 murder.  "I had to go through a very long journey with Elizabeth Short and write 'The Black Dahlia' before I could get to my mother.  Elizabeth Short was always the fictional stand-in for my mother.  And my mother and she transmogrified, it was quite a heady brew.  They are as one, in my mind, much of the time."

The Black Dahlia's story was certain to captivate Hollywood again, this time in the form of a feature film. Ellroy's 300-plus page novel was adapted by screenwriter Josh Friedman, who says, "I tend to not think of it as a genre book, but simply as historical fiction.  I went with the way Ellroy told the compelling story…he has such a unique way of interweaving.  I very much kept to the structure and the attitude of his characters engendered in the book."

After years in development under helmer David Fincher, the film was eventually turned over to director Brian de Palma, who acknowledges that he wanted to tell not just the story of the Dahlia but explore the world of fictionalized characters in 1947's L.A.—those who were profoundly affected by the crime. "James creates a whole noir world, and the way he tells his stories are very complex," De Palma adds.  "His language is so lush.  Josh was a very good barometer of what you could and couldn't do with his work.  He lived and breathed Ellroy's complex, dark material for a decade, forcing the material into Ellroy-ese, never taking the simple route."  A filmmaker known for plot-twists and switchbacks, De Palma also loved that "in the material, everybody lies.  In any sensitive dramatic scenes where you think someone's revealing something, they're usually revealing the opposite of what they said before."