L.A. Confidential

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• To pitch the movie to backers (and, later, to explain his aesthetic ideas about it to various cast and crew members), director Curtis Hanson put together a group of 18 period images illustrating different aspects of what he hoped to convey with the movie. These included the "Welcome to Los Angeles" postcard that's in the first shot of the movie. Photos of tract housing, orange groves, and the glamour shot of Veronica Lake are framed on Lynn Bracken's wall. Hanson also chose studio photos of two lesser-known 1950s actors (Aldo Ray and Guy Madison) to show to Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe what he envisioned as models for the characters Ed Exley and Bud White. Exley's model was Madison, while White's was Ray. This film takes its name from "Confidential", a notorious 1950s-era movie star tabloid, which is fictionally portrayed herein as "Hush-Hush".
• Mickey Cohen, the mobster who gets locked up which causes the war for control of the drug trade in the story, was a real-life Los Angeles mobster from the late '30s until his death in 1976 after two imprisonments for tax evasion. He was a small-time hood who joined forces with New York gangster Bugsy Siegel when Siegel came to L.A. to run the rackets (see the film Bugsy). After Siegel's murder in 1947, Cohen took over the rackets that Bugsy had built up, including labor union shakedowns at the studios, drug trafficking, gambling and prostitution. He was so hated by the police that he was constantly arrested for any crime, big or small (he was once arrested for using foul language on the street). As shown in the movie, he was eventually imprisoned for income tax evasion and spent nearly ten years in prison. After his release, he was semi-retired from the rackets and lived off his wealth, remaining a colorful character in Los Angeles until his death in 1976.
• Movie Goof (revealing mistake): SPOILER: At the end of the Victory Motel shootout, when Exley stands next to Captain Smith's dead body while holding his badge up, James Cromwell's body is clearly seen moving up and down as the actor is breathing.
• Anjelica Huston and Julia Louis-Dreyfus were each offered the role of Lynn, but both of them turned it down.