JAMES ELLROY'S FEAST OF DEATH is Vikram Jayanti's new feature documentary about crime writer James Ellroy. It will be screened at selected stops during Ellroy's book tour launching his novel THE COLD SIX THOUSAND. It was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for their ARENA arts programming slot, and premiered on British television on Sunday May 6, 2001.

This 90-minute documentary is the fifth film about James Ellroy, but it's unlike anything anyone's seen before. Audiences will see the world through Ellroy's eyes, a vision teeming with the victims of the true-life murders that fill his waking nightmares and fuel his fiction. We reconstruct crime scene after crime scene, including his mother's, as we drive with Ellroy at night, relentlessly travelling his personal dark obsessional map of the City of Angels.

Running through the film is a series of meals at Ellroy's favorite restaurant, The Pacific Dining Car (Raymond Chandler's old hangout), where lifer homicide detectives from the LAPD and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department chew on rare steak and on unsolved murders.

During the feasts, the cops and Ellroy explore both the Black Dahlia case (America's most celebrated unsolved murder) and Ellroy's mother's killing, and then -watched by Nick Nolte (who like several other Hollywood stars knows to drop in on Ellroy's spontaneous crime salons at the Pacific Dining Car) - the Black Dahlia mystery is finally solved, on-screen.

The film follows Ellroy to Las Vegas and Dealey Plaza in Dallas - twin ground zeroes of his "Underworld America" trilogy, which began with AMERICAN TABLOID in 1995. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND is the second volume of the planned trilogy.

We also visit with Ellroy and his wife Helen Knode in their grand Kansas City home, and we even travel with him to search for his mother's family's roots in the tiny, snow-buried cemetery of Tunnel City Wisconsin, population 200 - where he has an entirely unexpected encounter with his long lost remaining family.

All the threads of the film - Ellroy's gonzo public persona, his uncensored language and manic obsessions, his capacity for chilling, raw, visceral brutality coupled with outrageous black humor, and his unexpected and uncompromising humanity - come together at a rioutous raucous reading in an L.A. bookstore crammed to bursting with his own obsessional fans.

JAMES ELLROY'S FEAST OF DEATH is a noir romp through Ellroy's mind and his landscapes, and a meditation on the war against women, the difference between truth and fact, and what literature is for.

Vikram Jayanti's recent documentary credits include: THE MAN WHO BOUGHT MUSTIQUE, at New York's Film Forum in May, 2001; TRIPPING (Ken Kesey's film archive, narrated by Marianne Faithfull and Hunter Thompson); and the 1997 Academy Award winning WHEN WE WERE KINGS, about Muhammad Ali's 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" with George Foreman. The Mustique film won an Indie for Best Documentary in March 2001, and was nominated for this year's British Academy Award (BAFTA) for Best Documentary.

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