Chinatown Archives

Flickr photo c haley327.

I have a book about the opposite methodology – turning a novel into a script. But I’m not sure a roadmap exists for this what – this expansion, I guess, is what it would be.

I’m in the process now, with a script I wrote a few years ago called “Kept.” The movie I envisioned is a steamy potboiler encompassing the wide diversity of the folks who live out in the Coachella Valley (the Palm Springs, CA area).

I want to elevate the tenor of all this a bit for the novel, so I have to make some small changes which I hope will have a profound effect on the feeling the finished product gives the reader.

Here are some of the things I know I must do, in no particular order. If you’re embarking on a script-to-novel conversion, as many screenwriters seem to be doing these days, hopefully this is helpful:

Go back to your character bios and make them real. I always have written biographies for my main (and often secondary, as well) characters, using Lajos Egri’s “The Art of Dramatic Writing” as a guide (he furnishes an outline to follow). For a novel, it’s imperative that you can live and breathe your characters. In a screenplay, I know I’ve often cheated, using archetypes and gulp, cliches.
Go Back to Your Themes. Before writing a script (or any fictional thing, really) I list out my themes, the overarching ideas I want to have come through the work. The source I use to prod myself is an old copy of Eric Heath’s “Story Plotting Simplified,” which lists and explains the 36 Basic Plots. For “Kept,” Greed, Lust and Nihilism are essential themes. Your themes for a novel will be more internal than those you chose for your screenplay.

Continue reading →

What else will surface at Echo Park Lake?

Echo Park lake

So they are draining and fixing up Echo Park Lake.

It’s good they are cleaning it up, it’s not so good it’s going to take so long, but I’m going to keep my fingers crossed and expect the results will be spectacular.

Echo Park and its lake figure quite prominently in my own L.A. history.

When I first moved to the city in 1981, Echo Park was given as the freeway exit to take to get me to my new apartment, rented sight unseen from Milwaukee. So, indeed, Echo Park Avenue was the first city street I ever drove on in L.A. if you don’t count the freeway.

At first, I used the circular path in the park as a running track. This didn’t last long, however, because so many of the local residents (at the time) brought their dogs, sans leash, who would chase me down without mercy. As much as I pleaded with the ~~cholos~~ friendly neighbors to observe the signs that said dogs should be on leashes, alas, I was ignored at best and threatened at worst.
Vascular disease is yet another problem which plagues men cute-n-tiny.com buy levitra from canada constantly. The easiest way to cute-n-tiny.com generic levitra prices to find out if you or a family member would are eligible for one such programs by way of studying the section which says Personal Help. The allograft tissue isn’t cheap viagra like other grafts in that it comes from the patient. There could be several viagra australia online reasons that may be affecting your sexual health and wellbeing.
Since then, long since I stopped jogging, there have been picnics, first date strolls, and a couple of press conferences for a job I had (the park has an excellent backdrop view of the downtown L.A. skyline behind the fountains).

Whenever I cross over the park’s little bridge above the giant lily pads I think of Jake Gittes and the duplicitous older woman in “Chinatown” (Ida Sessions), who lived in an apartment court nearby.

He finds her murdered with her bag of groceries strewn across the floor. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a couple of bodies dredged up in the sediment.

So, what are your memories, past/present, of Echo Park? I’d really like to hear all the dirt, separate from that being dredged from the lake bottom.