Every story needs a protagonist with a goal -- and something preventing him from reaching it.

L.A. Mayor Russell Napolitano is the hero, or (who knows?) maybe anti-hero of “Right of Way.” He wants to build a subway down the Wilshire corridor to ease the constant traffic nightmare that threatens to bring our great city to a standstill. Possibly he has other motives too that haven’t yet been revealed.

But what’s standing in his way?

That was one of the questions floating around Jerry Lazar’s mind when he grabbed a taxi to LAX last Friday and discovered his ride was fueled by natural gas. Lazar, an L.A.-based writer/editor/webmaster and man-about-town, is a friend of L.A. Observed and had toyed with the idea of contributing to our Script Project but had no firm plans to do so -- until that fateful commute.

After chatting up the cabbie on their drive, Lazar came away with a burning desire to learn more about natural gas vehicles. “That night I Googled the hell out of NGVs and got a real education,” he says, “along with renewed inspiration for the central technological conflict in our movie."

He points out a delicious irony for future script contributors: “The underground methane that threatens subterranean explosions is the same substance that can power mass transportation…. It’s cheap, safe, clean, gets great mileage, and is in almost every way superior to the petroleum gasoline nearly everyone puts in their cars. So how come hardly anyone uses it?”

Despite spending the weekend doing business in San Francisco, Lazar was able to knock out what became pages 4-6 of our communal script like a man who was, well, driven. And in so doing, he created a great character, Sydney Pizer, a dapper, portly gent who might come to personify the obstacle to Russ Napolitano’s grand dream.

I’ll write more about Sydney’s potential in the next couple of days. I’ll also touch on a few of the other excellent submissions that came in last week.

But for now I’ll let Lazar have the last word about the challenge he faced as our project’s first freelance contributor:

“The hardest part was laying the groundwork for what I think should happen next, while realizing the whole time that someone’s gonna hijack my plot and spin it in another direction entirely. But, hey, that’s what Hollywood’s all about, right?”