According to the Los Angeles Police Department, police and paramedics responded to Hanson’s home in the 1800 block of North Vista Street for a “death investigation” call shortly before 5 p.m. Hanson was pronounced dead at the scene, apparently of natural causes.
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Hanson, who won an Oscar for the screenplay but was denied best director and producer by the huge success of Titanic at the 1998 Academy Awards, said in an interview in 2001 that he had always wanted to tell a story that was set in Los Angeles in the 50s “because that’s where I grew up”.
“Curtis Hanson believed in me and our insane idea to make a rap battle movie set in Detroit”.
Some sad news. The Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director Curtis Hanson has died at the age of 71.
He also was in the director’s chair for “Wonder Boys” the 2000 film starring Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas that is considered his best work by many fans and critics. “I will miss him”. “Confidential”, which he also directed, died today as his home in the Hollywood Hills.
It was his adaptation of James Ellroy’s sweeping crime novel L.A.
Most recently he directed the HBO film Too Big To Fail, about the financial crisis, in 2011, and 2012’s Chasing Mavericks, with Gerard Butler and Elisabeth Shue. The complex and exciting noir drama starred Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey and future Hollywood stars Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce as 1950s detectives pursuing different cases that connect in unexpected ways, implicating gangsters, paparazzi, politicians and fellow officers in a corruption scandal.
Film editor Jason Bailey commented: “Most directors don’t make one flawless movie”.
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In 1997, Hanson won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing L.A. Confidential with Brian Helgeland.
