Script consultant Diane Wright dropped me a note the other day to say she’s been deluged with scripts and unable to get to “Right of Way” until this coming weekend.

Diane, who promised us a set of notes on our first draft, is dealing with the challenge of blending a free/promotional assignment into a busy work schedule -- something we at the Script Project are quite familiar with.

Don’t worry, Diane, we understand. In fact, I will be addressing the second draft on the same kind of catch-as-catch-can schedule -- beginning when I get your notes.

I’m also doing some thinking about whether I want to handle the next pass by myself or open it up for more group participation and how exactly that would be done. Anyone with any thoughts on this can find me here, as usual.

Meantime, we had our project’s wrap party last week at the Formosa in Hollywood, and it was a total blast. Probably 250 people joined us at one point or another, making it difficult at times to move around. But we persevered.

I managed to thank the writers personally over an underpowered PA system, and the 20 or 30 people standing closest to the speaker seemed quite attentive.

Several people took pictures at the event, and if anyone sends me any good ones, I’ll post them here. Until then, here’s what my co-host Kevin Roderick had to say about the bash.

I promised you info about our upcoming Script Project wrap party, and after a couple of weeks of conceptualizing, location scouting, guest list building and sponsorship wrangling, I’m finally ready to announce details.

And I’ll do that in a second, but first I want to tell you about an interesting development with the script at the heart of all this, “Right of Way.”

As you probably know by now, my 19 Internet collaborators and I finished our draft of the screenplay earlier this month when I wrote a climactic confrontation and its aftermath set on Mt. Lee, up by the Hollywood sign. This is a great, iconic locale for a screenplay steeped in L.A. lore, and as far as I’m aware (somebody correct me if I’m wrong), no feature has ever had a major sequence shot there.

I was planning at that point to put the script aside for a little while and move on to other things, but I got an email that might change all that. The note was from Diane Wright, a story consultant who runs a website called The Story Spot.

Her site targets not only writers, she says, but “all those who work with stories as story editors, analysts and consultants of all types.”

“I'd be happy to offer you a set of notes of your choice from my services menu... in exchange for being a part of this nutty experiment,” she wrote. “I'm all about stories being created and shared in new ways, so it's thrilling to see it in action.”

We traded a few more emails, and I learned Diane lives in Santa Monica and has been in film production for more than 10 years -- first on crew, then in development, now with Milk Boss, her company with her husband, filmmaker Jeff Renfroe.

She’s worked with DreamWorks and Lifetime Television among other companies, and has helped create and develop a bunch of different properties, including Disney’s GO.com and Fox’s “American Idol” online.

“Right of Way” could certainly use some story help. We did our best to keep it on track and largely succeeded, as evidenced by the number of readers who’ve followed our project. (That group, by the way, includes an Oscar-nominated producer, who emailed me last week expressing interest.)

Still, at times it reads like it was written by 20 strangers working without an outline over the Internet. Which, in fact, it was.

I’ve thought about rewriting the script myself, but I would prefer, in the spirit of the project, to continue it as a web-based collaboration. So I’ve accepted Diane’s offer of help, and I’m also soliciting reader input.

I’ll be writing here about her notes, and yours, and updating you all on our progress going forward.

Now, about that party: I’ve reserved the rooftop deck at Hollywood’s legendary Formosa Café from 6-9 this Thursday evening, Sept. 25, for writers and friends of our project to get together, share some appetizers, drink from the no-host bar and swap a few stories. Kevin from LA Observed thought it would also be a good time to celebrate his site’s broad success, so he’s invited friends and supporters too. The official invitation is here:

If you’ve followed our script’s progress and would like to hang with the writers, most of whom will be there, feel free to rsvp and come on out! It should be a fun night.

Fade out.

Are there any sweeter words in the language than the two that mean your draft is done?

In the seven or eight months since this site has been active, 20 different people have contributed serially to our script “Right of Way,” some of them multiple times. I’ve posted 29 installments in all, one each week, beginning February 7, 2008, with only two weeks off for vacation.

Today, with pages 116-121, I made the last such post. The pages were written by the same guy who kicked the story off, lo those many months ago. But unless you’ve been keeping up all along, don’t just jump in at the end. You can read the whole thing starting here.

Be warned: I promised readers a dark, fictional look at the underbelly of LA transportation politics, complete with glamour, corruption, overweening ambition, betrayal and murder, and that’s what my 19 collaborators and I have delivered.

It’s a funny exercise, writing a spec feature in public for the whole world to see. One of my first bosses in TV used to say in the writers’ room we would be “seeing each other in our underwear.” I tended to give him a wide berth when our paths crossed after that, but eventually I came to understand what he meant: Constructing the bare bones of a story can be a messy and revealing business, best kept shielded from the eyes of the audience.

With the emergence of the Web though, I thought it would be fun to bring the process out into the open. And judging from the email I’ve received from contributors and other readers, a lot of you have found it instructive.

The question I’m asked most frequently is: What next? The answer: I’m not sure.

After I take care of a couple of other assignments and try to pay some bills, I’d like to write a new draft of the script, tying up the loose ends and eliminating the blind alleys that inevitably work their way into a story told by 20 different people working without an outline.

With that extra time investment, I believe our screenplay would be a marketable commodity.

In the meantime, I also hope to keep Script Notes running as an independent blog about “Right of Way” and other subjects of interest to screenwriters.

One such topic is an upcoming party in Hollywood to celebrate the completion of our project. Keep Sept. 25 open, and check back here soon for more details.

