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.”

When Kokomo, Indiana resident Dianna Brown first submitted an entry to this project a few months ago, she introduced herself by email, saying she’d only visited Los Angeles a couple of times, so her writing would focus mainly on character.

Her pages weren’t selected that time, or the next time she entered, or the next nine times after that. But this week, she finally nailed the tone of “Right of Way” with three pages (61-63) centering around our hero’s attempt to regroup personally and politically after yet another hellacious night.

It wasn’t easy.

“Mayor Russell Napolitano was like no other person, real or imaginary, that I have ever encountered,” Dianna said. “Each time I would think I had him figured out, he would do a flustering turnaround. I knew if I just hung in there he would turn my way eventually.”

The turning point came this week when Dianna, writing through severe thunderstorms that created havoc around Kokomo, chose to give Napolitano a breather from the breakneck pace he’s kept for the past 48 hours since learning of his friend Larry’s murder.

Back in his City Hall office at last, Napolitano deals with a flurry of official visitors but also grabs the chance to shower, shave, eat and sit for a cosmetician who tends to his banged up face.

Sure, carving out time for a makeup session will help the mayor avoid talking about being on the receiving end of two (count ’em) late-night assaults. But visually, the scene also spotlights the vanity and narcissism partially behind Napolitano’s quest to solve a rash of murders and free a kidnapped friend on his own.

Dianna kept our story on track by having Napolitano next grab 10 minutes of alone-time, during which he retrieves and studies a hidden copy of the stolen methane map. Here he starts to realize the map’s significance lies not in its marking of underground methane deposits, but in its title block, which names the parcel number and the city inspectors who surveyed that stretch of Wilshire back in 1926.

As hard as things have been for Napolitano, they weren’t much easier last week for Dianna. As 27 tornado cells bounced around her region, she wrote her entry in fits and starts, constantly scrambling to turn off her computer to avoid lightning strikes.

“I hurried through, because I was afraid we’d lose power and I would miss the deadline. The last thing I wanted to do,” she said, “was to lose Mayor Napolitano to cyberspace.”

The mayor survived due to tenacity and perseverance. Not his, this time, but Dianna’s, on her twelfth weekly submission.

“This has been the most fun, aggravating project I have ever done,” she said.

Just when Rachel is starting to spill her version of events leading to Celeste’s abduction, two ninja-style gunmen jack up Mayor Russell Napolitano on Western and she flees into the backseat of a Bentley, where she snorts coke and makes out with Sydney Pizer, the larger-than-life Scotsman behind the murder of his own friend Larry, Rachel’s stepfather.

Wow. Where did that come from?

“I’m a big noir fan,” says this week’s winning “Right of Way” contributor, Mitch Paradise, “and I felt the script was at a point where we needed to tap into that dark, sexy potential that we all feel is in the marrow of L.A.”

Yeah, but Sydney? The jolly, rotund engineer behind the development of the futuristic, alternative-energy car? Makes sense to Mitch, a Brentwood-based writer for film and TV.

“Sydney is a self-indulgent voluptuary with sybaritic tastes,” he says. “He’s my Ernst Stavro Blofeld, giving free reign to all his corrupting passions. There’s something wonderfully menacing about someone who you can write off as comically ineffectual at first blush but is actually both lethally dangerous and sexually depraved.

“Hopefully it will prod some people down the road to get a bit edgier, which I felt was needed. We needed some explicit perversion here, at least that’s how I saw it.”

Sure, great. Can’t wait to see the Google ads on this one.

Before contributing pages 56-60 to our collaboration, Mitch naturally spent some time going over the existing script. “So far, it had done a nice job of melding the eccentric with the real and laid out a lot of good potential conflicts,” he said.

But he felt we were losing Sydney, who should emerge as the key player in our many intertwined subplots. “It made perfect sense that he was manipulating the entire family, and it went against type, but still with logic that it would be him in the car.”

Napolitano, though, would probably think different, which is why Mitch has him planning to visit The Order in our script’s next pages, where our next contributor will no doubt have him lock horns with the powerful quasi-cult’s Prefect Patrick Duvane.

But first the mayor has to make his way, car-less, to City Hall, where he has a chance to shake loose some cobwebs, take a shower and arrange an attack plan with his two shaky police allies and his top aide.

