Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author and screenwriter. Ellis was one of the literary Brat Pack[1] and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style.[2] His novels commonly share recurring characters.[3][4]
Bret Easton Ellis
March 7, 1964
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
- Novelist
- screenwriter
1985–present
American Psycho (1991)
Less than Zero (1985)
The Shards (2023)
When Ellis was 21, his first novel, the controversial bestseller Less than Zero (1985),[5] was published by Simon & Schuster. His third novel, American Psycho (1991), was his most successful.[6] Upon its release the literary establishment widely condemned it as overly violent and misogynistic.[7] Though many petitions to ban the book saw Ellis dropped by Simon & Schuster,[5] the resounding controversy convinced Alfred A. Knopf to release it as a paperback later that year.[8] Ellis's novels have become increasingly metafictional. Lunar Park (2005), a pseudo-memoir and ghost story, received positive reviews. Imperial Bedrooms (2010), marketed as a sequel to Less than Zero, continues in this vein. The Shards (2023) is a fictionalized memoir of Ellis's final year of high school in 1981 Los Angeles.[9]
Four of Ellis's works have been made into films. Less than Zero was adapted in 1987 as a film of the same name, but the film bore little resemblance to the novel. Mary Harron's adaptation of American Psycho was released in 2000. Roger Avary's adaptation of The Rules of Attraction was released in 2002. The Informers, co-written by Ellis and based on his collection of short stories, was released in 2008. Ellis also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 film The Canyons.
Early life and education[edit]
Ellis was born in Los Angeles in 1964, and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. His father, Robert Martin Ellis, was a property developer, and his mother, Dale Ellis (née Dennis), was a homemaker.[10] They divorced in 1982. During the initial release of his third novel, American Psycho, Ellis said that his father was abusive and was the basis of the book's best-known character, Patrick Bateman. Later Ellis said the character was not in fact based on his father, but on Ellis himself, saying that all of his work came from a specific place of pain he was going through in his life during the writing of each of his books. Ellis says that while his family life growing up was somewhat difficult due to the divorce, he mostly had an "idyllic" California childhood.[11]
Ellis graduated from The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles. He then attended Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, where he studied music and then gradually gravitated to writing, which had been one of his passions since childhood. At Bennington College, he met and befriended Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem, who both later became published writers. At Bennington College, he also completed his first novel, Less than Zero, which was published while Ellis was 21 and still in college.[12]
Career[edit]
After the success and controversy of Less than Zero in 1985, Ellis became closely associated and good friends with fellow Brat Pack writer Jay McInerney: the two became known as the "toxic twins" for their highly publicized late-night debauchery.[13]
Ellis became a pariah for a time following the release of American Psycho (1991), which later became a critical and cult hit, more so after its 2000 movie adaptation.[14] It is now regarded as Ellis's magnum opus, garnering acknowledgement from a number of academics.[15] The Informers (1994) was offered to his publisher during Glamorama's long writing history. Ellis wrote a screenplay for The Rules of Attraction's film adaptation, which was not used. He records a fictionalized version of his life story up until this point in the first chapter of Lunar Park (2005). After the death of his lover Michael Wade Kaplan, Ellis was spurred to finish Lunar Park and inflected it with a new tone of wistfulness.[16] Ellis was approached by young screenwriter Nicholas Jarecki to adapt The Informers into a film; the script they co-wrote was cut from 150 to 94 pages and taken from Jarecki to give to Australian director Gregor Jordan, whose light-on-humor vision of the film met with negative reviews when it was released in 2009.[17]
Despite setbacks as a screenwriter, Ellis teamed up with director Gus Van Sant in 2009 to adapt the Vanity Fair article "The Golden Suicides" into a film of the same name, depicting the paranoid final days and suicides of celebrity artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.[18] The film, as of 2014, had not been made. When Van Sant appeared on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast on February 12, 2014, he stated that he was never attached to the project as a screenwriter or a director, merely a consultant, saying that the material seemed too tricky for him to properly render on screen. Ellis and Van Sant mentioned that Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling were approached to star as Duncan and Blake, respectively. Ellis confirmed that he and his producing partner Braxton Pope were still working on the project, with Ellis revisiting the screenplay from time to time. As of April 2014, radical filmmaker Gaspar Noé was officially attached to direct if the film went into production, but he proved troublesome to work with due to his erratic behavior.[11]
In 2010, Ellis released Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his début novel. Ellis wrote it following his return to LA. It fictionalizes his work on the film adaptation of The Informers, from the perspective of Clay. Publishers Weekly gave the book a positive review, saying, "Ellis fans will delight in the characters and Ellis's easy hand in manipulating their fates, and though the novel's synchronicity with Zero is sublime, this also works as a stellar stand-alone."[19] Ellis expressed interest in writing the screenplay for the Fifty Shades of Grey film adaptation. He discussed casting with his followers, and even mentioned meeting with the film's producers, as well as noting he felt it went well.[20][21] The job eventually went to Kelly Marcel, Patrick Marber and Mark Bomback.[22] In 2012 Ellis wrote the screenplay for the independent film The Canyons and helped raise money for its production.[23] The film was released in 2013 and critically panned, but was a modest financial success, with Lindsay Lohan's performance in the lead role earning some positive reviews.
