Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin

ection>

      

      The Unnamed Press

      P.O. Box 411272

      Los Angeles, CA 90041

      Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Copyright © 1995, 1996, 2016 by Paul Kolsby and David L. Ulin

      ISBN: 978-1-939419-88-0

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933957

      This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

      Designed & typeset by Jaya Nicely

      Cover illustration by Jaya Nicely

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

       For Erik Himmelsbach, who believed.

      CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

EAR TO THE GROUND

THURSDAY NIGHT

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

MEETING OF THE MINDS

A GOOD BOSS IS HARD TO FIND

SATURDAY NIGHT

SATURDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

       PRIMARY DISTURBANCE FORCES

       THE NUMBERS GAME

       INDEPENDENCE DAY

       THE WAY OF ZEN

       SHAKING ALL OVER

       RECOMMENDATION: PASS

       HITTING THE FAN

       SAN ANDREAS, D–55–8.9–DECEMBER 29, 1995

       EYES OF THE WORLD

       REASONABLE DOUBT

       THEY ALL LAUGHED

       BEDTIME STORIES

       THURSDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

       THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

       AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

       GREEN MEANS GO

       THE LOGIC OF NUMBERS

       PARALLEL LIVES

       COLLABORATION THERAPY

       A MODEL WORLD

       CITY UNPLUGGED

       POINT OF ORIGIN

       DARKNESS VISIBLE

       BUYER’S MARKET

       SEIZE THE DAY

       WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

       AND THE EARTH STOOD STILL

       THE NUMBERS GAME, PART TWO

       PLAYING THE ODDS

       END OF THE ROAD

       HAPPILY EVER AFTER

      APPENDIX

       CHARLIE IN KOBE

       INTRODUCTION

      There is a certain comfort in knowing that although the Los Angeles landscape is always in flux—1920s art deco beauties morphing into 1960s atomic stucco apartments morphing into boxy glass condo monstrosities—the low-grade threat of an earthquake leveling all our architectural mistakes is ever present. In Ear to the Ground, which originally appeared as a serial in the Los Angeles Reader in the 1990s, David L. Ulin and Paul Kolsby put that threat and worry to good use. Capitalizing on potential catastrophe is a winning game in Hollywood, and in the hilarious Ear to the Ground, Ian, a struggling screenwriter who is reminiscent of many a struggling screenwriter in many a coffee shop in the Los Angeles Basin, wins the golden ticket of a million-dollar writing deal in the midst of The Big One’s imminent arrival. The novel is a commiseration on the excess of the 1990s, when screenwriters like Joe Eszterhaus were scoring multi-million dollar deals and directors like Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich were making their stamp on Hollywood with bombastic disaster films like Armageddon and Independence Day.

      The 1990s also offers some of our most enduring cinematic visions of Los Angeles and Hollywood. The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece of a screenwriter’s Hollywood hell, Barton Fink, carried on a long tradition of Hollywood send-up novels like Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. These tales of terror are still handed out to eager film school students on their first day and provide more of an education about the wherewithal necessary for a spot on the lot. Necessary too, upon arrival to a Paramount-adjacent studio apartment, is a viewing of the quintessential Hollywood send-up, Swimming with Sharks. Working an agency desk for a week could surely get the first glimmers of anyone’s vengeful reverie going, even now. But the believers still keep coming, enduring humiliation and despair for a chance to grab the brass ring of fame. Ear to the Ground carries on the tradition of these acerbic Hollywood satires as starry-eyed earthquake specialists are caught in the web of disaster movie-making with excitable D-girls, alongside cameos from bad boy European super directors.

      Like William Faulkner, Joan Didion and Bruce Wagner before them, writers have long been wading into Los Angeles’s literary waters, myself included. One has to deeply love the strange, lonely pulse of the hidden neighborhoods and haunted canyons and be on the right vibration to “get” Los Angeles and write about it with credibility. It’s a vibration I struggled to tap into over my years in Los Angeles, but I feel lucky to have found it—in all its peculiarity and sunny doom. There’s a reason writers flock here and a reason I couldn’t stay away (five years in New York was all I could muster): Los Angeles is a city of perpetual hope and chance, a 24/7 Vegas casino with a bright sun and glittering blue sky, and a place where reinvention is still an ever-present dream.

      There’s an exciting nostalgia that wafts through Ear to the Ground—nestled between the moment Jerry Garcia died and O.J. Simpson’s trial for murder began—and though Ed Debevic’s and Damiano’s are gone from our grid, it’s nice to revisit a time when million dollar movie ideas were still being written down on bar napkins.

      — Karolina Waclawiak

      A NOTE ON THE TEXT

      Ear to the Ground was originally published as a weekly serial novel in the Los Angeles Reader, beginning with Volume 17, Number 30, May 5, 1995 and ending with Volume 18, Number 17, February 2, 1996. An additional chapter not published in the Los Angeles Reader, “Charlie in Kobe,” appears here for the first time as an appendix. Minor inconsistencies in the narrative that occurred during the process of serialization have been left intact.

       EAR TO THE GROUND

      LOS ANGELES IS THE ONLY MAJOR CITY IN THE WORLD, thought Charlie Richter, heading east on Sunset in his red Rent-a-Corsica, where everybody has to drive. The May morning sun was a laser, confounding even the most creative extensions of his car’s visor, so he looked over at the bus to his right, moving along with him at eleven feet per minute. Its passengers seemed uniformly unhappy, and it occurred to him that Detroit had planned its L.A. marketing campaign carefully. Drive and you’ll be happier.