L.A. Confidential director Curtis Hanson is dead at 71

Curtis Hanson, the Academy Award–winning screenwriter and director of L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Wonder Boys, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 71.

Police say they were called to Hanson's home for a medical emergency Tuesday evening, and he was pronounced dead at the scene from natural causes. Hanson was born in Reno and raised in Los Angeles, and he always had an interest in films, becoming the movie critic and entertainment editor for the newspaper at California State University Los Angeles, despite the fact he did not attend classes there. He went on to write for his uncle's magazine, Cinema, and interviewed several screenwriters and directors, including John Ford, Vincente Minnelli, and William Wellman.

Before winning the Academy Award for adapted screenplay in 1997 for L.A. Confidential, Hanson worked as a producer, writer, and director for a wide range of projects, including writing the screenplay of the 1978 crime drama The Silent Partner with Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan said Hanson had a "great and abiding passion for the history of film, a gift for making genre come alive for modern audiences, and a restless and wide-ranging curiosity that meant that each of his films was a new adventure both for viewers and for himself."

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