Mayor Napolitano takes a breather at City Hall

After being threatened, chased, kidnapped, battered and beaten, fictional L.A. mayor Russell Napolitano finally got back to his office in City Hall. Phew. The fast-moving action in "Right of Way" has been almost as harrowing for this week's writer, Dianna Johnson. She lives and works on spec scripts in Kokomo, Indiana and spent the week worrying about tornadoes. LA Observed Script Project producer Eric Estrin picks up her story.

When [Brown] first submitted an entry to this project a few months ago, she introduced herself by email, saying she’d only visited Los Angeles a couple of times, so her writing would focus mainly on character.

Her pages weren’t selected that time, or the next time she entered, or the next nine times after that. But this week, she finally nailed the tone of “Right of Way” with three pages (61-63) centering around our hero’s attempt to regroup personally and politically after yet another hellacious night.

It wasn’t easy.

“Mayor Russell Napolitano was like no other person, real or imaginary, that I have ever encountered,” Dianna said. “Each time I would think I had him figured out, he would do a flustering turnaround. I knew if I just hung in there he would turn my way eventually.”

The turning point came this week when Dianna, writing through severe thunderstorms that created havoc around Kokomo, chose to give Napolitano a breather from the breakneck pace he’s kept for the past 48 hours since learning of his friend Larry’s murder.

Back in his City Hall office at last, Napolitano deals with a flurry of official visitors but also grabs the chance to shower, shave, eat and sit for a cosmetician who tends to his banged up face.

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As hard as things have been for Napolitano, they weren’t much easier last week for Dianna. As 27 tornado cells bounced around her region, she wrote her entry in fits and starts, constantly scrambling to turn off her computer to avoid lightning strikes.

“I hurried through, because I was afraid we’d lose power and I would miss the deadline. The last thing I wanted to do,” she said, “was to lose Mayor Napolitano to cyberspace.”

Read the developing story from the beginning here, check out who the other writers have been here, and catch up on Eric's script notes here. Submissions as always are needed by Sunday night. The LAO Script Project t-shirt could be yours.