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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?