I’d also love to begin a public discussion of “Right of Way” and other screenwriting topics, so please email me your questions, suggestions, criticisms and comments to this site.

Fade out, not fade away.

In pages 111-115 of “Right of Way,” our 28th and penultimate installment of the LA Observed Script Project, two murderous enforcers have cornered Napolitano and Rachel in the hills, where they’ve taken refuge under cover of the Hollywood Sign.

The thugs have Napolitano’s cohort, suspended LAPD Detective Deland, with them to use as a hostage, a bargaining chip or perhaps as an agent of their menace.

But time is running out. Even as Rachel cowers in terror with Napolitano (whom she’s recently been told is her real father), the bad guys too are under the gun, pursued by an approaching police helicopter.

One of the cops in the chopper may turn out to be Undersheriff Dallesandro, who himself is no doubt sweating the chance that Deland will survive this ordeal and expose the department’s history of corruption that runs underneath the city like so many abandoned subway tunnels.

And so, this Mobius strip of a tale takes us to the same place all good stories eventually go:

The ledge.

Everyone must now move left or move right, and their decisions will reveal their character.

On another more immediate level -- as illustrated by the case of the henchman Alphonse, whose car just went tumbling off the mountainside -- every choice made now could mean life or death.

This is the third consecutive installment and fourth overall from reality show writer (oh, sorry, most reality TV doesn’t use “writers”; he’s got some other title) Michael Breiburg. Mike is the only one of our collaborators to contribute more than twice.

The script has come together remarkably well for something written by 20 different strangers working on their own without an outline. Still, there are questions that need to be answered and a few loose ends that may never be tied up, at least not in this draft.

(These dead ends are like Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere,” in that I, as final arbiter, enthusiastically encouraged their inclusion but am now disavowing them as shortsighted and wasteful. Unfortunately, in this case, there were no $398 million earmarks involved.)

I’ll be writing the script’s final pages next week, doing the best I can to make sense of things. Please come back after Tuesday to find out how our story ends.

And stay tuned here at Script Notes to learn about future developments, including an upcoming LA Observed/“Right of Way” wrap party to which you’re all invited!

In the newest pages, 106-110, from my last breathing collaborator Michael Breiburg, Napolitano is driven to Wolf’s Lair, where he and Rachel are to be executed.

Sensing a setup but needing to rescue Rachel, the disgraced mayor slips out of the car early and approaches Sydney’s mansion in the hills on foot. He’s obviously unsure about his cohort Deland’s role in all this -- a concern later validated -- and he wants to buy himself a little time.

Hiding on the mansion grounds while Deland meets with the goons inside, Napolitano spots the opening he needs: a door to the balcony outside the room where Rachel’s being held. (We saw Rachel temporarily escape out that same door earlier, so we can buy that it’s been left open.)

In a way, Napolitano’s treacherous quest to save Rachel parallels the job facing the most recent writers of our soon-to-be-finished screenplay collaboration, “Right of Way.” The odds are stacked against them, but they keep searching for an opening to exploit, a way to stave off a horrible crash-and-burn demise for at least another week.

Take Breiburg for example. The guy’s working 11-hour days on some clearly exploitive reality TV show (my characterization, not his); he comes home barely energetic enough to feed his political jones with the latest convention news; then he makes it to the weekend, only to learn no one else has contributed any new pages to our script, and it’s up to him to keep our group effort going another week.

He must feel like Napolitano, whose perseverance and quick thinking lands him in Rachel’s bedroom, where he finds she’s been handcuffed to the bed with the executioner’s clock ticking. Sure, he finds a way to get her out of there, but now he’s got four armed henchmen (and maybe an ally with questionable loyalties) clamoring after him full-tilt.

Because of the interactive nature of our project, you have one last chance to bail out the good guys (Napolitano and Breiburg), by writing the script’s next pages.

In the past, our deadlines have been Sunday at midnight, but this week, if I don’t get a decent submission by Sunday at noon, I’m going to take the whip to Breiburg one last time.

I’ll be writing the script’s final pages the week after that, so if you want to take part in our heroic quest and maybe win a Script Project t-shirt in the process, the door is closing.

But for now, the opening is still there, waiting for someone to blast through.

I’m not sure who’s had it rougher these past few weeks -- “Right of Way’s” tarnished hero Mayor Russell Napolitano or the Script Project contributors who’ve been pushing his story toward its suspenseful conclusion.

Ever since confronting The Order’s creepy Prefect Duvane, whom he unwisely slugged in full view of the cult’s security cameras, Napolitano has been running from police across Hollywood and back again, through menacing streets and abandoned subway tunnels, refusing to face their trumped-up murder charges until he can prove he’s been framed.

This week, he was finally apprehended by a sheriff’s department S.W.A.T. team, dumped in a cell to await arraignment, and then sprung in the middle of the night for reasons we don’t yet understand by his reluctant cohort, suspended LAPD detective Deland.

It’s all in a day’s work for Napolitano, who’s already lost his good friend to a horrific murder, had his girlfriend betray him for money, and been beaten up twice, carjacked, and publicly humiliated by the media frenzy over his fall from grace.

The 20-odd writers (emphasis on odd) who’ve piled the weight of the world onto Napolitano’s weary shoulders have done themselves no favors either. The yarn they’ve woven has at least a loose thread for every contributor and no overall plan for stitching them all together.

It was fun creating this mess, but getting Napolitano out of it is another story.

Take Michael Breiburg, for instance. Back around page 18, Mike no doubt thought it was a kick tossing two dead bodies and a mysterious, powerful cult into the story mix.

