Two Screenplays (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798899760778)

In Remember Pearl Harbor, Jasper Starkey, a Hollywood screenwriter-cynical, opportunistic, and not without charm-arrives at a Pasadena mansion to research a novel and finds himself entangled with its owner, Patricia Beveins, a young war widow. When her aunt is murdered, suspicion falls on the conveniently absent butler. Jasper isn't convinced. As his romance with Patricia deepens, so does his unease, and what begins as Hollywood film noir-murders, misdirection, a mansion with secrets-takes on something lighter and more unsettling, where the real mystery may be the people themselves. This is Eve Babitz's Hollywood-the one she grew up in, the parties and the shadows behind them, the glamour that was always a little too knowing to take entirely seriously.

In The Flute, an American director in Paris refuses to accept the end of his marriage, trailing his estranged French wife through the city as his life quietly unravels. His obsession leads to awkward surveillance, floppy manipulations, and public scenes-while the world goes on without him. An attempt to repair his life with flute lessons offers the possibility of change, if he can let go of the story he's telling himself. A comic homage to the French New Wave from two writers who grew up on Truffaut and Godard, the film favors mood over resolution, behavior over explanation-and treats Paris the way Babitz always treated Los Angeles: as a character with its own desires.

The screenplays come out of a particular creative friendship-romantic, dissipated, and faintly dangerous-between Eve Babitz, author of Slow Days, Fast Company, and Michael Elias, screenwriter of The Jerk and author of Benders L.A. One screenplay is soaked in Los Angeles noir. The other dreams in French. Both are written by people who loved movies before they made them.