Everything you've ever heard about El Lay is only half-true. It's so bad, so convoluted, so insubstantial, that words cannot encompass the bizarre black hole nature of the place. It goes on for days, and it's all about cars and driving and hating the driving and so hating the other drivers, and who makes what or who. It's an air conditioned nightmare inside a Blade Runner homunculus inside a P.T. Barnum sideshow. It's not a place for a so-called "literary" writer from the East Coast. But I was there anyway.

The treatment the studio wanted was based on their idea that my novel was the "Chinatown" for the 'nineties. Everybody says that Hollywood movies are based on a "concept," a three-minute parallel between the proposed project and some other "hit" that the accountants who control the studios can be convinced --- while chewing on their power salad at some breezy meeting in a trendy outdoor bistro where nobody takes off their sunglasses when eating --- will make them barrels of money .

In my case, because the novel had been about Chinese gangs involved in smuggling people into this country, the "natural" parallel was "Chinatown." Three of the primary scenes take place in the Chinatowns of New York, San Francisco and Toronto, don't they?

Of course, my writing is about as close to Robert Towne's as his is to Rabelais. But what did that matter. They wanted "Quiet Worlds," my novel, to be transmogrified into "Chinatown." They would pay me almost seventy grand to do it.

After they approved the treatment and all the papers were "authorized" (nobody liked to use the word "signed" for some reason) they had me "take a meeting" with the director they had chosen. He was suitably supercilious and dismissive enough to leave me impressed with my unimportance in this whole "collaborative" process. After all he was the auteur, I was just the author...

My first day on the set was more informative.

The leading man, the guy who would portray my detective, Harry Trotter, certainly looked the part. He was a head taller than I, with hands the size of baseball gloves. I thought he was a little lean for a veteran East Coast detective, but everyone in El Lay said that the camera puts ten pounds on you. He took my hand into his big paw and pumped my arm. "And you are?" he asked.

"Just another essential nonentity hired to make you look good," I told him.

"Look," he said, flashing me his winning movie star smile, "I'm not that good with names. So can I just call you Nonentity?"

"You many call me whatever you like," I said. "I don't think we'll be seeing that much of each other after today."

He chuckled with seeming delight. I couldn't tell if he had paid attention to a word I had said or not. Making he was just acting. "Man, Nonentity, you have got the deadpan down pat! Maybe you should be playing this detective."

"Naw, too short."

"Too Short? I thought he was dead! Nobody told me he was going to be in this flick!" He dropped my hand like a cold fish and went off looking for somebody of importance to complain to about being left out of the loop.

I had a lot of disjointed conversations like that one during the filming of the picture. It was like communicating from the moon, what I said never arrived at its destination until minutes later, if at all.

The TeknoSurf AdWave

A "take" is a potential piece of filming that might end up in the movie, but more than likely will end up on some film editor's cutting room floor. In the byzantine logic of auteurism, you need to make lots of takes, and keep people being paid Actor's Equity scale, at the bare minimum --- meaning what the no-name extras who provide human scenery get --- waiting for hours between each take. Imagine every house in Rome being made of hundred dollar bills while Nero was playing that fiddle and you will have some idea of the scale of fiscal impropriety I am talking about.

Being Mr. Nonentity, this was the time when I got to know a lot of the other nonentities, extras and bit players, grips and electricians, lighting folks and such, while we made the movie which pretended to be based on my book.

I heard a lot of gossip about the directors, the assistant directors --- especially the ones he was supposedly boning--- and the principal actors on the film. I even, later on, got to meet a few "professional" Hollywood script doctors. You see, by the time my book made it to celluloid, there were four writers credited with the screenplay. I got third billing.