Now he comes home from his real job working 11+-hour days at the as-yet-unscheduled NBC reality show “Momma’s Boys,” and he’s got some half-crazed Maniac Producer on the line, demanding he sacrifice his few hours of sleep to help tidy up Napolitano’s story and to make sure the mayor battles the odds with honor, strength and a certain style.

For free. (Except for a t-shirt.)

And why is Mike on the hook for all this? Because, as he told a local TV news reporter a few weeks ago, he thinks it’s “fun.”

Oh, and also because after six months of running this project, the aforementioned Maniac Producer can’t find anyone else willing to try.

That’s right. The line of volunteers has dwindled from five or 10 each week in our script’s first months down to just a few in its middle section and now, finally, to zero would-be contributors willing to take a shot at solving our story problems at this late stage of the game. (And no, that doesn’t count the lady who submitted a few paragraphs suggesting a staggering new, unrelated plot twist in narrative, non-script format.)

So Mike now is scheduled to become our project’s only three-time contributor, when he delivers new pages this coming weekend to pay off the mayor’s ordeal with the slam-bang action finish he proposed to me earlier and which we’ve all been waiting for. Right, Mike?

Mike? Wake up, Mike!

Meanwhile, you can read his current contribution, in which Napolitano faces the music in order to prevent Rachel from being raped and murdered by the evil prefect in the purple robe, on pages 102-105 of our script-in progress.

Nice job, Mike. You’ve done a Maniac Producer’s heart good.

This project’s been a total blast to run so far. The script, despite its flaws, is turning out better than anyone’s had a right to expect, and we’ve all stayed pretty much within the parameters I concocted six months ago, with minimal adjustments along the way.

Now, with a few weeks to go, it’s time for a bigger adjustment.

I just can’t look you all in the cyber-eye and expect one of you to step forward and tie up our story’s loose ends while bringing it to a successful, dramatic climax without a little bit more direction.

So here’s the deal:

I’ll be working with a previous contributor, Michael Breiburg, to craft an ending to the script based on a suggestion he made months ago. Mike will write the next-to-last installment, and I’ll take the finale myself.

That leaves this week and possibly one more for open submissions. Whether you’ve been assiduously following our progress from the beginning or you just tuned in recently -- and website numbers indicate there are a lot of you in the latter category -- you still have one last chance (maybe two) to contribute to our group effort and win an LA Observed Script Project t-shirt.

You even have some leeway in what you can write, although not as much as in weeks past. Here’s a rough checklist of what the next few pages need to cover:

A confrontation in the tunnel: Duvane and his minions escape with Rachel back into their building through the tunnel entrance. Napolitano urges the cops to follow, but they’re not interested. They only want to arrest the mayor. (Remember, Dallesandro, the undersheriff leading the posse, is crooked and in Duvane’s pocket.)

Napolitano gets free: Either he’s bailed out or recog’d by a friendly judge or he escapes with the help of Deland and/or Gallardo, his two suspended cop allies. (He’s probably suspended as well from his mayoral duties, though that may not figure into the story at this point.)

The Duvane-Sydney connection is established visually: We’ve heard these two are in cahoots; now it’s time to see them together.

My suggestion is that Sydney, who’s been shot by his coked-out cohort Celeste, comes to The Order for some quiet medical attention. Duvane then unloads Rachel on him, telling him to get rid of her. Sydney should have a lot of trouble with this directive. After all, she’s not only his girlfriend but a blood relative as well (hey, we’re not judging here).

He takes her back up to Wolf’s Lair, his mansion in the hills, to figure out his next move.

Somewhere around here, Mike Breiburg will take over. Napolitano must rescue Rachel for her sake and his own: She’s the only person who can help him establish his innocence and finger Sydney and Duvane for Larry’s murder.

Don’t feel you have to follow these directives to the letter, but don’t stray too far either. If you reach your page limit before you cover all the necessary ground, don’t worry. You’re welcome to give others a chance to submit those pages the following week. (The rules state that submissions can be 1-5 pages, but at this point I'm looking for 3-5.)

As always, your work is due Sunday at midnight. Read the script, read the recent Script Notes, and give it a shot. I’d love to get one or two new winners to join our title page before this project is finished.

In my rush to post this week’s pages while getting back on track from a family vacation, I neglected to mention here that Rich DeMuro, the technology reporter for L.A.’s KCBS and KCAL news, did indeed make good on his plan to bring the story of our online group collaboration to local viewers.

Rich interviewed LAOSP contributor Michael Breiburg and me at Mike’s apartment in Hollywood Monday afternoon, whipped up a nicely done report with the help of his one-woman crew, and got versions of it on the air that evening for two different KCAL-9 newscasts and another one on KCBS-2.

He also wrote a short piece for his Tech Check blog here. You can link to the Channel 9 report by going to the blog and clicking on the video screen to the right.

In case you’re wondering, I chose Mike to represent the Script Project’s contributors partly because he lives conveniently close to the news operation’s home base -- an important factor for a reporter on a breakneck schedule.

It also helped that Mike is planning to become a two-time contributor in a couple of weeks by crafting a Hitchcockian chase through the hills to the Hollywood sign for our story’s climactic sequence. (I’ll post more about that tomorrow.)

In Mike’s initial pages last spring, he had investigators find two bodies -- one in a vacant lot next to his own building and another in the building’s courtyard. Rich passed on the opportunity to photograph those locations in favor of giving more screen time to Mike and me.

No word yet on whether or not he regrets that decision.

