The big 'Payback' in Hollywood

Wiseguys: Director Brian Helgeland, left, and James Ellroy at the new "Payback" screening (courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment)

Just back from a one-off theatrical screening of "Payback: Straight Up: The Director's Cut."The audience rolled right along with the Mel Gibson flick, and had no trouble finding the humor jammed in there along with the violence. Great to have the movie on DVD, but it's too bad people won't get to see the resurrected film in theaters. This is one terrific, seriously hard-boiled movie.

Director Brian Helgeland showed up for a post-screening Q&A moderated by his pal James Ellroy, the crime novelist whose "L.A. Confidential" screenplay was written by Helgeland when he was a punk kid. Ellroy, a funny guy if you're into dry-gulch sarcasm, said he'd seen three movies that took a satirical approach to the hardboiled crime genre: "Pulp Fiction," "Kill Bill 2" and "Payback." He dismissed the two Quentin Tarantino movies as too smug, overly referential and just not smart enough, but gave Helgeland vague props for his effort of eight years ago.

At first, Helgeland didn't seem eager to talk about how Paramount (and Warner) took the movie away from him back in 1998, but spilled late in the talk. The suits expected and wanted a "Lethal Weapon," but blamed the decision to throw out the director's downbeat third act on low audience test scores (that apparently were higher than those for "Goodfellas"). In 2005, Gibson and the current regime at Paramount gave Helgeland another shot at the film. The old tapes turned up missing, so the director and his editor slowly recut the work using film.

The execs who hijacked the movie are no longer in the industry, Helgeland said with a wry grin, but "I'm still here."

Read the "Payback" DVD review
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