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How an LAPD Homicide Detective Became One of Hollywood's Top Screenwriters

Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Thursday, Jan 3 2013

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PHOTO BY WILSON WEBB

Giovanni Ribisi, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie, Michael Peña and Robert Patrick

PHOTO BY WILSON WEBB

(l-r) Michael Peña, Ryan Gosling, Robert Patrick, Anthony Mackie and Josh Brolin

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When Gangster Squad was postponed from its original fall 2012 release date in the wake of last summer's Aurora, Colo., movie-theater shooting, Beall and Fleischer quickly mobilized to devise a new sequence to replace a violent mob-ambush scene set inside Grauman's Chinese Theatre (and glimpsed briefly in the first Gangster Squad trailers). "The decision to get rid of that scene was not one that we entered into lightly, but I think everybody felt like it was the right thing to do," Beall says. "And I think it's actually a better movie with the new scene" — a scene, appropriately, set in Chinatown.

So what's adrenaline-pumping: making arrests or making movies? "I joke sometimes that I think something terrible happened to me when I was a cop and this is all some kind of Jacob's Ladder coma dream or something," he says with a laugh. "But it's a different kind of excitement. I feel like these are the two most exciting industries in Los Angeles, and I'm lucky enough to have spent some time in both. It's hard for me to answer that question because I was a cop for a little over 10 years, and the writing is still fairly new, but I'm having a lot of fun."