Those of you following closely may recall a scene posted in late May when our script took a turn for the sordid.

In those pages, Rachel, who had been introduced earlier as a sexy nymph in a negligee and largely forgotten, wound up snorting coke in the backseat of a Bentley and making out with Sydney Pizer, a fat man old enough to be her grandfather.

The scene was penned by Mitch Paradise, who this week adds pages 97-101 to our script and becomes the latest in a small but growing coterie of two-time contributors to “Right of Way.”

Where others had given Sydney a complex code of honor that allowed him to reluctantly arrange for a friend’s murder, Mitch saw him as a lethally corrupt sybarite, who could inject some needed perversion into our story.

This week Mitch is at it again, creating a scene in which Rachel, apparently drugged by cult leader Duvane, is nearly raped and murdered in what Duvane hopes will look to his followers like a ritual sacrifice but is really something else.

For good measure, Mitch brings back his old pal Sydney, who ends up on the wrong end of an over-indulgent thrill-shooting by his incestuous lover and partner in crime, Celeste.

“I really enjoy writing Sydney as a character,” says Mitch, who admits to an appetite for lurid things such as dime-store pulp novels and Chicago Cubs baseball, the latter of which he portrayed on the small screen as a writer and producer of Showtime’s “Bleacher Bums.”

“I find him to be a character who brings out certain aspects of depravity that every good noir story needs.”

With our depravity quotient ramped up to full-bore, Mitch has Mayor Napolitano step in to save Rachel’s life, possibly at the expense of his own freedom.

“It was great to have the opportunity to come back in at a crucial time and help set up the script’s end-game,” he said.

Indeed, by my estimation, we’ve got only about three weeks of story-telling left here at the Script Project.

What’s more, I’ve decided to write the project’s final pages myself, and I’ve assigned the pages immediately preceding those to Michael Breiburg, a previous contributor who put a bug in my ear a few months ago about an ending I like.

That means only this coming week’s pages and possibly one more submission the week after that are up for grabs before Mike and I bring this story home.

In order to transition to the ending, I’ll post a rough outline in the next day or two, indicating where these next several pages must go.

If you’ve been planning to submit some wildly creative scene introducing new complications, well, sorry -- that train’s already left the station.

Then again, if plotting is not your strong suit but you’ve wanted to take a shot at writing some good action and dialog, this could be your weekend to shine.

Look for my rough story outline by Friday, and whip up a few pages over the weekend. It may be your last chance.

One submission stood out this week, not only because it pushes our story toward a satisfying conclusion, but also because it breaks new ground to do so.

The contributor had purposely gone back and modified the end of last week’s scene in order to take his own pages in a slightly different direction. That, of course, is a brazen transgression of the rules we’ve been following since we launched this crazy enterprise nearly six months ago.

What’s the matter with this guy? Without hard and fast guidelines, we could never have made this thing work as well as it has. If people started rewriting everything that’s gone before, our effort might veer from cordial collaboration to bare-knuckles brawl. At the very least it would become, well, unruly.

Oh, by the way, I’m allowing it.

The writer, a second-time contributor whose identity I won’t reveal until I post the new pages, took a chance that this late in the game I’d be willing to think outside the box if it would bring a good short-term result.

It did, and I am.

His new pages boost us over the 100 mark. Check them out tomorrow night, and read about him, his process, and how we intend to finish our draft over the next few weeks, here at Script Notes.

With your humble story editor on the road this week, we’ll be skipping our usual weekly routine here at the Script Project. There will be no pages read or added, no words of wisdom spouted, and no t-shirt awarded until after next weekend’s August 10 deadline.

Meantime, here are some things to think about as you use all that extra time to get your next submission together:

* Napolitano needs a plan.

For a good part of this script, our protagonist has been reactive. Things have happened to him, and he’s dealt with them in a clever or amusing way.

That’s been fine for this draft, but the story has worked best when Napolitano took matters into his own hands -- like when he confronted Prefect Duvane the first time, or when he broke into Rachel’s guest house to collect evidence.

In our next pages, when the mayor emerges from hiding in the subway tunnel, he will have thousands of cops and reporters on his tail, he’ll be recognizable to the whole city, and he’ll have no time to waste before he moves decisively to set things right.

It’s up to you to decide what those moves will be. But this is a huge turning point in the script, so give it some thought, and make it good.

* Is Napolitano really Rachel’s father? If she is, it’s news to him. (If he knew, he would have acted differently when she tried to seduce him.)

We need to clear this up once pretty soon so we can use it for the story’s climax. It would be great if he found out the news in an interesting way -- other than being told by Rachel or Celeste. It might even be worth dedicating most of an entire submission to setting up and paying off this discovery.

* What’s the trade-off? In noir, the hero usually wins some sort of Pyrrhic victory. He gets his subway but loses the girl. He rescues the girl but loses his freedom. He fights for his freedom, but at some unforeseen great cost.

Napolitano needs to learn a painful lesson about where the power really lies in this town and what lines he should never have crossed to wield it. Try to be mindful of the big picture as we set up the script’s last 15-20 pages.

One last note: I’ll be interviewed when I get back, along with contributor Mike Breiburg, for a feature on the Script Project, tentatively scheduled to air Monday, Aug. 11 on KCAL-TV, Channel 9.

If I don’t say or do anything particularly embarrassing, I’ll keep you posted.

What would it be like to be a high-profile L.A. mayor, framed for murder, who goes on the run in his own city and, with the police and media in hot pursuit, elects to live by his wits underground until he can clear his good name?

