Plague Books: La La Land

Be Cool by Elmore Leonard, William Morrow 1994

Provenance: I dunno. The book itself showed up on the bookshelf I reserve for paperbacks.  It has as a bookmark a receipt from the Tacoma Book Center, a mecca of used books in the shadow of the Tacoma Dome. It has a sticker on the back saying it was from Port Book & News in Port Angeles, but even that may be a remainder. In any event, it has been on my paperback shelf, which I have been looking at in my downstairs home office every day. And the trade paperback size and blue steel cover kept taunting me as I was working.

Yes, I judged a book by the cover. That's the point. That's why they have covers.

Review: Look. I'm going to be careful taking on Elmore Leonard. The guy was writing since the 50s, passed on only seven years ago, and a LOT of his books have been turned into movies. New York Times bestseller. So, successful. Lemme walk carefully because, spoilers, I didn't care much for the book.

Mind you, I didn't read the previous book, Get Shorty, nor have I seen either of the movies based on the books. So I walk in without knowing much about our protagonist, Chili Palmer, former sorta-mobster and loan shark who has gotten into movie production. His first movie was a success. His second was a bomb. So he's looking for a new idea. And he's doing lunch with another former sorta-mobster who is now in the record business, and the former sorta-mobster is shot down right before his eyes. And Chili's first thought is - hey, this is a great idea for a movie.

Like I said, I don't know Chili. This is the first time I've encountered him. But I don't particularly like him. This is one of the thing which impresses me about Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories (oh, wow, here he goes again about Nero Wolfe). Regardless of the story, you get an idea right up front of who Nero and Archie are, and what their relationship is. And you have a reason to root for Archie, our narrator. In other words, any Nero Wolfe story could be your first Nero Wolfe story. I don't get that break here, so Chili and I get off to a rough start.

To use an Hollywood reference, there's a book out called Save the Cat. It is a short book that for a while was (and maybe still is) gospel in screenwriting. One of the things that it stresses as a "must" is that, in the first few minutes of the movie, you have to give the reader some reason to root for your protagonist. He is kind to a little old lady, fixes someone's tire, or, yes, saves the cat. So Chili meets a former sorta-mobster turned record producer, heads for the men's room, and on his return sees the former sorta-mobster gunned down. And his first thought is how he can turn this into a movie.

As I said: Rough start.

Another bit in the book is the idea that everyone in LA wants to be in a movie about their lives. I am not a LA native. I go down every so often for recording sessions for computer games, which keeps me in the general vicinity of Burbank and the old Bob Hope airport. I don't hate LA or love it. I am more LA-Adjacent. But I haven't met anyone yet who does the whole "you should do a movie about my life" thing. But I like Leonard's LA. It feels relatively comfortable. So that's a good thing.

So Chili gets into the record business, and stuff just starts happening. He discovers a hot new talent. He becomes her manager. He gets her to put her old band from Texas back together. He comes home one night and finds a dead body sitting at his desk. He makes friends with a homicide detective who, surprise, wants to see a movie about his life. Homicide detective is now Chili's new best friend, despite the fact Chili is a witness/suspect in two murders. Chili encounters a gay Samoan bodyguard that sounds suspiciously like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and who is (surprise) played by Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson in the movie version. And then Aerosmith shows up.

You know, it sounds sillier than Leonard lays it out to be, but no sillier than most things that end up in LA's fictional universe. At the end of it all, Chili Palmer is a hustler, flying by the seat of his pants, making up lies on the spur of the moment and not getting called on it. He's got some tight situations but he never pays for his crimes, or realizes fully what he's done. He's not amazingly likeable, and remains an external force in LA, not really part of the entertainment world, but just an opportunist who sees it as he most recent grift.

Leonard is famous for saying, "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." And while I agree with the idea that language should sound realistic and natural, clarity has to ultimately rule. There are chunks here that feel like they were written during the Great Punctuation Shortage of 1993, and I had to take a couple runs at a few sentences to determine who is talking about what.

Be Cool is OK fiction. Not great, just OK. Like Chili Palmer, the book is not likeable enough to really pull me onto its side, but entertaining and engaging enough to work. Leonard's writing ethos is akin to some other authors I know - "If you do something wrong long enough, it becomes a personal style". Like LA itself, I can't muster up the emotion to hate it or love it. So I guess I'm Be Cool adjacent.

And now I can take that book off my shelf, so its blue steel cover doesn't distract me anymore.

More later,

LA, Again

So I went down to LA again, This time for the voice recordings for our new game. I went with Sound Guru Robert and Other Writer Ree. Both I referred to numerous times as "the Thin People", for whom a cheese danish is a hearty breakfast and the two miles between the recording studio and the hotel is amusingly called "walking distance".

Robert is along as a second set of ears, a more professional set attuned to the popping, gurgling, smacking, and growling that the human body is inadvertently capable of when it is placed near a microphone. Ree is the other game-designer-who-writes at the company, and she is along so that when SHE has to do this for her project, it is not like we're throwing her into the deep end of the pool in a burlap sack.

The taping went very, very well - there is a lot to be said for bringing together a crue of well-prepared professionals. Now Robert gets the odious talks of stitching it all together and seeing if we really made conversations out of everything we wrote.

These trips to LA have been surprisingly painless. Car to SeaTac to LAX to Hotel, the last by horribly expensive but generally capable cab. The hotel this time was the Sportsman's Lodge, a long-time fixture in Studio City because it kept most of its land while the rest of the area has been developed. Once the site of two man-made trout ponds, where Clark Gable fished off the back porch, it now is a nice hotel with a huge pool adjacent to a massive reception complex dedicated to weddings and reunions. The mattresses were firm, the walls solid, the hallway traffic light, and the showers adequate. No idea on the breakfast, because, as you know, I was traveling with the Thin People.

This time I DID manage to get to an above-average restaurant - the Marrakesh on Ventura. Moroccan food, which in our case meant quail, rabbit, lamb, and a chicken pastry wrapped in filo and topped with powdered sugar. Baklava, low tables, and belly dancers. The company may bridle at the cost, but it was worth it.

But I've been down to LA five times now in the past year, and have not given myself the chance to see friends or get to the Getty Museum. The last is a bit of a Holy Grail at this point. many years ago the Lovely Bride and I wanted to see it, but the region was hit by flooding and itw as closed. And each time since, my days have been filled with keeping my head down over the script and listening Very Very hard to the actors. Perhaps next time I will make the time for the pilgrimage. Or perhaps not.

More later,