With an almost completely dead, holiday hungover RSS, I spent the morning leisurely slogging through this LA Times profile of 80s it-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Much of the story’s 3,000 words are devoted to defenses of Ellis’ literary reputation, most notably for our purposes from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who praises Ellis as “a much more radical writer than he seems.” The rest of it details the oft-adapted novelist’s own attempts to break into screenwriting.

Ellis’ published work has so far formed the basis of three released films: the gloriously trashy Less Than Zero, in which Robert Downey Jr. essentially plays a future version of himself; Mary Harron’s American Psycho, which broke with Ellis’ trademark moral passivity in order to turn the material into obvious satire; and Roger Avery’s Rules of Attraction, which seemed to be kind of more about Roger Avery learning how to use Final Cut Pro than anything else. Somewhere along the way, Ellis apparently “realized he’s not very good at script doctoring” and started concentrating on crafting scripts from scratch. The first of these efforts to see the light of day will be the upcoming The Informers, for which Ellis adapted his own shot story collection in collaboration with Nicholas Jarecki. But to say that Ellis’ outlook on his new career is less than rosy would be an understatement. After the jump, an excerpt from the end of the article, in which Ellis semi-bitterly acknowledges that he’s in a “lost period.”

While he hardly seemed depressed — he’s recovered from a long, hard-drinking, itinerant meltdown that followed the death of his boyfriend in 2004 — he offered, half-jokingly, that he’s in a “lost period.” He had the look of a man still unsure whether his life’s work adds up to anything, but who’d like to put off worrying about it for a little longer.

“I always thought this was going to be Jay McInerney’s second act and not mine,” Ellis, finishing his cappuccino and preparing to stand up, said of his old friend and rival, who in 2006 married Anne Hearst.

“I thought he was going to become the alcoholic screenwriter and I was gonna marry the heiress.”