Lou Mathews is unequivocal in his devotion to Los Angeles and its environs. “I love it — and I don’t understand people who don’t,” says the welcoming, white-bearded Mathews, 78, throughout a current interview at his longtime Beachwood Canyon house carried out previous to the devastating fires that started Jan. 7. “I don’t think you can entirely understand it — and I’m going out on a limb here — unless you’ve been born here. That’s a hard stand to take but it’s just that it’s so diverse.”
Mathews loves Los Angeles. And that’s factor contemplating that not solely is he a fourth-generation Angeleno (his California household dates again to the Gold Rush days) however he has written extensively about L.A. as a journalist, a brief story scribe and a novelist.
The Glendale-born raconteur continues, “I describe it in another book as ‘the city of a thousand villages.’ It takes so long to learn the place.”
His newest work, “Hollywoodski,” which publishes on Jan. 21, is a novelized assortment of quick tales that takes a colourful, satirical and darkly affectionate take a look at L.A. via the eyes of fictional Hollywood screenwriter Dale Davis, a onetime success now hovering on the fringes of present enterprise.
In “Hollywoodski,” we comply with the never-say-die Davis round his favourite native haunts, together with Hollywood’s Musso & Frank Grill, Du-Pars within the Authentic Farmers Market and, particularly, an old-school bar known as Bowdler’s (a made-up knockoff of such Hollywood mainstays because the Frolic Room and the Energy Home), as he spins first-person yarns from the screenwriting trenches. He’s usually accompanied by his day-drinking friends Jaime and Oscar, two different inventively drawn La-La Land castoffs with their very own eccentric present biz travels and travails.
Readers will even find yourself in Orange County, rural Texas and Nicaragua as Mathews captivates with tales impressed by his observations and true-life experiences rubbing elbows with an eclectic array of Hollywoodland denizens.
Of the ebook’s 15 largely chronological tales (together with a number of written as if by Davis himself), most have been beforehand printed in literary journals equivalent to “The New England Review,” “Chicago Quarterly Review” and “Black Clock.”
“Hollywoodski,” by Lou Mathews.
However Mathews didn’t initially think about that his quirky Tinseltown tales would possibly someday add as much as a publishable ebook. “I work in a really, really byzantine fashion,” he explains. “The first story in that book was written probably 35 or 40 years ago,” Mathews says of “Individual Medley,” a wistful snapshot of a former aggressive swimmer.
“It’s one of the stories attributed to Dale Davis,” the writer continues. “One of the things I decided to do was have stories ‘written’ by Davis, which chart his sort of spiritual flow. Though he gets quite crazy by the end when you get to the Philip K. Dick story,” he says, referring to the surreal “Persecution Street & Hazard Avenue, the Corner Of…,” “Hollywoodski’s” penultimate story puckishly credited to visionary science-fiction writer Dick “as told to D. Dale Davis.”
“But I didn’t know at that point there was a book,” Mathews recollects as he serves a formidable home-cooked lunch of French onion soup and mustard-tarragon hen in honor of a current journey to Paris he took together with his spouse, Alison, a poet and retired lawyer.
Because the years went on, Mathews expanded his Davis-centric oeuvre into what he calls “the cinematic stories.” After he wrote “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others,” a serendipitous recount of how Davis discovered himself co-writing and directing an ill-fated remake of Sam Peckinpah’s unsung western “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” Mathews discovered that the tales began to suit an total narrative and “became a progression.”
“I then knew there was a book there and knew the stories that had to be written,” he says. “But assembling it just took a long, long time. It was probably a 10-year period. And then the last four or five stories, which form a kind of patchwork where you’re filling in the gaps, were written in the last year.”
Mathews additional explains, “I think about stories for a long time before I write them, but the writing process is fairly fast once I start. There’s very little editing; most of the time it’s cuts. I really like taking things down to the bone.
“I guess I’m something of a miniaturist,” he notes with fun.
Though Mathews by no means actually thought of utilizing these tales and characters as a foundation for a extra conventional Hollywood novel — his personal “The Day of the Locust” or “The Player” — he’s no stranger to the shape. His first novel, “L.A. Breakdown,” printed in 1999, was a straight narrative. It concerned the late-Sixties drag racing scene and vibrantly drew from Mathews’ pre-writer previous as a automotive mechanic, avenue racer, champion of the working class and Chicano ally. The ebook was chosen by The Occasions as the most effective of the yr.
His second printed novel, 2021’s “Shaky Town,” was, like “Hollywoodski,” a linked assemblage of quick tales, however set in East L.A. within the Eighties. A evaluate on the web site “Los Angeles Literature” in contrast it to Leonard Gardner’s 1970 novel “Fat City,” unsurprisingly, a favourite learn of Mathews. As well as, the ebook’s Pushcart Prize-winning story, “Crazy Life,” was tailored right into a 2005 quick movie by Texas writer-director Dora Peña.
Drawing on his love of films, usually these from the Seventies, Mathews peppers “Hollywoodski” with a trove of name-checks from the elegant (“The Last Picture Show,” “Chinatown,” “The Parallax View”) to the ridiculous (“The Thing With Two Heads,” “Frogs,” “The Black Gestapo”) as he chronicles the escapades of protagonist Davis, his Runyonesque cohorts and different Hollywood wild playing cards.
As an added kick for movie buffs, his characters usually cite selection film dialogue as a type of conversational shorthand. But when somebody will get a line incorrect, another person will fortunately appropriate them. The title story alone references dialogue from 1948’s “Joan of Arc,” 1961’s “The Hustler” and 1967’s “In the Heat of the Night,” with different random shout-outs to such photos as “Easy Rider,” the 1976 “King Kong” remake, “Kansas City Bomber” and “Two-Lane Blacktop.” To repeat: that’s multi functional chapter.
Provided that he writes about what he is aware of, has lived and has beloved, it’s no shock to study from Mathews that he, like Davis, was as soon as concerned in penning a doomed remake of “Alfredo Garcia.” It was Mathews’ first skilled foray into screenwriting — and his final.
“I loved taking apart that script and rewriting it,” he says, “but I had no patience for what came next. It took too long to get answers because of the money involved and I was spoiled by the godlike powers you have writing fiction and plays, where there’s far less money but far more freedom.”
Though he’s identified his share of notable movie and TV writers together with Alex Cox (“Repo Man”), Jim Gavin (AMC’s “Lodge 49”) and Howard A. Rodman (“Joe Gould’s Secret”), Mathews says that Davis shouldn’t be primarily based on anybody actual screenwriter however is extra of an amalgam. Nonetheless, he’s encountered the sort.
“I have a bunch of friends who had, like, a hit and have sort of lived on that,” he says. “But it’s such a strange business, too.” Mathews continues, “I look at friends who made the wrong choice, who turned down the low-budget independent gig to take the high-priced job and the low-budget gig turned out to be a ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ or ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and the high-paying gig turned out to be something that came and went. That happens a lot.”
As for the longer term, Mathews is trying ahead to creating the promotional rounds for “Hollywoodski” and persevering with to show fiction writing, as he has since 1989, for the UCLA Extension Writers Program.
He additionally has various quick tales nonetheless in him, together with one which, Mathews says, “has been kicking my ass for 30 years called ‘The Death of a Democrat.’ ” He provides wryly, “That’s particularly appropriate right now, don’t you think?”
Goldstein is an L.A.-based journalist, playwright, screenwriter and novelist.
Mathews will seem for a dialog and ebook signing at 6 p.m. Jan. 25, Chevalier’s Books, 133 N. Larchmont Ave., Los Angeles. eventbrite.com