Bret Lott's Hollywood reflection
BOOKS
In 'Ancient Highway,' the novelist reaches into his family's past.
SOME places you can't find on a map. You can't reach them by plane or train -- not even by foot. Novelist Bret Lott got here, to this very spot in Echo Park, via a more oblique route: a collection of photographs, a tilting "postmodern" bluegrass melody and the nuts-and-bolts of family memory.
He remembers these old houses, stucco, red tile; the spot, "over there," where the Alvarado School was. But it's quite a different experience, some 40 years later, to stand in the sharp summer sun at Echo Park Lake. This is a neighborhood that Lott, an L.A. native who now lives in South Carolina, hasn't seen up close since he was 8; a neighborhood in which much of his new novel, "Ancient Highway" (Random House: 244 pp., $25), takes place. In "Ancient Highway," he goes back in time, to the 1920s, 1940s and 1980s, writing about the fringes of Hollywood -- both the place and the idea of it -- where his protagonist, a Texas dreamer named Earl Holmes, arrived, at 14, to be in "flickers."
Lott's own grandfather, also Earl Holmes, came here to be in movies in the 1920s. He jumped a train and hobo-ed out from East Texas. "He died carrying a Screen Actors Guild membership card, but he never made it," Lott says as he strolls through the sprinkler-drenched grass. "He was in lots of movies, but he was never anybody you'd have recognized or would have even seen."
This neighborhood is where his grandfather's first chapter unfolded, where he ended up with his young wife and daughter in an apartment on Sunset at Alvarado. Just as he lived on the fringes of his dream, he also worked there, as a janitor sweeping up on set, telling stories as wide as a movie screen. How much, if any of it, was true?
Things have changed so little, really. People still land in Los Angeles to grab the hem of something, a dream, a lead, a larger idea. As Lott makes his way through the park, he sees men in grimy T-shirts collapsed beneath the spread of a palm tree and then a crisp-collared student type with a movie camera, his lens trained on a setup near the foot bridge. A cluster of men in work boots and baseball caps sits near the bust of Cuban poet-activist José Martí; when Lott approaches, one grabs an open bottle of red wine and stashes it in a backpack.
Runaways, every one of them. They came from here or there, and are on their way to what's next. All the while, their own scripts scroll in their heads.
