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| Bret Easton Ellis |
The Real Bret Easton Ellis
By Dana Goodyear
“The Informers,” an ensemble film set in nineteen-eighties L.A.—Ray-Bans, chopper soundtrack, drugs, rock, vodka in the tub, spiritual alienation rendered as standing on the sidelines of a foursome, clothed—maintains a certain fidelity to that world as it is witnessed by Bret Easton Ellis, the postmodern pastiche author who wrote the short stories on which the film was based. Ellis wrote the stories during long winter breaks from Bennington College, while back home in his childhood bedroom in Sherman Oaks. They came out as a book in 1994, after his best-known novels, “Less Than Zero” and “American Psycho,” had already been published; he wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki several years ago, and both writers are credited as executive producers on the film.
“Canter’s represents a place where one would go out to eat at four in the morning after being at clubs,” Ellis said the other day, referring to the all-night delicatessen on Fairfax where the nervous television anchorwoman played by Winona Ryder goes for a pack of cigarettes and a garden salad. “It was one of the very few places open where you could get a sandwich and hang out.” Spago, painstakingly re-created, down to the white wire-basket chairs, for an awkward family-dinner scene (with Billy Bob Thornton as the cheating, narcissistic studio-executive dad and Kim Basinger as the unglued mom), was, Ellis said, “a place my family went to dinner a lot, not to sound too gross.” In the film, a debauched rock star has a gig at the Greek, where as a teen-ager Ellis would go to hear his favorite bands: the Go-Go’s, Split Enz, Squeeze. The Ellis family vacationed in Hawaii—the locus of strained recreation for a bullying father (Chris Isaak) and his huffy son (Lou Taylor Pucci). In 1983, the year in which the film is set, Ellis was driving a cherry-red BMW; the next year, he was given his father’s hand-me-down Mercedes 450SL. Needless to say, the cars of “The Informers” are German-made.
Ellis, who is forty-five, has reddish-brown hair, a cleft chin, and a soft gaze, was sitting before a computer at a glass-topped desk in a small apartment in West Hollywood, which he bought in 2006, after leaving New York, where he had lived since the late eighties. The few furnishings—a sleek fawn-colored sofa, an ottoman with Lucite legs—came with the unit. Since moving in, he said, he has been working on a sequel to “Less Than Zero,” which will come out next spring. The narrator is Clay, the spoiled, cocaine-numbed teen of the first book, twenty-five years down the road, and now a Hollywood screenwriter who, having lived in New York for years, returns to Los Angeles. The novel’s opening line, Ellis said, is “They had made a movie about us,” an allusion to the film that came out in 1987, with Andrew McCarthy as Clay and Robert Downey, Jr., as his friend Julian. He said that he identifies more deeply with Clay than with the character he named Bret Easton Ellis in his most recent book, “Lunar Park,” a palimpsest of Ellis’s real life and past fictions. “Clay is probably a more villainous version of me, a mean version of me.”
In Los Angeles, Ellis spends a lot of time with his closest high-school friends, the artist’s studies for the “Less Than Zero” characters. The rest he keeps track of on Facebook, where he has his own profile—“I got on Facebook to stalk someone,” he said—as well as several impersonators, which, being himself something of an identity prankster, he doesn’t mind.
What about Twitter? He said he didn’t have an account, but, with light encouragement, he decided to establish one. He moved the computer mouse across a stack of Artforum magazines—the one personal affectation in the room—and tried to register “BretEastonEllis.” The user name was taken—the profile photograph was an old Bret Easton Ellis publicity shot—and so was “bretellis.” He settled on “eastonellis,” and sent out a message. “This is the real BEE,” he wrote, and said aloud, “What should I put, BTW, FYI, OMG?”
Satisfied, Ellis turned from the computer screen and said he had come back to Los Angeles to start over. “I just wanted to not be Bret Easton Ellis, whatever this persona was,” he said. “I was tired of going to book parties, the gossip, the same faces. L.A. seemed like an opportunity to reinvent myself. I’m alone a lot. It makes you look at yourself. It goes beyond narcissism—it goes to the heart of who you really are. And then you become who you really are.” He smiled knowingly. “I’m the real BEE now. ♦
Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the host of the podcast “Lost Hills.”
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