“We needed to get him back downtown to see him in his element,” Mitch said. “After all, it’s all about politics, ain’t it?”

Why is it that in some movies, a protagonist’s little misstep can propel his emotional arc quickly downward, but in another story, a guy can have his good friend murdered, his girlfriend kidnapped, and he himself can be conked on the head and left in a heap under a canal, and it seems like he’s hardly even suffered?

It all depends on tone, of course -- how a character is drawn, and how his experiences are meant to be felt by an audience.

In “Right of Way,” it hasn’t exactly been a cakewalk so far for our charismatic Mayor Russell Napolitano, who has endured all the indignities mentioned above. But in a way, Napolitano has been skating, and I’m afraid he’s going to have to find that out in the next few installments.

Because as bad as his recent experiences might sound, they haven’t really felt that oppressive -- for him or for us.

I have my theories about this, and they stem from Napolitano’s character: As a winning politician, he must be able to endure setbacks while maintaining a positive outlook. And this he has done in spades.

What Napolitano has not yet had to face, though he keeps edging closer, is the deep, abiding shame that must eventually come with his gross malfeasance in office. He’s been able to avoid it so far by working literally around the clock to try and correct his mistakes, while keeping them largely out of view from the press and the public.

As a public person, this is what Napolitano wants to avoid the most. Sure, we can surmise that he’s been hurt by his losses so far. We even caught a glimpse of emotion from him when he listened in solitude to his murdered friend Larry on voicemail.

But the visceral pain that he has yet to suffer will come when the extent of his involvement in this series of fiascos is exposed, and he is forced to step down as mayor or fight to remain on the job and to avoid prosecution. That’s when he’ll feel it the most.

And when he feels it, we the audience feel it.

We need Napolitano to suffer for his flaws, because that is what happens in this kind of story. And then we need to see him triumph over his circumstances, seize whatever it is he’s going after, while losing something and learning in the process.

That’s just the way it’s going to have to be.

Celeste’s kidnapper, Omar, takes Napolitano to a tunnel under the Venice canals to show him Celeste is okay, but she’s not there!

This week’s winner, Arthur Tiersky, who picks up “Right of Way” from that point in his pages 51-55, says he followed a deductive reasoning process to help him whittle down the story’s many possible directions and focus on its most logical dramatic path.

“Things were either what they seemed to be (a guy named Omar, who knows Rachel, kidnapped Celeste for money) or things were not what they seemed to be (which the formidable novelist and screenwriter Jim Thompson once said was a condensed version of EVERY story, so already I’m more drawn to this).”

Artie, a Glendale-based writer currently working for the Disney Channel, took Thompson’s edict to heart, devising a back-story in his mind that cast Celeste as a mastermind of her own abduction.

Why? Well, he’s not saying, but he promises it all makes sense if you buy the premise: “Celeste wants to stage a kidnapping. Rachel knows this dude Omar who would be willing to ‘play’ the kidnapper... Calls are made, the plan is arranged, Napolitano falls for it, and it all goes right...

“Until something went wrong. Someone ACTUALLY wanted to kidnap Celeste, and the fake kidnapping made the real kidnapping that much easier to pull off. So this act of foolishness, whatever bizarre reasons were behind it, has serious consequences.

“This I like,” Arthur said. “Moreover, hapless innocent Omar is killed, and in such a way that ties this whole seemingly red herring back to our other plotlines. This I like too.”

Now the question is how can Napolitano, who has himself been abducted, knocked unconscious and left shoeless, get himself and our story back on track? The answer, in Arthur’s mind, was to track down Rachel by impersonating Omar on the phone.

“That Russ is able to accurately imitate Omar is not just a gimmick (though it was that), but it reflects Russ’s character, helps explain how he has had such success as a cop and politician. He listens and observes and is able to get in the mind of those around him. That’s what we want from our protagonist,” Arthur said.

Napolitano's quest to save his friend Celeste and, at this point, to avoid possible prosecution for royally screwing up a police investigation, next proceeds to a Korean Karaoke club and a pre-dawn heart-to-heart with the sllnky femme fatale who seems to know more than she's saying about her mother's disappearance.

“This plot is going to get only more convoluted, and it’s going to take a guy like this to stay one step ahead of it.”

