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.

She’d concocted an original, stop-and-go car chase on La Brea, a police shakedown of the mayor, and the abduction of the mayor’s close friend. There was a lot of guilt flying around, and some of it stuck to Elizabeth herself.

“While I was glad to give you something you could use,” she said, “I was feeling slightly bad about leaving future writers hanging -- that in coming up with the kidnapping of Celeste, I gave you a major headache.”

She knew that other writers would take up our story where she left it, and in fact, contributor Paul Smolarski did just that the following week, sending the mayor on a productive reconnaissance mission to Celeste’s house before launching him toward a late rendezvous in Santa Monica with her abductor.

But Elizabeth, a television writer and mystery novelist, still couldn’t get “Right of Way” out of her head.

“I'm writing something now that's putting my mystery skills to the test,” she said, “and whenever I put it down for a bit, I realized I was starting to think about our mayor and his predicament. I started ruminating about the midnight meeting under the pier and how it might play out.”

How it played out -- so far -- can be found in our newly posted pages, 42-46. The writer: Elizabeth herself, making her our project’s first repeat winner.

One tight spot she had to address was how Celeste’s kidnapper could escape the heat after the mayor tipped off two L.A. detectives in advance of their meeting.

“The boat was the first thing I thought of,” she said, “only because in all the years I lived 10 blocks from that pier, I hardly ever saw a motorboat near there. So I thought why not throw that in as the getaway?

“We'll probably catch some flack from people who know better about the surf, but that's the beauty of the movies -- anything can happen if you want it to. So there.”

Works for me. And now Elizabeth can finally get back to her novel without “Right of Way” intruding on her thoughts.

Unless, of course, that guilt starts to creep up again.

We can only hope.

You won’t find it in the script, because it wasn’t time to reveal it. But Paul knows why that map exists, even if our protagonist, Russell Napolitano, still doesn’t. And he’s given me the go-ahead to share that info here in the hope that, down the road when the time is right, one of you will work it into the story in just the right way.

First, let’s review: In the script’s opening pages, Mayor Napolitano, under cover of darkness, slipped into a tunnel beneath downtown L.A.’s deserted Toluca Substation to retrieve something hidden there. Later, it was revealed to be the above-mentioned, crudely drawn map.

Two questions have been dogging perceptive readers (and potential writers) ever since: Who left Napolitano the map? And what is the significance of a hand-drawn document that seems to reveal nothing more than what city engineers would already know?

Paul addressed the first question in his pages, posted Tuesday night. The map was left for the mayor by an anonymous caller who said she did work for the powerful cult, The Order. Presumably, that woman was Susan Harmon, who later turned up dead near the secretive group’s Hollywood headquarters.

But now that the cops question Napolitano over the reason for the map’s existence, he finally articulates what many of us have suspected all along: He has no idea.

Obviously, it has significance beyond the depiction of the methane pockets, and it's something important enough to have gotten Susan Harmon killed. Could there be some message written in code? Or maybe it has to do with the map’s paper, which another writer, David Benullo, has already revealed to be of the same stock as the stationery at The Order.

Paul, whose job involves securing rights of way for a telecommunications engineering firm, has another theory. Maybe it’s something hidden in plain sight -- the parcel numbers and easement information included on the site map (example here). These weren’t pointed out earlier because they’re so routine and because the writer who introduced the map was, well, clueless.

But what if Susan Harmon was an assistant to a real estate lawyer who’s been poring over parcel maps for months on The Order’s behalf and has discovered a problem with an easement granted by the city 200 years ago when L.A. was a little pueblo? What if, this defect in title put the ownership in question?

And what if now, with the value of those Wilshire parcels above the subway route about to explode, The Order doesn’t want that information coming to light? That might have led to Larry’s death and to Susan’s. (The third murder, that of the big thug in the Rannoch Moor sweatshirt, could be explained as somebody tying up loose ends.)

I’ll leave it to you to work out the details, or to come up with something better if you can. But for now, we’ve got a hostage situation to deal with, and the mayor is risking his career and maybe his life to handle things his way.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Screenwriting sometimes requires the same kind of research. So, for instance, if you need help on a script called “Right of Way” that deals with building a subway line through the heart of Los Angeles, you go to a guy who secures public rights of way for a living.

Better yet, if the guy is also a movie buff with an affinity for noir classics, you get him to write the scene himself.

Paul Smolarski, who contributed this week’s pages, is that guy.