Personal life[edit]
When asked in an interview in 2002 whether he was gay, Ellis explained that he did not identify as gay or straight, but was comfortable being thought of as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual and enjoyed playing with his persona, identifying variously as gay, straight, and bisexual to different people over the years.[24] In a February 1999 interview, Ellis suggested that his reluctance to definitively label his sexuality was for "artistic reasons." "If people knew that I was straight, they'd read [my books] in a different way. If they knew I was gay, Psycho would be read as a different book," he told the Los Angeles Times.[25] In an interview with Robert F. Coleman, Ellis said he had an "indeterminate sexuality", that "any other interviewer out there will get a different answer and it just depends on the mood I am in".[26]
In a 2011 interview with James Brown, Ellis again said that his answers to questions about his sexuality have varied and discussed being labelled "bi" by a Details interviewer. "I think the last time I slept with a woman was five or six years ago, so the bi thing can only be played out so long", he said. "But I still use it, I still say it."[27] Responding to Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Ellis tweeted, "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse."[28] In a 2012 op-ed for The Daily Beast, while apologizing for a series of controversial tweets, Ellis came out as gay.[29]
Lunar Park was dedicated to Ellis's lover, Michael Wade Kaplan, who died shortly before he finished the book and to Ellis's father, Robert Ellis, who died in 1992. In one interview Ellis described feeling a liberation in the completion of the novel that allowed him to come to terms with unresolved issues about his father.[30] In the "author Q&A" for Lunar Park on the Random House website, Ellis comments on his relationship with Robert, and says he feels that his father was a "tough case" who left him damaged. Having grown older and "mellow[ed] out", Ellis describes how his opinion of his father changed since 15 years ago when writing Glamorama (in which the central conspiracy concerns the relationship of a father and son).[31]
Earlier in his career, Ellis said he based the character Patrick Bateman in American Psycho on his father,[32] but in a 2010 interview he said he had lied about this explanation. Explaining that "Patrick Bateman was about me," he said, "I didn't want to finally own up to the responsibility of being Patrick Bateman, so I laid it on my father, I laid it on Wall Street." In reality, the book was "about me at the time, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings."[26] To James Brown, he clarified that Bateman was based on "my father a little bit but I was living that lifestyle; my father wasn't in New York the same age as Patrick Bateman, living in the same building, going to the same places that Patrick Bateman was going to."[27]
Ellis named his first novel and his 2010 novel after two Elvis Costello references: "Less than Zero" and Imperial Bedroom, respectively. Ellis called Bruce Springsteen his "musical hero" in a 2010 interview with NME.[33]
In February 2023, when asked about his political views, Ellis replied, "I’m not a conservative or a liberal. At least in the US, I can’t agree with either of them. I think they’re both completely bonkers."[34]
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Podcast[edit]
On November 18, 2013, Ellis launched a podcast[46] with PodcastOne Studios. The aim of the show, which comes in 1-hour segments, is to have Ellis engage in open and honest conversation with his guests about their work, inspirations, and life experiences, as well as music and movies. Ellis, who has always been averse to publicity, has been using the platform to engage in intellectual conversation and debate about his own observations on the media, the film industry, the music scene and the analog vs. digital age in a generational context.[47]
Guests have included Kanye West, Marilyn Manson, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Kevin Smith, Michael Ian Black, Matt Berninger, Brandon Boyd, B. J. Novak, Gus Van Sant, Joe Swanberg, Ezra Koenig, Ryan Leone, Stephen Malkmus, John Densmore, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, Matty Healy, Ivan Reitman, and Adam Carolla.
In April 2018 the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast began a Patreon for instant access to new episodes. $2.00+ is charged per episode, with isolated excerpts occasionally made available to non-patrons.[48]
