Who needs Jake Gittes, when the mayor turns out to be a former high-ranking LAPD official and still a bit of a detective himself? Along with a pal in the coroner’s office, and with or without the cooperation of two investigating police detectives, he is going to try to crack Larry’s murder while running this city and keeping his own backroom plans well hidden.

I’m still a little overwhelmed after a week of touring college campuses with my family, but something tells me our story is about to graduate to a whole new level.

Writers often hack away on a script for several drafts before a clear, underlying theme emerges. Underneath the beat-by-beat machinations of the plot... behind the characters’ goals and motivations... what is our screenplay really about? Beats the hell out of me.

Eleven-year-old Jonah Lazar felt our story was lacking a “hot tamale like Angelina Jolie,” whose animated presence in last year’s “Beowulf” he greatly admired. In this, his instincts were perfect.

KP Mackie reads screenplays as a hobby and once graded 75 entries for the HBO/Bravo series "Project Greenlight." Her runner-up submission for our project makes it obvious that all that critical thinking has paid off.

This week's pages were written by our youngest participant so far, a boy not yet in his teens. So agents, stand by your Blackberries. This kid’s got at least another full decade before he’s over the hill.

What would it mean to the mayor’s career to be found with Celeste in a compromising position? How would the cops want to handle that? Should we throw a P.I. into the mix as well? You can't show a movie without some kind of projector, and it all starts with the writing.

What we know: Larry has been buying up land near the proposed Wilshire Boulevard subway route. Larry’s wife has the hots for the mayor. What we don’t know: What was the precise business relationship between Larry and Sydney, and what got Larry killed?

Russ Napolitano's late-night tryst with movie star and widow-in-the-making Celeste Davis begins to define what's at stake in "Right of Way's" newest pages, which come from two writers on two continents.

Do the cops find Napolitano and Celeste hovering over Larry's dead body in the tunnel? Does Celeste disappear with the cash outside a 7-11? And if so, who's on the other end of that ringing cell phone? Decisions, decisions.

Sometimes it’s pretty easy to choose which pages work best for our script, sometimes it’s harder, and sometimes, like today, it’s impossible.

In Hollywood, almost every script presentation conforms to pretty rigid standards, but our project is different. Screw 'em.

The next pages of our script will be critical, as they focus our story and launch our protagonist on a clear path. Will that protagonist be the mayor? The guy who developed that weird car? A detective, as yet introduced? Or maybe Colonel Mustard in the tunnel with a peat brick. Someone with vision must step up and decide.

Evil weirdness in the Vermouth Theater bathroom... a topless lassie emoting over the bagpipes... Celeste’s bad case of waiter-lust... the Manila envelope resurfaces... It could only be Round 3 of our continuing tag-team triumph, “Right of Way.” And since Hunter Thompson’s not around to make sense of the madness, what happens next is up to you.

This week's runner up proves that a good writer doesn’t have to be from L.A., or even America, if she’s willing to do the slightest research and has an understanding of our story’s issues and elements.

If you want to contribute, there’s not much you can do before reading the new scenes, except maybe brush up on your Robert Burns or at least check out what Wikipedia has to say about the industrial uses and dangers of peat. No, I'm not kidding.

I don’t need to know whether Russell Napolitano is sleeping with Celeste right now. What I would like to see, in the next two or three weeks at the most, is what some screenwriting teachers call “the inciting incident,” something that brings this story into focus and sets it on a clear path.