Remember when your real estate agent was working on a screenplay? Or that one your cousin the accountant was writing? Or the script your dental hygienist was laboring on, which she pitched to you in its entirety while your mouth was wrapped in a dental dam so you couldn't politely beg her to shut up?
Those days have mercifully ended. Now, aspiring writers in Southern California are abandoning their Final Draft software and thronging to the novel writing classes at UCLA Extension. What's going on here? Are there larger cultural doings afoot?
Los Angeles has always produced novelists; the work of writers such as Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Budd Schulberg snaps, crackles and pops through the ages. But let's face it: L.A. has never truly been considered a book writing town. Why then, given the techno-crazed, instant access, over-caffeinated age in which we find ourselves -- this era of computers and blogging and a zillion television channels -- should there be such a sudden profusion of local novelists? Why is that woman sitting near you in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf working on a chick lit opus? Why is that guy at the corner table in the 18th Street Coffee House writing a series of young adult books based on a Norse saga? Why have novels become the new screenplays?
A little history: In the 1950s, aspiring American writers declaimed poetry in smoky cafes. A decade later, they were writing songs for bands that materialized at the nexus of inspiration and dissipation before disappearing in a fog of "bad vibes."
By the 1970s, all this had been supplanted by that bastard stepchild, the screenplay. Suddenly, late in the Nixon presidency, the young and arty (some of them anyway) found themselves looking for deals at Paramount.
Why did this long-derided form of writing find such new and prestigious life? Because the late 1960s and early 1970s were a killer period for American film, and great films require smart scripts with compelling characters and sharply hewn dialogue. "Shampoo," "Taxi Driver," "Dog Day Afternoon," "The Godfather" -- they were all (amazingly, from our perspective in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" era) mainstream studio pictures. Directors such as Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola drew inspiration from foreign films, so it is no coincidence that this was a time when each week offered the promise of new work from someone like Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini or Luis Bunuel.
