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CANNES -- She came, she saw, she did a little talking. Kim Basinger didn't have to say much of anything to be yesterday's zoom-lens focus of the 50th Cannes Film Festival.
The sultry Hollywood star, with her blonde hair cropped as short as I've ever seen it, held her head up, her shoulders back and her bosom forward. The paparazzi went nutzoid.
"Keem! Keem! Look dis way, Keem!" they shouted from 1,000 different angles as Basinger glided goddess-like into a press conference for the hot new American movie, L.A. Confidential, which was in Cannes competition yesterday.
"It was a mighty nice seat on the bus," Basinger purred about co-starring -- as a high-class L.A. whore who has been remodelled into a Veronica Lake lookalike by her millionaire pimp in 1953 -- in a testosterone-driven comic film noir. Except for her, it's a man's world populated by Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, David Strathairn and Danny DeVito.
"I really loved Veronica Lake," Basinger offered, paying tribute to the golden era Lake represents. "I've always been envious of that era. This (L.A. Confidential) was such an experience to let us be able to share in it today."
Actresses such as Lake, says Basinger, symbolize real movie stardom.
"We have so little of that today."
Except for her wistful reverie, Basinger brought only the glamor yesterday. Stealing the press conference was American crime novelist James Ellroy, who created the dark, angry, comic film noir world that director Curtis Hanson turned into the movie, and DeVito, who plays the king of sleazy mongers in L.A. Confidential.
"I wanted to burn the L.A.-based crime novel to the f...ing ground and resurrect a revisionist monument to myself in the ashes," Ellroy said as he trashed legendary novelists such as Raymond Chandler, whom Ellroy thinks is a hack.
"I wanted to write the biggest, baddest, ugliest, darkest crime novel of all time and set it in L.A., my smog-bound fatherland," said Ellroy, who was drawn to the crime world in 1958, when he was 10 years old and his mother was murdered in a case that was never solved.
"The desire of L.A. Confidential, the novel, was to put it all in one big ugly pot. The miracle of L.A. Confidential, the film, is that most of my book is there intact in a way I could never have imagined, with brilliant actors portraying characters I created but giving them a visual life that is slightly mine and more theirs."
DeVito plays a gutter-press gossip and crime reporter who pays cops off to witness celebrity arrests in sex and drug situations which he has set up himself.
"I've always wanted to play a journalist," DeVito deadpanned to gales of laughter as he added, "someone who is naturally morally pure."