James Ellroy on his new novel This Storm and why Citizen Kane is a 's---ty' film

“I despise the minimal, I despise the small, the picayune,” says Ellroy, “and that’s why I write these big books.”ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why did you decide to write a second L.A. Quartet? One of the most maddening things is to go on some high-profile TV show, and think you’re going to be able to talk about the book that you wrote, a book that — in my case — derives from my fixation on America’s past, and have somebody bring up the present, and have to tell them for the twelve thousandth time, “It’s not about anything, it’s not about anything today, I’m not commenting on anything today.”This book, it’s simply a result of this obsession of mine with history, which goes back to when I was seven and eight-years-old and living with my divorced mother, and she had a big stack of Life magazines going back to the War. As a little kid, I’m always looking at the pictures, and reading the stories, and going, Oh, this government committee; Oh, gas rationing; Oh, Japanese internment; Oh, Hitler invades Russia. That’s where it comes from.What was it like, re-reading your earlier books in preparation to write This Storm? Perfidia, that’s great, but now I’ve got to write The Storm, and now I have to move on to the third book in the series.The supporting characters in The Storm include Orson Welles.