He's giving writers their space

Walk into the Office and you feel as though you've wandered into a Brentwood day spa. And in a sense you have, but a day spa for writers. Writers who live in Brentwood or the Palisades or Santa Monica, writers with studio deals, perhaps, and offices at home or on the lot but who nevertheless still find themselves needing that elusive "room of one's own," as Virginia Woolf, in a somewhat different context, put it.

It was at the Office, says Aleks Horvat, the screenwriter-cum-entrepreneur who opened the place about two months ago, that Brooke Shields wrote the first words of her forthcoming book on postpartum depression. Other "charter members," as they're called, are Shields' TV-writer husband Chris Henchy, Joss Whedon (creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") and screenwriters Blake Herron ("The Bourne Identity") and Jim Uhls ("Fight Club").

Hemingway wrote in Parisian cafes because he had no heat in his apartment, or food. The Paris cafe here has been transmuted into a quiet space done in tasteful earth tones, Enya playing softly on the iPod. The Office is on 26th Street between San Vicente and Montana -- a busy commercial stretch for Westside nannies, stay-at-home mothers and the SUVs that get them to the dry cleaners, the hair salon, to yoga.

Only in Hollywood, you could say, but Horvat would probably just smile and say he's feeding a need. His business venture, indeed, speaks to two very local obsessions: Hollywood screenwriter glory and proximity to the glorious. Also, the notion that creative inspiration is somehow embedded in where you work, how you work, who you're sitting next to when you work.

In a sense, the Office is a new Schwab's Pharmacy, only instead of a lunch counter the fantasy involves a T1 line and Aeron chairs by Herman Miller, and the prospect that you'll be writing your sitcom spec while sitting next to J.J. Abrams, creator of "Felicity" and "Alias."

"What's the golden dream here? To sell the million-dollar screenplay," Horvat said last week, sitting at a patio table in back of the Office.

Inside, business was slow, but Horvat, looking like a screenwriter (khakis, Nike Presto running shoes) seemed not to be worried. The Office could catch on, given time -- not just with film and TV people but with students and other professionals -- and that would create the need for more Offices: in Hollywood, in the Valley.