CS Weekly Archive > Happenings > 7/08/05

City of Dreams:
The Los Angeles Film Festival's "L.A. Writes Itself" Panel

By nick randall

From an Australian transplant to a Beverly Hills native, the writers on this Los Angeles Film Festival panel see the city of Los Angeles as a series of different characters. But is the city one thing seen by many people, or an ever-shifting mirror for those that try to define it?

When screenwriter Stuart Beattie arrived in Los Angeles in 1992, he knew he had entered a new world. "I remember flying into the city and just seeing the endless expanse. It was a magical place where I could pursue my dreams." But this mythical city isn't the only Los Angeles. There's also the dark nighttime landscape seen in Beattie's Collateral and an entire other city, separate from celebrity sightings and the Sunset Strip.

So what, then, is the real Los Angeles? The L.A. Film Festival's recent "L.A. Writes Itself" panel, featuring the Australian-born Beattie and three other writer/directors, explored just how Los Angeles is perceived in film, and how screenwriters incorporate the city into their own stories.

Like Beattie, many aspiring screenwriters journey to Los Angeles every year with hopes of making that one big sale. For panelist author Steve Erickson (Our Ecstatic Days), these expectations influence the city's image. "People come here with the idea that it's a blank page…the idea that they can redefine themselves in a way that New York isn't going to allow them to do," he says. "That kind of psychological expectation to the city winds up having an impact."

On the other hand, novelist Bruce Wagner (who's also writer/creator of ABC's Wild Palms miniseries) knows only the Los Angeles where he grew up. It's a Los Angeles not obsessed with fulfilling dreams. "I didn't aspire to come here. I lived on Rodeo Drive. I drove limousines out of The Beverly Hills Hotel. It's in my bones." He continues, "If I was from Iowa, I'd write about Iowa."

For Beattie, the move to Los Angeles and the city's sheer size took an immediate shape on his writing, and, specifically, Collateral. "What does it mean when this many people live this close together? What then becomes the value of a human life? If someone dies in L.A., how do we care? Should we care?" Asking these questions helped Beattie create cab driver Max and the dilemma of stopping Vincent's killing spree.

Similar to movies such as Woody Allen's Manhattan and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Beattie said he wanted the city to stand alone as its own character. "Early on in the development, I knew the city was going to be a character. It had to be. Making sure that every single scene, somewhere, there was some notion of the city, some part of it eking into the scene somehow."

Wagner, though, doesn't want his locations to become so technical. "It all comes down to stories," he says. "It's not Los Angeles as a character. It's stories." Character or not, a large part of Los Angeles remains its cultural diversity. While Beattie admits he did not specify the character of Max to be black or white in his original script, he says his new home certainly helped open his eyes. "It just feeds you. You feel there's more than white guys and white guys' problems."

Nick Randall is one of the aspirants currently paying for a degree in screenwriting. He has written two features, a TV spec, and a TV pilot. After spending the first twenty-one years of his life in the Midwest, the thing he misses most in L.A. is Steak 'n Shake.

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