“The Bureau of Engineering, Public Works, the mayor’s office, DWP -- I deal with these people on a daily basis,” said Paul, project manager for a company that designs and installs wireless sites around Los Angeles.

“You get to kind of understand the process of the city operating that people don’t ever see or care about. It’s a comfortable arena for me.”

So comfortable that Paul, a first-time writer, has actually deciphered the meaning of Mayor Napolitano’s secret methane map, the coveted, hand-drawn document that sparked Celeste’s kidnapping. He only hints at the map’s significance in these pages; you can’t give everything away at once, after all. But he has an excellent theory about the map’s value which I will share here tomorrow in the hope that another writer will build upon it.

Perhaps Paul’s greatest achievement was to seamlessly blend his scene’s wonky, public works details into a gripping sequence involving a daring physical stunt, a startling new lead, the fleshing out of several important characters (including Celeste’s daughter Rachel, who’s not even there), and a call to action by Mayor Napolitano.

For now, things are coalescing around the scheduled meeting under the Santa Monica Pier with Celeste’s abductor, a confrontation that Paul has cannily dumped into the lap of our next contributor.

But we do know that Napolitano has subverted LAPD policy with varying degrees of cooperation from Detectives Deland and Gallardo, who will be backing him up at a distance as he hurries toward that midnight rendezvous. Meanwhile, Napolitano’s chief aide Sam Higamatsu, has the AWOL mayor’s back with the press and the city.

Every week, with the help of writers like Paul, Napolitano digs himself in deeper. How long until he gets burned? There's no source material for that one. You'll have to come up with it yourselves.

a) take the meeting alone, as demanded, and play it by ear.
b) do a little sleuthing on his own before deciding how to proceed.
c) contact the LAPD, which will likely stake out the pier and observe from a distance.
d) using the vast powers of City Hall, prevail upon the LAPD and FBI to rain down some righteous fury on Celeste’s abductor, and damn the auxiliary damage!
e) go home and get some sleep. Celeste is probably in league with the bad guys anyway.

As usual, I don’t have the answer, which is why you’re the ones writing the screenplay, but I do have some ideas, some guidance and ultimately, the final say. (This is why producing jobs are so much easier than actual writing.)

First of all, whatever choice Napolitano makes cannot result in Celeste’s quick and heroic liberation, unless it leads to an even bigger immediate problem.

Of course, we’ve already upped the stakes so many times that it gets tough to keep pace. We could do it, sure, but we’d be treading out into action-flick territory and away from noir, with its heavier concentration on mood and character

Another option is to spend the rest of the movie, or at least the next 50 pages, dealing with Celeste’s kidnap. That’s a tried and true dramatic device and one that could fit into the noir convention. The challenge would be to do it in a way that allows us to eventually pay off our various other storylines (the subway, the super-car, The Order, the methane map, etc.).

Whatever we choose, it’s now time to use the elements we’ve already created to put Napolitano in an extreme moral bind and to spend some time examining its complexities.

Which brings us to choice e), above. It may not be the best answer, but it’s at least worth considering.

There is ample reason to believe Celeste knows more about Larry’s murder than she’s letting on. If Napolitano weren’t so sleep-deprived, he might suspect as much. In fact, maybe he does.

What he does next will begin to tell the tale.

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.

At this time of year, our Jewish friends gather over Seder tables here in Los Angeles and across the world to celebrate freedom and commemorate their time of slavery under the Pharaohs.

Tradition commands them to imagine once again a life of involuntary servitude. In that way, they are reminded that freedom is a precious gift to be fought for and cherished.

According to Jewish teaching, the heavy burden of slavery is borne not only by those suffering under repressive regimes and tyrannical leaders.

Some are enslaved by poverty here at home.

Some are powerless and enslaved by destructive personal habits.

And some who must travel miles to work each day in horrendous conditions, surely feel enslaved as they sit motionless in gridlocked traffic, burning away precious fuel resources, polluting our air, going nowhere.

Today, those of us who enjoy our freedom must work diligently to help those still enslaved. We must do what we can to make this a better world, whether it be speaking out against human rights abuses in Darfur and Tibet, or building a sensible subway line here in Los Angeles.

Together we can make it happen.

Best personal regards,

Russell J. Napolitano
Mayor

RJN:ee

Who’s the guy in Napolitano’s rear-view mirror? Was he sent by Prefect Patrick Duvane, who just grappled with Napolitano about L.A.’s future in The Order’s solarium? Does Celeste, who sounded stressed and needy on the mayor’s car-phone, have something to do with this? Or is it something else?

