FX is picking up a show which the main character is one of Hollywood’s top former private eyes – Fred O’Tash.
The show is called Shakedown from writer James Ellroy. It is set in the tabloid world and underbelly of Los Angeles, circa the late 1950s. The drama centers on the city’s top informant/operator/wire tapper/fixer Fred O’Tash, who lives and works where the glamor and grime intersect.
For Ellroy, the small-screen project marks his latest work to feature Otash. The crime writer previously used a fictionalized version of Otash in two of his novels from the Underworld USA trilogy: 2001’s The Cold Six Thousand and 2009’s Blood’s a Rover. He’s also the central figure in another Ellroy short titled Shakedown, which featured the character in purgatory.
Ellroy will also executive produce the FX Productions alongside Joe Roth, Clark Peterson, Steven Hoban and Palak Patel.
O’tash, who died in October 1992, was a somewhat dubious 1950s private eye who claimed to have listened in on Marilyn Monroe having sex with John F. Kenned and taped Rock Hudson telling his wife he was gay. In the 1960s when Congress began to scrutinize some of the sleazy magazines he worked for. He was one of the people on whom Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown character was based.
