American sideshow: Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis hasn’t written a book in four years yet he’s more prolific than ever before: lambasting Nobel Prize winners on Twitter, writing scripts for Kanye West and casting Lindsay Lohan in a low-budget thriller. As a musical version of his defining 1980s novel American Psycho transfers to the West End, Tim Walker meets the entertainment world’s most peculiar polymath
Tim Walker17 April 2014

Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho and tyro novelist who tore up the 1980s New York literary scene, answers the door to his West Hollywood apartment barefoot, in sweatpants and a hoodie, as if interrupted midway through a House of Cards marathon. I’m dis-appointed. I was expecting a razor-sharp suit and a sneer. ‘I stopped wearing the suit in 2005,’ he explains with eerie precision. (Photo shoots aside.) ‘I just decided I didn’t like wearing suits any more. A lot of [the suit-wearing] was about the idea of being a literary author. I felt I should present myself as the novelists of an earlier era had.’

Ellis hasn’t published a book in the past four years, and during that time he’s likely typed more words on Twitter than in the pages of any prospective novel. In fact, now that his focus has turned to films, he’s no longer, strictly speaking, a novelist. Or at least, he’s not only a novelist. He’s also a screenwriter, a podcast host, an off-the-cuff cultural critic.

With his tweets, Ellis has slayed enough sacred cows to put even Patrick Bateman to shame: Breaking Bad, he wrote in 2012, ‘is the most overrated TV series in the history of television’. Last year’s Nobel Laureate Alice Munro ‘was always an overrated writer and now that she’s won the Nobel she always will be’. The sainted David Foster Wallace? ‘The most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation.’

Contrary to the critical consensus, Ellis believes 2013 was ‘a desperate moment in Hollywood’. Understandably, he’s often accused of being a contrarian. But, he claims, ‘I genuinely like or dislike things. I don’t dislike things just to ruffle people. Why would I? Who wants to get a rise out of people? I don’t.’

The writer, who recently turned 50, lives with his boyfriend, twenty-something musician Todd Schultz, in a small, curiously sparse 11th-floor condo close to the Sunset Strip. The apartment’s only striking feature is its spectacular view of LA, the hometown to which Ellis returned in 2006 after 17 years on the East Coast. Now, far from being a dis-interested observer of Hollywood, he’s right in the thick of it.

Presently, his passion project is a sprawling, ten-hour mini-series about the Hollywood scene surrounding the Manson murders, which he’s developing with director Rob Zombie. A stack of books about the case, which gripped LA in 1969, sits next to his desk. Ellis was born five years beforehand and grew up in a city scarred by the killings, the influence of which undoubtedly crept into his early fiction. ‘It was this fearful myth: the idea that people could just walk into your house and kill your whole family weighed heavily on a lot of people’s minds. Growing up knowing all about the case surely had an effect on me. To explore it now is kind of like an exorcism.’

The LA of Less Than Zero, his 1985 debut, was a place whose alienated, apathetic youth was unmoved by murder, prostitution and gang rape. But it was his third novel, written when he was only 26, that truly plumbed the depths of depravity. Before it was a blackly comic movie, let alone a musical, American Psycho was an outrage. Dropped by its original publisher, fiercely attacked by feminists, Ellis’ ultraviolent satire of the era’s excesses drew a swarm of criticism. Now, of course, it is considered a defining novel, perhaps the defining novel, of the 1980s.

Following its sell-out run at the Almeida, the stage version is expected to transfer to the West End later this year. The ‘musical thriller’, which Ellis hasn’t even seen yet, looked like a huge risk on paper. But with Doctor Who’s Matt Smith as Bateman, Chimerica and Enron director Rupert Goold on board and costumes courtesy of mrporter.com, the slick production, which opened with Smith rising out of the stage on a vertical sunbed wearing only tight white undies and an eye patch, was a hit with the critics. ‘A musical version of Bret Easton Ellis’ gruesome cult novel American Psycho sounds like the punchline of a sick joke,’ wrote the Standard’s critic Henry Hitchings. ‘But this skilful interpretation is built around a superb performance by Matt Smith, who serves up an intriguing blend of nihilism, cold vanity and twisted charm.’

Of the 1991 book’s vilification, Ellis says, ‘Nothing that comes out any more has that effect… [American Psycho] would only cause a ripple now. What book is going to cause outrage in 2014? Who’s even reading?’

At the time of American Psycho, Ellis was a Manhattan socialite, regularly snapped in that suit, lapping up champagne or something stronger with fellow members of the so-called ‘literary Brat Pack’ that included Jay McInerney and Donna Tartt, who had been Ellis’ contemporary at Bennington College in Vermont. In the faux memoir that makes up the first 40 pages of his 2005 novel Lunar Park, the erstwhile hellraiser suggests he squandered the proceeds of his biggest hits on drugs, women and cocaine-fuelled parties at his loft apartment in New York’s Union Square, for which he’d hire a 35-strong team of caterers, entertainers and security staff.