This week, KP Mackie joins the array of talented writers bringing this improbable scenario convincingly to life in our tag-team script project, “Right of Way.”

With plot threads buzzing around overhead like local news choppers, KP’s pages 94-97 smartly focus on Mayor Napolitano’s temporary escape through a maze of subway tunnels and the mysterious benefactor who lights his path.

Possibly without realizing it, KP and two previous writers who put the mayor below ground in the first place have turned up a great central image for our script -- the movie’s poster, if you will:

Napolitano fumbling around in L.A.’s dark underbelly, searching for a way out of the hole he’s dug himself.

(Of course, if this were a 1940s- or '50s-style poster, we’d include a few striking secondary images as well: Rachel, the slinky seductress; Larry, stuffed with peat in a men’s room urinal, the sexy widow Celeste crying on Napolitano’s shoulder; Duvane in his Order garments under a plasma-screen cosmos....)

KP has never tried to push a subway project through a soul-deadening bureaucracy, nor to my knowledge has she ever undertaken Napolitano’s singular quest for redemption. But in some ways, she has exhibited the same kind of tenacity and perseverance as that of our fictional mayor.

This entry was her nineteenth consecutive submission to our project, shattering Dianna Brown’s previous record of 12.

“I tend to be a bit overzealous," she says. "My kids have another word for it.”

She exhibited the same kind of commitment while voluntarily reading and reviewing more than 75 scripts for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s “Project Greenlight,” a pursuit that got her hooked on the allure of good screenwriting.

A San Diego mother of three teenage sons, KP has had our script on her mind pretty much constantly for more than four months now. “I hear about writers who sit down and start writing immediately, and I am in awe,” she says.

“I jog and use that hour to solve dilemmas. I also read other fiction. I have subscriptions to ’Creative Screenwriting,’ ’Script,’ and ’Entertainment Weekly,’ and am amazed how many ideas I steal, I mean borrow, from those publications.

“I've heard these exercises referred to as stalling.”

Speaking of which, the Script Project will be dark next week, as I head north for a family vacation. Deadline for the next submission will be midnight, August 10, after which I expect to solicit only a couple of additional contributions before writing the script’s final pages myself.

Those of you who don’t know what to do with yourselves while I’m away are encouraged to get to work designing our poster.

Are you listening, KP?

When Alex Austin’s pages showed up in my inbox last week, my natural elation was mixed with a hint of concern. Al, you may remember, is the guy who almost sent our noir drama off the rails with an early contribution that hinted at a murderous L.A.-based Scottish mafia and introduced the peat brick as their weapon of choice.

It was a brilliantly original vision, which was perhaps overzealously embraced by subsequent writers and took us nearly 80 pages to build a story around that made any sense. Now that we were starting to wrap things up neatly, we could ill afford another such flight of fancy.

This week, Al becomes only the fourth two-time contributor to “Right of Way.” His pages 90-94 do indeed introduce a couple of startling new twists which, I’m thrilled to say, are not only manageable but necessary for our story’s final act.

For starters, he has Rachel wandering Hollywood Boulevard, where she runs into an Order recruiter, who’s pitching his cult’s mythology regarding the “miracle of the quanta,” previously referenced by the villainous Prefect Duvane. According to church doctrine, one can achieve infinite wisdom by bonding with the patriarchs, who have disappeared from this plane of existence and turned to perfect intelligence.

What Al and Duvane know, and a future writer must eventually incorporate into our script, is that the patriarchs were murdered by the prefect and buried under The Order headquarters, where Duvane now worries they are perfectly preserved in subterranean peat deposits.

The building and indeed the religion itself were erected to hide the evidence of Duvane’s long-ago triple-homicide.

Remarkably, Al has tied up our script’s entire wacky peat detour, giving Duvane a motive beyond the weaker financial one for making certain the mayor’s preferred subway route is never excavated.

But he doesn’t stop there. Al then puts a couple of toughs on the train with the mayor, to menace him, expose his identity, and send him fleeing into a vacant tunnel -- his third hidden tunnel excursion in the script, for those keeping track -- where he encounters a mysterious underground guide who will eventually lead him out of this mess.

It’s all in a day’s work for Al, a schoolteacher and former magazine editor, who kept busy between appearances here by publishing a novel, “The Red Album of Asbury Park,” and mounting a new play, “Dupe,” in Studio City.

If Al’s plotlines tend to include some fantastic convolutions, they merely reflect the reality of his own life. Listen to this story he tells about a matinee performance of his play on a brutal, Valley summer day when the air conditioning went out:

“By the end of the first act, the theater’s temperature was approaching triple digits, and the audience members were fanning themselves with anything not tied down.

At this point, Al says, his lead actress points in panic to an unseen stalker, and her co-star is supposed to jump off the stage and run down the center aisle into the closed theater lobby in pursuit of the threat.

“On this afternoon, with the fanning audience sounding like a flock of seagulls, the actress screamed ‘Stalker!,” the theater door swung open, and standing in the doorway was Irish Brian, a private detective guy I play basketball with, who had arrived an hour late to the play.

“The audience, thinking Irish Brian was the stalker/actor, stopped their fanning. The cast went silent. But Irish Brian didn’t bat an eyelash.

“‘Brian Mahoney, P.I.,’” he announced. ‘Does anyone here own the late model black Jeep parked out front?’

“Silence.

“‘You've got a one-legged drunken cyclist ramming it with his bicycle.’”

With that, Al hustled Brian out the door and into the lobby, and the play went on.

