How do you take a car chase that we’ve seen a thousand times and make it pop?
Like Fred Astaire, dancing with a chair and a broomstick, you start with what you have -- in this case, the mayor’s Lexus, a car in pursuit with powerful headlamps, and La Brea Blvd. after dark
“I thought to myself, what could possibly make this scene more interesting,” said Elizabeth Cosin, a television writer and author of two Zen Moses detective novels, “and then I realized the only thing we need here is traffic. After all, it's the theme of the whole script.”
A long-time Angeleno now living in California’s wine country, Elizabeth no longer has to worry much about congested streets except when she visits Los Angeles, which she frequently does -- both in actuality and in her thoughts.
“I love writing about the city,” she said. “Even now in the midst of a sabbatical from L.A., it's still all I write about. Reading the pages about Napolitano driving down La Brea put me right in that neighborhood at night.”
So Elizabeth crafted a scene (pages 32-36) that is not so much about high-speed stunts as it is a meditation on power and the way people use it to get around obstacles in the city.
Elizabeth also knew she had to give the sequence of events some internal logic. “I couldn't figure out who was following Napolitano in the script, so I assumed it had to do with the guys from cult. Maybe the call that the prefect made was to the cops I wrote about. The question now is are they phony cops or are they just church members?”
Ah, questions, questions. Is anybody keeping track?
Here’s another one: What exactly did those cops want from the mayor?
”I think they would have searched his car for the map and maybe tried to sweat him for whatever information they could get. If the cult is involved in the murders -- and that’s a big "if" -- then they might also have figured out a way to get rid of the mayor too,” Cosin said.
Lucky for Napolitano, his creators have made him too smart for that. Celeste, however, may be another story.
If you want to take a shot at writing it, start with what you have -- a distorted voice on a car-phone, a terrified victim, a meeting spot under the pier. You’ve got until Sunday to figure out what comes next.
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