And why? As mayor, Napolitano would seem to have too high a profile to be threatened or harassed publicly. At first blush, this doesn’t make sense.

Let’s ease off the gas for a minute and think.

Napolitano probably wouldn’t risk evasive action on La Brea. He doesn’t want to be in a car chase that ends up on the news, and besides, it’s unseemly for the mayor (a former high-ranking police official, no less) to run from trouble. He’ll take his lumps if he has to, but he’ll want to control the environment as much as possible. He’s a pretty cool character, after all.

What he chooses to do largely depends on what he perceives all this to be about. He knows his situation better than we do right now, and it might involve factors you haven’t even dreamed of.

Unless you’re the one writing the scene.

Yep. I’ve taken writers to task here before for telling, not showing, but sometimes a little good dialog is exactly what’s needed. It was provided this week by Pasadena screenwriter Glenn Camhi, whose pages 28-31 I chose because he seemed to understand exactly what brought the mayor back to Hollywood in the dead of night and what this scene means to the film’s narrative structure.

“While it had been hinted at, I didn't see Napolitano actually wanting to learn much about The Order -- or joining it, even as a ruse,” Glenn says. “Which meant the challenge was figuring out what he came here for.

“I felt the scene had to set these two men up as adversaries for the rest of the story, even though neither of them would say most of what they're really thinking here. They're mainly sussing each other out. How much does Napolitano suspect? How involved was Duvane in any, or all, of the murders? What was Susan Harmon's significance to Larry and/or the map, or...? All of this is, of course, just beneath the surface of what they're discussing.”

Glenn may have had an advantage on a project like this. Not only has he taught a class on narrative structure, he’s also spent years performing and directing improv theatre -- a form of expression that, like ours, can take infinite wild tangents, depending on the instincts of each participant at the time.

But Glenn’s focus was on Napolitano’s relationship with Larry, and he felt it was time to examine that in the script. “Maybe he was simply a useful tool,” Glenn says, “but it seemed more interesting if Napolitano really cares about the man whose wife he's screwing. Hell, it's noir. Also, now he has a more personal motivation to carry him through Act Two.”

Since the reader can’t be completely sure how authentically Napolitano is portraying his private sentiments to Duvane, Glenn gives us a glimpse of the real deal after the scene is over. That’s when the mayor replays a message from his old friend in the car.

Was Napolitano feeling sentimental or looking for a clue? That’s for the rest of our ad hoc improv group to reveal down the road.

But for now, fasten your seatbelts. There’s a tail in the mirror, and Napolitano’s shifting into high gear.

Man does not live by dialog alone.

With this one simple, striking visual, he captures Duvane’s vision of the city’s future, and puts it in stark contrast to Mayor Napolitano’s.

Mike, who contributed the pages introducing the idea of The Order to our script a couple of weeks ago, also brings the mayor into Duvane’s office, where they meet over the mini-L.A.-under-glass. Napolitano has come to join Duvane’s cult as a way of working to bring them down from the inside.

If Duvane harbors any serious doubts about Napolitano’s motives, they’re clouded over by his immediate reaction: “I really think we can help you,” the prefect says. “First of all, let's get the matter of your contribution out of the way.”

That nice bit of dialog makes the whole setup plausible.

Finally, Mike’s submission shows us Napolitano on the phone, stuck in traffic, ordering an aide to move $200,000 from a political slush fund into a more accessible account, while defending his decision to join the murderous cult undercover.

“I'm taking the case, Henny... as mayor. I'm taking the case,” he says. “I am not going to let The Order get the drop on my city. Not on my watch.”

With this, the battle lines are clearly set for Act Two.

It was tough to pass on Mike’s submission, but at the last minute, I decided to go with something else. I’ll post the new pages tonight, and explain my decision here tomorrow.

What’s really going on behind the heavy wooden doors of his group’s multi-million-dollar Hollywood estate? Is Prefect Duvane behind a campaign to derail Mayor Russell Napolitano’s subway project through sabotage and murder? That’s what Napolitano shows up to find out.

Our most recent contributor, David Benullo has introduced us to Duvane, memorably characterized him in only a few words, and set him up as a worthy adversary to the mayor. But it still remains for us to reveal the true essence of Duvane's character and the depth of his conflict with Napolitano.

Our next deadline is tomorrow at midnight. I can’t wait to see how you proceed.

Incidentally, film buffs will recognize the hed on this item as a play on one of the great last lines in movie history. The original two-word closing was co-written by an industry giant (although he has credited his partner with actually coming up with the line), who worked masterfully across many genres, co-writing and directing at least three film noir classics that I’m aware of.

