ITALY: Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett arrive on the Lido as the 63rd Venice Film Festival opens with grim murder movie "Black Dahlia."

Record ID: 676286

  • Title: ITALY: Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett arrive on the Lido as the 63rd Venice Film Festival opens with grim murder movie "Black Dahlia."
  • Date: 31st August 2006
  • Summary: LIDO OF VENICE, ITALY (AUGUST 30, 2006) (REUTERS) MEDIA GATHERED AT FILM FESTIVAL VENUE
  • Embargoed: 15th September 2006 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Italy
  • Country: Italy
  • Reuters ID: LVA1JT5HTWU6917L6Y8QIQGK6C6S
  • Story Text: The Venice Film Festival opens on Wednesday (August 30) with the world premiere of "The Black Dahlia", a sepia-tinted throwback to 1940s Hollywood based on a grisly real-life murder that remains unsolved to this day.
    Starring Scarlett Johansson, two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett, Brian de Palma's heavily stylised adaptation of a James Ellroy novel kicks off 11 days of movies, stars and parties along the fashionable Lido beach front.
    The highly anticipated movie is one of four major U.S. productions in Venice this year that focus on true murder stories from the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
    Johansson, Hartnett and other members of the Black Dahlia cast and crew arrived at the festival on Wednesday, all sailing down one of the Lido's canals and stepping off at a jetty crowded with photographers and fans.
    At a news conference, the 21-year-old Johansson was asked if she thought her scene of passion with Hartnett in the movie might prove too distracting for viewers but said she tried not to think about it.
    "Of course it's nice to be considered sexy as a young woman in my prime, I guess.
    "I try not to think about sexiness or sexy scenes," she said.
    The actors in this modern "film noir", much of which was shot on set in Bulgaria, drew inspiration from screen giants from the 1940s and 50s including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Fred MacMurray and Rita Hayworth.
    The title The Black Dahlia is taken from the nickname given to Elizabeth Short, a young aspiring actress whose grisly death in 1947 gripped Los Angeles. Her body was body was brutally mutilated, discovered naked and cut in half at the waist.
    De Palma said he was keen to resurrect the old crime genre.
    "They don't do many of them today, these obsessive stories, these femmes fatales, these dark depressive characters leading into hell," he said, "I can't quite explain why that period was so full of these noir works."
    The movie is a fitting opening to a festival also featuring competition entrants "Hollywoodland", about the mysterious death of Superman TV star George Reeves in 1959, and "Bobby", about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968.
    Ellroy's novel, which layers fiction on to the factual murder, was the writer's way of coping with his own mother's death by strangulation in 1958 in another unsolved case.
    "Twice in my 27-year novel-writing career I got lucky with film adaptations -- first with 'LA Confidential' and second with The Black Dahlia," Ellroy told reporters after the press screening of the film ahead of an evening red carpet premiere.
    "The Black Dahlia is an obsessive part of my own life history deriving from my own mother's murder in 1958 -- my mother, Black Dahlia as one.
    Diane Lane, Adrien Brody, Ben Affleck and Bob Hoskins, while Sharon Stone, Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore and Lindsay Lohan appear in Emilio Estevez's Bobby.
    Out of competition is "Infamous", Douglas McGrath's take on the life of crime writer Truman Capote featuring Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig and Gwyneth Paltrow.
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