For those of you wondering why I didn’t post a Three Stooges short this weekend (or for those of you who wonder why I post Three Stooges shorts at all) let me explain. I began a re-reading of James Ellroy’s ‘The Big Nowhere’ on Saturday morning and more or less didn’t put it down until last night. I’d read the book before–I love Ellroy though I confess I’ve read only about half of his enormous body of work–but for reasons I won’t go into now I needed a refresher course on this particular novel. I actually didn’t even mean to re-read it in its entirety, just to scan it. But the book–like all of his work–has a magnetic force buried within it its brilliantly hep prose and outlandishly inventive plotting that is impossible to resist. This led me to YouTube (of course) to scour for some choice Ellroy interviews. An Ellroy sit-down is always an EVENT, filled with his merciless scorn for things he doesn’t like (rock and roll, cop-haters, bleeding hearts etc.) and bombastic proclamations about his own genius and non-stop outpouring of novels that “are all masterpieces”. For me, these self-serving over-the-top blowhard proclamations serve to endear him to me, not repel me. They are the forced overdone declarations of a very lonely little boy who still can’t quite believe in the size of his talent and the burden it places on him to use it to continue to impress his elders who won’t love him if he stops. Yes, that sounds like cheap pop psych 101 stuff but I’ve found it to be pretty much always true; a towering ego is usually constructed to hide a cowering ego. And I don’t even believe he believes his own propaganda. He even says in the above interview “this is all an act”. He’s a genius goofball, plain and simple. A very nerdy bald white guy who doesn’t work on a computer, doesn’t have an email address, doesn’t have a cell phone and for some reason wound up living in Denver,. Colorado. Perhaps constantly writing about Los Angeles and living there at the same time is just to much. (Just living there is too much for me). Actually at the time of this interview he was ‘between marriages’ and had moved back to LA because, as he explains, LA is where he goes back to “when women divorce me”. Enjoy the above interview with him, done in a coffee shop and shot, appropriately, in black and white.