![]() ![]() With its emphasis on mood, atmosphere, and character, the film has been labeled by some as a "black Chinatown" - not a bad analogy. These turn out to be choice roles for Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle, respectively. "I was guided by people at Universal who wanted to do a straightforward mystery-crime thing." Instead, Franklin's film version - like Mosley's novel - takes a lot of time to establish the setting - South Central Los Angeles in 1948 - and characters, including the black detective hero, Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, and his violent boyhood pal, Mouse. "My draft just wasn't working," he recalls. ![]() ![]() ![]() "Someone else commits the murder in Carl's film," laughs Mosley, who originally wrote a first draft of the script. When director Carl Franklin adapted Mosley's first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, for the screen, he made a slight change. That's a lesson that Walter Mosley knows all too well. There's an old rule about screen adaptations: to be faithful to a book, one often has to be unfaithful to it. ![]()
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