“And by the way,” Al says, “out front there was a one-legged, drunken cyclist ramming his bicycle into a black jeep. Quite a crowd had gathered to watch him.”

By now, quite a crowd has gathered here too. Let’s hope they’re all properly insured.

In the dank, moral cesspool that is “Right of Way,” our newest contributor, Steve Chivers, may have found a ray of light.

Her name is Rachel Davis, and when she was introduced in our story, trouble emanated from her in heat waves. Her 11-year-old creator, Jonah Lazar, encapsulated her sex appeal with a single word: “Vavoom.”

Since then, Rachel has indeed proven to be a handful. She helped her mother, Celeste, plot her own kidnapping, lied to the mayor about it, tried to seduce him, and set him up for a mugging as she ran off to snort cocaine and make out with Sydney Pizer, a fat Scotsman 40 years her senior, who also happens to be a blood relative.

Now it turns out Rachel is related to Mayor Napolitano as well. She’s his daughter, which she knew (but Napolitano did not) when she put her hand on his leg in the car and moved in close for a kiss.

Yet somehow, in a testament to the depravity of our story’s array of characters, Steve has begun to turn this emotionally unstable little powder keg into our most sympathetic figure outside the put-upon mayor.

“Celeste had become entirely unlikable to me, and I felt like Rachel was heading in that direction too. I wanted to make her father-daughter relationship with Napolitano mean something and give her some added dimension,” he said.

Steve did this in newly posted pages 85-89 by revealing Rachel’s vulnerable side. After the death of her relatively decent stepfather Larry, whom she feuded with, she can now be understood as someone desperate to be loved by a parental figure who’s not thoroughly perverted and corrupt.

The mayor would fill that bill just fine.

“I see her as a pivotal character in the final third of the story. We've got to care about someone else besides Napolitano, and she represents both his past and his future.”

Steve, a writer and producer for TV, movies and the Web, pulled off a couple of deft, logistical triumphs as well: He identified the home where Sydney, Celeste and Rachel engage in their conspiracies and incestuous dalliances as Wolf’s Lair, the historic Hollywood Hills mansion.

“I was trying to think of a way to get the characters up near the Hollywood sign for the story’s ending,” Steve said, resurrecting a notion first introduced by contributor Michael Breiburg in an earlier Script Note.

“I used to walk around Lake Hollywood and always admired Wolf’s Lair. It popped into my mind as a cool setting to use, and it seemed like a great place for Sydney to live.”

He also corrected an oversight in the story by having Napolitano, disguised in thrift-store knockoffs and a hoodie, slip into a train station to evade police.

“I thought someone should ride the subway,” he said, “since that's so much of what the story is about. So I sent him into the station at Vermont and Santa Monica, where he will (in my mind at least) ride to Hollywood Boulevard and then walk (or maybe do something crazy like ride a bike) up to Wolf's Lair for the final confrontation.”

Sounds good to me.

Who’s next?

KPCC-FM’s John Rabe did a fun piece on our Script Project this weekend on his weekly show, which airs throughout greater Los Angeles and is now available to hear worldwide on the web.

John interviewed me for the story and then had some on-air talent from around the station play one of our scenes. We chose some early pages for the actors to do -- the scene written by 11-year-old Jonah Lazar which has the two cops, Deland and Gallardo, informing Celeste of her husband’s murder, and which also introduces Rachel.

John’s a good interviewer and a good editor (or editorial supervisor, I’m not sure which). He had read both the “Right of Way” script-in-progress and the Script Notes and seemed to be a big fan of both.

If you missed the five-minute segment on our project, you can catch it here. (*Edited to reflect a new, more direct link.)

After 79 pages of playing political footsie with seemingly every big-time hustler in Los Angeles, Mayor Napolitano finally snapped last week and decked the head of the powerful cult who was blackmailing him for murder.

It must have felt liberating, because this week, in pages 81-84 of our collaborative screenplay “Right of Way,” new contributor David Klein has Napolitano practice some surprise jujitsu on an Order security guard, steal the guard’s golf cart and lead a bunch of pursuers on a slippery chase through the cult’s sprawling Hollywood compound, before vaulting a fence and going on the lam from police.

A few days ago, Napolitano was an ambitious mayor on the move, wooing an upscale Brentwood crowd to support his multi-billion dollar plan to unclog L.A.’s freeways with a subway to the sea.

Now, as his transit plans and his political career veer wildly off track, Napolitano scrambles to evade two police agencies and a murderous cult in a last-ditch attempt to clear his suddenly sullied name.

Blasting into its final act with maybe six or seven weekly installments remaining, the story’s got everything going for it -- almost.

“I couldn’t believe you got to page 80 without the mayor having a girlfriend,” David said after submitting the pages that would utterly and completely prevent Napolitano’s erstwhile friend Celeste from ever fulfilling that role. “The last act of the story’s got to be about the hero getting the girl, losing the girl, saving the girl -- something! Haven’t you guys ever seen a movie before?”

Hmm, well, we tried. The mayor had something interesting going with Celeste before she admitted arranging her own kidnapping in order to bilk him out of a million bucks.

In the new pages, David reveals it was Celeste, working with sybaritic super-car inventor Sydney Pizer, who masterminded her husband Larry’s murder and manipulated cult leader Duvane into pinning everything on Napolitano.

David, a Chicago-based publisher of trade magazines (including the local must-read, Television Week), said his goal this week was to tie up the story’s loose ends so that future writers would at least have a common understanding of what it’s about. It took some doing, but amazingly, our rambling, 18-author (and counting) script now begins to make complete sense.

