L.A. Confidential

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PASADENA, Calif. _ “Good morning, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks, and pimps,” was our hi-hello-how-are-you on Wednesday from the novelist and onetime Kansan James Ellroy.

He was meeting the press to help promote a new Court TV series, “Murder, They Wrote.” Ellroy and four other writers (Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Lisa Scottoline, Michael Connelly) will discuss four real-life crime stories they turned into books.

The four other writers agreed to sit for extended interviews about their stories, with a Court TV producer doing the rest. Not Ellroy. For reasons partly related to his story’s subject matter — his mom’s murder in 1958, which he recounted in a 1996 memoir, My Dark Places — and partly because he rides a bullet train of ego, Ellroy said he would have complete creative control over his segment.

“I will script and narrate the entire program as well as appear on camera throughout the entire show,” Ellroy said.

That was followed by a hilariously profane Q & A. (Sample: “Serial killers are a statistically minuscule anomaly. Your chances of running into a crazed bleepity-bleep-bleep are somewhere between slim and none.”)

After a few such exchanges, the president of Court TV, Henry Schlieff, felt obliged to note that Ellroy “is going to be hosting, writing and producing his segment. We will be editing his segment.”

Today the man who once wrote an afterword for a Bill O’Reilly book lives in a house in San Francisco that lacks a TV, radio or computer. He hasn’t watched O’Reilly in years, Ellroy told me. I asked him if he misses Kansas.

“No,” he said without hesitation. “Heat drove me out. Golly, it gets hot there.”

Or words to that effect.

■ Paul Mooney isn’t the most famous guy in comedy, but within comedy circles he’s a legend. He has been writing for TV since “Sanford and Son.” His services are still in demand by Eddie Griffin, Dave Chappelle and other prominent black comics today.

He also gave the funniest definition of television I’ve ever heard while he was promoting “That’s What I’m Talking About,” a freewheeling panel show about African-Americans and TV that will air for three weeks beginning Feb. 1 on TV Land.

Mooney kept the crowd laughing throughout the session with his views on everything from Black History Month (“I’m offended that it’s only 29 days”) and the N-word (“I say it 100 times every morning. It makes my teeth white”) to the benefits of racial mixing (“There will never be another riot in Los Angeles because you won’t know who to beat up”).

Later, I asked about “Chappelle’s Show,” which he wrote for and appeared on until Chappelle abruptly told Comedy Central he wouldn’t do it anymore.

“They offered him $70 million, and he turned it down,” Mooney said. “It’s funny because (in the beginning) the show almost didn’t get made. He said, ‘I can do it if no one will mess with my material, if they’ll let me do what I want creatively, because these people don’t know what funny is.’ (That’s why) I went and did it.”

Oh, and that definition of television? “TV is like a hooker in Vegas — it’s up all night.” Mooney added, “When I was growing up, TV had dignity. It said good night.”

■ Pity the heavy-metal superstar. Ever since “This Is Spinal Tap” he has been lampooned, belittled and denied the respect due a true musical pioneer. Well, that and adored and made fantastically wealthy by millions of CD-buying teenagers.

“We ourselves as musicians have never been acknowledged or recognized,” complained Rob Halford of Judas Priest, one of three metal legends who showed up to promote the four-part documentary “Heavy: The Story of Metal,” which begins May 1 on VH1.

“Heavy” will take headbanger music seriously and recount its history similar to the documentary last year on hip-hop music. As VH1’s Michael Hirschorn noted, it will do for metal what Ken Burns did for jazz, “only a lot louder.”

■ John Waters will be hosting a Court TV series “’Til Death Do Us Part,” in which actors will re-create a marriage gone to hell. He’ll play “The Groom Reaper,” a Hitchcockian figure who will appear during the wedding scene of each episode and remind the viewers that by the end of the show, one of these people will murder the other.

The director of “Pink Flamingos” said that when he was  offered the part, he misheard.

“I thought they wanted me to be the Groom Raper,” he said. That was followed by a roar of laughter from a room of journalists who knew that Waters would’ve taken that role, too.