If you want to learn a little something about noir, this guy is a good place to start.

All that intrigue works great on TV. “Lost” has had four years to weave its complex storyline and won’t be tying up loose ends until 2010. We have no such luxury here, and I’ve been worried we’d never find our way out of the morass.

David Benullo must have sensed my concern. A busy, working screenwriter, Dave checked out our project and saw an opportunity to help straighten things out. The key for him was to combine some of the loose story threads, beginning with the one involving the mystery-shrouded, cult-like group, The Order, which may be tied to a rash of murders.

“I was trying to stitch the pieces all together, and The Order felt like it would have committed the murders to retrieve the map,” he said, referring to Mayor Napolitano’s crudely drawn guide to the Wilshire corridor’s subterranean methane pockets.

“Who knows what goes on behind the walls of a compound like that? Especially in the higher echelons of power.”

In our script's newest pages, 23-27, Dave has brought Napolitano inside The Order in a twist that sets up the screenplay’s long middle section.

Is Napolitano serious when he hints to his friend Hendricks that he’s thinking about “joining a new religion” in order to get at some of the cult’s deep, dark secrets? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s clear that his involvement with this powerful group will fuel our story’s second act.

David had other concerns when creating The Order’s prefect, Patrick Duvane. “The hardest part was not making the villain mastermind a cliché,” he said. He did this by introducing Duvane at his laptop where, like seemingly everyone else in town, he’s banging out a screenplay.

No word from Dave if Duvane’s monitor should display the latest pages of “Right of Way,” but I don't think so.

That would be too much like “Lost.”

We also get a glimpse of Sydney, angrily pounding the wheel of his super-car with a bloody hand, and we see the mayor’s Burbank home, where someone has filled his bathtub with peat. Out of the boggy mess rises a crudely made tombstone sporting a vaguely threatening epitaph written in free verse.

Guillaume’s writing is as lyrical as his name, but at times it appears better suited for a novel, which he’s also working on. The tombstone poem certainly made this entry pop from the pack, but how do you cram all those words onto a sign in the bathtub and make it visually interesting? And besides, I couldn’t buy Napolitano living in Burbank.

Frequent participant Dianna Brown from Kokomo, Indiana, also weighed in this week and almost had a winner, if only for the nifty way she had Mayor Napolitano snag some evidence from the crime scene by inverting his latex glove around it and tying it off.

Give actors cool stuff like that to do, and they’ll want to play the part.

In Dianna’s economical two pages, she hints the big thug in the Rannoch Moor sweatshirt was killed by members of The Order, identifies the female murder victim as Celeste’s cousin Vina McKay (love that name!), and then takes us to Vina’s funeral, where someone surveilling the proceedings disappears when the mayor catches sight of him.

A nice effort, and it could have been good enough, if I hadn’t gotten another submission that begins to make a little more sense of our story’s big picture.

Check back late tonight to see this week’s winning pages.

I learned many things from Crews in Gainesville, not least of which was that kitchen utensils are largely unnecessary when gobbling down steak and eggs to accompany your first drink in the morning. He also taught me a little about writing, including an axiom so simple as to appear obvious:

All character is revealed by bringing someone to a fork in the road and having him choose left or choose right.

So this week, with our main characters confronting personal crisis points in “Right of Way,” it was fun to see how our various participants made their characters move. Tomorrow, I’ll share a couple of examples here from the runner-up submissions.

Then on Wednesday, after posting the new script pages, I’ll talk about the winning entry, its author, and why I picked it.

Let’s hope I chose right.

We’ve got the Scottish mafia, a bio-fueled supercar, two possible femmes fatales, some high-stakes monopoly on Wilshire Blvd., a murkily made methane map, two murders for peat’s sake and a third one linked to a cult-like group that chills the mayor’s bones.

And we’re still in Act One.

If we can tie all this together by the time we’re through, this is gonna be one hell of a yarn, but the time to begin is now.

The next couple of contributors are going to have to launch us into the second act by bringing things to a head -- some major plot point that moves Napolitano to focus on a clear, new goal. (I dealt with this a little bit, here.)

So before you write the next few pages, think about what’s been going on in our story when we weren’t looking. What’s the deal with the peat, for instance? Is somebody trying to send a message, and why?

Then point us toward that big twist, either in this installment or the next one, that will set us on a bold new course of action.

And the rest of us will take it from there.