“Whatever amount of expository dialog it took was worth it,” David said. “It had to be done. What can I tell you? I’m a natural martyr.”

David’s experience co-writing his first and only spec feature back in the late 1970s was arguably more cinematic than the resulting script itself. He and a partner began writing while living for free in a Gainesville, Florida hotel, then migrated to the hotel owner’s condo as their patron, the hotelier, lost his business and began a messy divorce.

I happen to know the details of that youthful escapade well, having been David’s partner on the project. The experience introduced us both to Hollywood, where I ended up launching a TV and screenwriting career, and from which David fled screaming as if his hair were on fire.

But in the process we both learned that protagonists in commercial Hollywood movies need to be working on some kind of romantic relationship more often than not.

It’s too late for any kind of fulfilling romance in our script, but David did manage to set up an ending where Napolitano will grow to care very much about Celeste’s beautiful and depraved daughter Rachel.

You’ll have to write it yourself, but the elements -- finally! -- are all there.

Deep in his lair at The Order’s world headquarters in Los Angeles, Prefect Patrick Duvane devises a dastardly new plot: the takeover of the LA Observed Script Project.

BWAHAHAHAHAAAA!

No, wait, that can’t be right. Duvane is a fictional character. The guy threatening to hijack our screenplay is Marvin Wolf who, by writing our newest pages (76-80) of “Right of Way,” becomes a rare two-time contributor and the first to achieve that status in consecutive weeks.

Truth be told, Marvin is not most people’s idea of dastardly. On the surface, he’s a mild-mannered screenwriter, journalist, photographer and author with a distinguished, even heroic, military record

But look deeper. It’s Marv who breathed life into Duvane’s evil plan to sabotage Mayor Napolitano’s subway project, financially ruin his friend and investor Larry Davis, and then frame the mayor for Davis’ murder.

Coming late to our project, he’s taken our world of sunshine, optimism and progressive, public transportation, and revealed it to be lousy with corruption, betrayal and murder.

Actually, most of that stuff was already there, but Marv brought it into full relief by concocting a complex back-story that ties together several or our story’s many loose ends and manages to sound smart and believable in the process.

“One of the things I liked about ‘Right of Way,’ as I encountered it with 70 pages written, was its parade of characters,” he said. “Yet I also worried about this parade marching right past the story.

“So I decided to go back to one of those faces met in passing, flesh him out and make him a key to solving the puzzle of the plot.”

But here’s the rub: Marv knew from the outset that his goal would take more than the allotted maximum five pages to reach.

Working in secret and without shame, he hatched a plan to contribute a 10-page chunk of story by writing so well that his submissions would be selected two weeks in a row!

So the question remains, Marv or Duvane -- which of these two diabolical puppetmasters is really in charge?

And now, having created a twist that will force Napolitano to fight a trumped-up murder rap, will Marv sit back and admire his handiwork or will he mount a quest for Act Three domination?

“The strength of this work is in the diversity of its contributors, and I must respect that,” he said.

But can we believe him after what he did to the mayor? Keep in mind, his history of polygraph failure has been documented.

Tune in next week to read our newest pages. Or better yet, write them yourself.

BWAHAHAHAHAAAA!

My first staff job on a television series was story editing the popular, if not exactly highbrow ABC show, “MacGyver” back in 1987.

I was pretty surprised when, on my very first day on the job, the show’s executive producer Henry Winkler waltzed into my office on the Paramount lot, introduced himself to my then-partner and me, and proceeded to write a single word on the whiteboard:

“Attitude.”

I suddenly feared that word of my critical snobbishness had leaked out to my bosses, and they’d already sent the Fonz to straighten me out. Luckily, he was only there to share what he considered his most important advice on writing: Whatever else a scene is intended to do, it must also give the actors something to play.

Motivation. Spin. Attitude. Something’s got to be there, beneath the surface of all the dialog and action, for an actor, and later the viewer, to feel engaged.

It’s an important lesson for all writers, and one sparklingly practiced this week by our newest contributor, Marvin Wolf.

Marv jumped into “Right of Way” with Napolitano and Celeste headed for questioning at LAPD’s downtown headquarters. His recently posted pages, 71-75, not only lend clarity and authenticity to our main characters’ complex legal situations; they do so with style, adding color and depth to their flawed personalities.

So when movie star Celeste is taken into a room and questioned about her role in a kidnapping and blackmail scheme, she seems less concerned about that than the possibility that her interrogation video might end up on YouTube.

And with the mayor’s career and even his freedom on the line, he rails against his arresting officer, Chief of Detectives, Walter Hoovler, with whom he has some interesting personal history.

And while all that’s going on, Marv fills in the scorecard for the game that’s been unfolding in our pages:

Detectives Deland and Gallardo: suspended.
Celeste: arrested and released to her high-powered attorney on her own recognizance.
Mayor Napolitano: arrested by LAPD, then freed when a high-ranking supersheriff pulls jurisdictional rank.

Marv, a four-time past president of the Independent Writers of Southern California, obviously knows his way around a police stationhouse. He’s written often about law enforcement in his 15 books and countless magazine articles, and he’s also racked up some firsthand experience, being arrested by Hermosa Beach’s chief of police for the heinous act of selling encyclopedias.

His familiarity with the LAPD’s Parker Center interrogation room comes from another real-life incident: It started when he interviewed a source in a Valley restaurant for his book “Platinum Crime.” (That book later served as source material for the USA Network TV movie “Ladies Night,” which he co-wrote with partner Larry Mintz.)