Of course, Arthur’s thesis could be all wrong. Maybe Celeste didn’t engineer her own kidnapping. Maybe it was done by someone else entirely.

Artie would be the first to admit it: Things aren’t always what they seem.

One minute, Russell Napolitano is sitting pretty as L.A.’s charismatic mayor, a man on the verge of remaking a great world city.

Not a few days later he’s stumbling at gunpoint through darkened Venice streets -- no shoes, no cell phone, his good friend murdered, his perhaps-lover abducted, his political career in shambles, his very life at risk.

How did Napolitano sink so far so fast? And how can we take such a preposterously sudden turnaround and make it not only believable but compelling?

With that challenge in mind, I exercised my producer’s prerogative this week and wrote the latest installment of our collaborative script “Right of Way” myself. We had other submissions, but our story is at a critical juncture as it approaches its midpoint, and I had a definite idea about what I thought it needed.

First of all, I wanted Celeste’s predicament to grow murkier than ever. The mayor’s good friend and possible lover had been kidnapped several pages earlier, and Napolitano had made the dubious decision to try to get her back through unofficial channels.

If he succeeded, the story’s momentum would come grinding to a halt. Where could we go next that wouldn’t make her abduction and rescue seem gratuitous?

If he alerted the authorities, we’d have the basis for a conventional hostage rescue drama, with our protagonist, the mayor, getting pushed aside as the pros take over the job and drive the story.

No, what works best is for Napolitano to jump in and botch things so severely that he’ll have to spend the rest of the script trying to extract himself from the cavernous hole he’s dug.

And in pages 47-50, that’s just what he does, dealing with a kidnapper who, like the mayor himself, is by turns sharp as a tack and hopelessly inept.

We can believe Napolitano’s wild swing because we’ve already seen him as a man whose ego sometimes makes demands that his brain can’t pay off. He’s enraged by the frontal attack on his inner circle of friends, and his judgment is clouded by some serious sleep deprivation. The possibility that he stands to profit from kickbacks tied to his transit project might also be fueling his desperation.

As for Omar the kidnapper, he seems to have things well in hand until his hostage, Celeste, disappears. We should have fun exploring how and why that happened for the remainder of our screenplay’s second act.

Having gotten us to this point, I’m glad to say I have no idea what happens next. If you do, let me hear about it by Sunday night.

And don’t try to solve everything at once. We still have a long way to go.

Plotting and snappy dialog are important, and “Right of Way” has them in spades. But if you think about the stories you love and why you love them, chances are you’ll be thinking about character. That’s what connects us to movies the most.

The action, the effects, the photography, the music, costumes and art direction -- they’re all there to enhance the relationships we have with the movie’s stars.

Do we have a great central character in “Right of Way”?

In Mayor Russell Napolitano, I believe we have the beginning of one. We care about Napolitano, I hope, for a few reasons: For one -- and you can’t underestimate the importance of this -- he’s a cool guy. He’s charismatic and powerful, and yet he doesn’t take himself too seriously. That’s what readers (and ideally viewers) will latch onto right off the bat. He’s likable in a superficial way.

As we get to know him, though, we realize he’s passionate about something: He wants to expand L.A.’s subway system, and he seems to want to do it for the right reasons. So we can emotionally connect with that too.

But is that all there is to Russ Napolitano?

Thankfully, no. Contributor Glenn Camhi made certain in his pages (28-31) that we see Napolitano as a good friend to Larry Davis, Celeste’s murdered husband. His personal affection for Larry is what drives him to risk his life and political career to get to the bottom of Larry’s murder.

That’s the heart of our story, and it’s something I think we need to see more of: Napolitano as a guy who feels the loss of his friend and wants to set things right.

So if he cared so much about Larry, then why did he sleep with Celeste?

I might write more about that later, but for now, here are two possible explanations to chew on:

1) Maybe he didn’t. Yeah, he spent the night at her house, and yeah, there’s obviously some romantic tension between them, but we never saw them in bed together, so we really don’t know.

2) Or maybe he did. Maybe he screwed up big time and has to spend the rest of the movie trying to live it down. Flawed characters make mistakes, and screwing his good friend’s wife on the night of the friend’s murder would certainly qualify as a whopper.

It’s the kind of thing that could dimensionalize a larger-than-life noir hero and fuel a quest for redemption that lasts a whole movie.