Recently, Jack wrote about Bravo's show on turning LA
Confidential into a movie (which I taped, but have not yet
had a chance to watch):
"Also, in the same show Ellroy and his agent admitted that
when the publisher wouldn't let him submit and 800 page
manuscript that they went back and took out conjunctions and
articles to cut down on word count."
I've always wondered about this story. Wasn't Ellroy already
a big seller by the time he submitted White Jazz? Would his
publisher really refuse a manuscript for length? They sure
didn't on his next two novels. I've always thought this story
might just be part of Ellroy's myth-making, similar to the
story that William S. Burroughs discovered the cut-up style
of writing by dropping his manuscript of Naked Lunch while
handing it to Allen Ginsberg (or was it Kerouac?), then
randomly stacking the pages back into the box and sending it
along to his publisher as is.
Mark
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