His restaurant companion was a private eye who claimed to be keeping a police captain on retainer to provide him with inside information -- a situation Marv has cannily set up for a possible future installment of our script.

When someone in the restaurant overheard them and reported their conversation to police, the department’s Internal Affairs Group tracked Marv down and demanded he take a polygraph.

“Knowing how unreliable these were, I refused,” Marv said. “They kept asking; eventually I realized that I was being offered an opportunity most writers never get.”

Marv relented and was taken to Parker Center, where his pages for this week’s developments take place.

“When they strapped me into the polygraph, my pulse started to race. And when interrogators accused me of being the one who bribed a police captain, I had a panic attack. The styluses tracing my bodily responses all but flew off the paper. I was judged untruthful and given a chance to repent my sins through confession.

“I had nothing to confess,” Marv says, “except that I had accepted Internal Affairs’ invitation out of purely opportunistic motives. But not until I yielded to the pull of ‘Right of Way,’” Marv says, “was I able to put that experience to creative use.

“If a writer lives long enough, nothing in his life goes to waste.”

As any good screenwriter knows, the key to writing explanatory dialog that doesn’t sound forced is to avoid it as long as humanly possible.

You can’t just shoehorn information into a scene because you want the reader to know it. You have to wait until there’s absolutely no way to withhold it any longer.

In “Right of Way,” that time is now, which Eric Volkman figured out in this week’s pages, 67-70.

“I wanted to start tying up a few loose ends without giving away the whole gig,” Eric said. “We've had a lot of questions so far, but few answers.”

That’s because no one was around to supply them. But now, with Celeste and Napolitano reunited for the first time since her kidnapping, it’s only natural for him to demand the whole story.

Whether or not he can believe what she tells him is another matter entirely.

“Celeste is a fun character to play around with,” Eric said. She's slippery and a good actress -- a great foil for Napolitano. But Our Hero, though he has a weakness for this woman, is a quick learner and is rapidly starting to figure her out.”

Celeste’s story isn’t pretty. Faced with Napolitano's angry barrage of questions, she eventually admits she and Omar set up her kidnapping in order to squeeze some money out of the mayor. Before she can explain why the plan capsized, they’re pulled over by Detective Deland, who’s tired of serving as Napolitano’s errand boy and is bringing some new attitude to the party.

It would seem Napolitano’s quest to keep this whole extended fiasco out of the public eye is about to fall apart, and his career quite possibly along with it. But we won’t know until at least next week because, with Deland’s interruption, Eric has found a way to postpone the inevitable a little longer.

Eric’s own story is similarly circuitous. A native New Yorker, he spent the past 13 years in Prague, Czech Republic, where, among other things, he published what he calls “a pan-ex-Soviet-Satellite-States business magazine.”

He also played rock and roll bass, wrote screenplays, attended a summer film school and made a memorable visit to the set of "Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" in the Barrandov hills. Prague was booming for Hollywood productions a few years ago, but when the dollar went south, Eric headed west -- to Los Angeles, where he hopes to write TV comedy.

“If Mohammed won't come to the mountain,” he said, “the mountain must go to Mohammed. So I packed up my bags, hopped a plane, and here I am.”

Irene Turner was paging through “Right of Way” last week -- maybe it was in her L.A. apartment near the Strip, the one with the Spanish poster of “The Big Heat” on the wall -- and she was thinking about the hole in the heart of our screenplay-to-be.

“When I looked back at the story so far, I thought it had some cool set-pieces and interesting twists and turns, but Hizzoner (Mayor Napolitano) needed some emotional resonance. Something had to hit home.”

Yeah, I know, it’s the same problem I’ve been hammering at lately in my Script Notes. Is it any wonder the girl with the noir-sounding name wrote an entry that grabbed my attention like the business end of a .45?

The fix, Irene figured, was to put Napolitano in one place with the two people he cares about most. “And since those two were married,” she said, “well... it's always good to get a love triangle together in the same room. Even if one them is dead.”

That’s why this week’s pages (64-66) take place in the downtown morgue, where we see Napolitano torn between the very cold corpse of his good friend Larry and the very hot presence of Larry’s wife, Celeste, who, having slipped a captor’s bindings, drifts into the scene with torn Versace, a sob story and a bad case of rope-burn.

Even better, it all plays out under the disapproving eye of Napolitano’s other longtime friend Hendricks, the county coroner.

Napolitano is starting to feel the heavy burden of his misdeeds, and so are we.

He also wrangles Celeste’s version of the kidnapping story, which fingers her daughter Rachel as mastermind. Rachel, it seems, was funneling Larry and Celeste’s dough to the powerful cult group, The Order, and wasn’t too thrilled when her parents cut her off.

This of course directly contradicts Rachel’s side of things, which we heard a couple of weeks ago, before Napolitano caught the butt of a gun with his face and she disappeared into a black Bentley with a coke-snorting fat man.

Like the dames in our story, Irene can also pull a quick disappearing act when the heat is on. Faced suddenly with a pressing deadline that promised a payday worth even more than the LAOSP t-shirt, she handed off her pages-in-progress to yours truly for completion and adamantly insisted on sharing credit.

I wondered briefly if my experience with her had all been a dream. Then this note appeared in my inbox:

“See you next full moon outside some dreary Bunker Hill post-war apartment,” she wrote.

“I'll be the one leaning against a streetlight in a trench coat. Face shadowed, stilettos tall. A cop car will pass, flip on its siren. You'll turn back to greet me -- and I'll be gone.”