‘I wouldn’t say I squandered all of my earnings, but everyone who makes money in their late teens and twenties has to go through the baptism of spending it all,’ he says. ‘I have friends who’ve moved into the executive ranks at studios, become agents and producers, who get a good pay cheque and a credit on a Marvel movie or whatever. I don’t think I could do that. You just have to be content with the fact that you are where you are because you were doing the things that you wanted to do. And maybe you’re never going to be rich, not in the way this town thinks of wealth.’

Might that explain why his apartment is quite so modest and unadorned? ‘I was looking for a house and couldn’t find anything, so my realtor said, “Get a condo, take a year to look for houses, you’ll flip the condo and make some money off it.” That was 2006. And then…’ And then came the financial crisis. ‘Luckily, I like this place a lot,’ he says.

These days, Ellis claims to be uninterested in parties, though he managed to drag himself to the Vanity Fair Oscar bash, and to his own 50th birthday dinner. The pleasure of partying in LA is insufficient, he says, when compared to the effort it takes to get anywhere. He nonetheless braves the freeways at least once a week to visit his mother Dale and stepfather Julio, who still live in the Valley. His property developer father Robert divorced Dale in 1982 and died ten years later. His is the shadow that looms over much of his son’s work: Bateman was supposedly based on Ellis Sr.

Growing up in LA, Ellis recalls, ‘Most of my friends’ parents were in the film industry; I knew the nuts and bolts of the business. But the writing took off, and I became more interested in working on a series of novels. By the time they were done, I was interested in finally making movies... The notion of the writer who comes to Hollywood like Faulkner and Fitzgerald? That world doesn’t even exist any more. I can’t imagine any studio in their right mind hiring a novelist to class up Spider-Man 4. But my idea was to match myself up with interesting collaborators, and to make low-budget independent movies.’

Hence The Canyons, his malevolent, micro-budget thriller about a group of bored Hollywood hopefuls who screw and backstab each other, literally and figuratively, on the fringes of the film industry. Ellis says he wrote the script after reading Fifty Shades of Grey. ‘I really wanted the job of writing the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, but I knew I probably wasn’t going to get it, so I devised my own movie about sex and power.’

The Canyons met with mostly bad reviews when it was released in the US last year. No Oscar nominations were forthcoming, though its star Lindsay Lohan was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Actress. And yet the movie makes compelling viewing, thanks in large part to its bizarre cocktail of collaborators: Lohan; her co-star, the porn actor James Deen; director Paul Schrader, best known for writing Taxi Driver; and Ellis himself.

‘We weren’t out to make The Godfather,’ Ellis says. ‘It was guerrilla movie-making. We were shooting in friends’ bedrooms. Paul and I knew a lot of people wouldn’t like it, but we didn’t care: we were making it for no money, who was really going to notice? Well, with the casting of Lindsay, people did notice, it became a cultural event, and a huge amount of expectation was placed on this tiny movie. I was surprised by the level of vitriol directed towards it.’

Although The Canyons contains the blood, sex and cynicism familiar from his novels, Ellis thinks his as-yet-unproduced screenplays might surprise his readers. There’s a mysterious script that he’s writing for Kanye West. There’s The Golden Suicides, a biopic of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. There’s even a romcom — an adaptation of the novel The Frog King, to which Joseph Gordon-Levitt was once attached. ‘There’s no blood in it, no death,’ Ellis says. ‘Just a guy and a girl.’

Ellis’ last novel was Imperial Bedrooms, a sort of sequel to Less Than Zero, published in 2010. On his hard drive are the beginnings of a new book, which was written last year: ‘Writing the prose was fun, but I had a hard time concentrating on what the book should be.’ Contrary to rumours, it is not a follow-up to American Psycho. ‘The American Psycho sequel was just a couple of tweets I did late one night when I was bored and wanted to get a reaction,’ he says. ‘I was never going to write it.’

Indeed, to the dismay of his literary fans, Ellis has all but abandoned novels in favour of movies, tweets and the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, his succession of conversations about culture with interview subjects including Kanye, Judd Apatow and Chuck Klosterman.

‘I want to do a podcast, and I want to write a mini-series, and I want to make micro-budget movies, and I don’t see myself locked in a tower with a monocle and a pen writing more novels,’ he says. ‘The problem is that I’m best known for writing books, and I probably do that better than anything else I’ve done so far. But you can’t shut off your desire to explore other things.’

The Canyons DVD is available to pre-order at amazon.co.uk and on demand from 12 May

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