Episode 774: Cop (1988)

Episode 774: Cop (1988)

Noirvember closes with James B. Harris’s Cop (1988)—the first time James Ellroy’s feverish fiction hit the big screen. Mike teams with Andrew Nette and Rod Lott for a deep read of Harris’s adaptation, where James Woods’s unhinged Detective Lloyd Hopkins hunts a killer across eighteen years of buried violence.

The trio digs into Ellroy’s original novel Blood on the Moon and the wilder, abandoned incarnation that came before it—L.A. Death Trip, the unsold, manuscript that first birthed Hopkins. Using material from Ellroy’s own accounts and critical studies (including the brute-force early drafts, the rewrites demanded by Otto Penzler and Nat Sobel, and the shift to publishable structure), the conversation maps how a doomed finale turned into a tight serial-killer pursuit.

The episode also features a new interview with James B. Harris, who breaks down the challenges of translating Ellroy’s structure, keeping Hopkins’s mania intact, and staying faithful to the narrative rhythms of the novel. What emerges is a portrait of a filmmaker wrestling with source material born in chaos—reforged into the dark, abrasive thriller that helped spark decades of Ellroy adaptations.


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Episode 789:  Head-On (2004)

Episode 789: Head-On (2004)

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Special Report: The Oldest Person in the World (2026)

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Special Report: Derek Boonstra on Seized (2026)

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Special Report: Andres Landau on Nuisance Bear (2026)

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27 Feb 29min

Special Report: Angelo Madsen on A Body to Live In (2025)

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Episode 788: Welcome to Woop Woop (1997)

Episode 788: Welcome to Woop Woop (1997)

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