At TALK/SHOW: James Ellroy and Bruce Wagner

Iconic LA authors James Ellroy and Bruce Wagner lit up The Loft on the Rooftop Village yesterday with readings from their works and acerbic, off-the-cuff, as well as insightful answers to audience questions.

The two writers are perfect foils for one another: Wagner, laid back, cool and dressed in all black; Ellroy fiery, passionate and red in the face.

The air was thick with great quotes, so here's the best of the best.

On the writer's strike
WAGNER: I hate the writers' strike. It's costing me money. I'm not thinking about the digital world and about how I'm being robbed and digitized. I'm on the side of the scabs and the studio heads. Those people who write The Office -.they're not going to suffer. It's the little people who're going to suffer. And, of course, I'm completely in support of the strike, too.

On movie options
ELLROY: Any author who takes option money for a book should know that it's probably not gonna be made - and if they do make it, they're going to fuck it up.

On the sanitization of Hollywood (the physical place)
WAGNER: I think it's even sleazier now. I don't know anyone who spends that much time in Hollywood. The Hollywood I remember is the one that had big bookstores.
ELLROY: If I could I'd take a giant atom bomb and drop it on Hollywood and Vine. I'd wipe out all the addicts, weirdoes and perverts. I'm an Old Testament sage.

On the destruction of LA landmarks:
WAGNER: They keep tearing them down. The one that meant the most to me is the theater in the shape of the Taj Mahal that they just tore down. They're putting in condos. I put back certain ones [in his work]: the Derby, and we lost Trader Vic's. ... There are all these places that are the new landmarks that I'm unaware of because I'm completely in my head all the time ... and in rehab.

Sacrifices of being a creative mind:
ELLROY: I am ... fucked up on women. All of my books were written for one reason, so that women will love me.
WAGNER: As a living being there's a price to pay. And it doesn't matter if one is an artist or a lover of the arts or if one is unconscious of arts in the world. Hopefully as one gets older one becomes aware that, as Allen Ginsberg said, that joy and tears are one taste. It's presumptuous to say that there's a price to pay if you're an artist. ... Everybody shares the agony and the anguish. It's just part of being on the planet.

On hours a day spent writing, and if they ever get bored
WAGNER: I don't think you ever write if you're bored. ... I only write more than six hours a day if I'm under extreme deadline. ... I'm not the kind of writer who's regimented in that sense. I'm extremely disciplined but not regimented.
ELLROY: In the book I'm writing now, everything is mapped out minute by minute. But that allows me to extrapolate from within it.
WAGNER: the idea of writing a book and then saying, this didn't really work, is completely foreign to me.

On density
ELLROY: I love bigness. I listen to classical music extensively. I love Beethoven. I despise satire, pastiche, comedy and smallness. I love writing gigantic novels where character and plot means a great deal.
WAGNER: Men particularly feel this need to write 800- to 1000-page books, and there is a certain joy in that.... I need to contain myself after writer a long work. So I write something small, more compact.

On whether or not Film Noir affected their writing
WAGNER: In my case I don't feel it affected my writing. I was just so pleased that there seemed to be this epic genre about my mother, Los Angeles. LA has been my Mother India, my Mother Earth. Film Noir, with LA as its epicenter, has filled me with a kind of grace beatitude and hopefulness. In terms of my writing - the nastiness, the pornographic - I can't tip my hat to Billy Wilder or something.
ELLROY: I wrote LA Quartet before I saw Film Noir. Now, I enjoy Film Noir. I enjoy looking at it, because there's LA in 1953. I can go back and I can look at it.
WAGNER: A lot of the LA that I experienced... the nursing homes I worked in, driving for Schaeffer Ambulance ... there was a Film Noir experience to some of my childhood. Watching Film Noir is a kind of nostalgic opium trip to a time that we almost wish was here. You're looking at images of lost things: the way people looked; the light of the city - which is quite different than the ArcLight of the city, so to speak.

On whether they would ever direct a movie.
WAGNER: A guy once asked me if I would ever direct a movie. I said a.) I never wanted to and b.) I wouldn't enjoy it. He asked me how I knew that, since I'd never directed anything. So I told him, 'I've never fucked a porcupine either, but I'm reasonably sure I wouldn't enjoy it.'"