Just when Rachel is starting to spill her version of events leading to Celeste’s abduction, two ninja-style gunmen jack up Mayor Russell Napolitano on Western and she flees into the backseat of a Bentley, where she snorts coke and makes out with Sydney Pizer, the larger-than-life Scotsman behind the murder of his own friend Larry, Rachel’s stepfather.
Wow. Where did that come from?
“I’m a big noir fan,” says this week’s winning “Right of Way” contributor, Mitch Paradise, “and I felt the script was at a point where we needed to tap into that dark, sexy potential that we all feel is in the marrow of L.A.”
Yeah, but Sydney? The jolly, rotund engineer behind the development of the futuristic, alternative-energy car? Makes sense to Mitch, a Brentwood-based writer for film and TV.
“Sydney is a self-indulgent voluptuary with sybaritic tastes,” he says. “He’s my Ernst Stavro Blofeld, giving free reign to all his corrupting passions. There’s something wonderfully menacing about someone who you can write off as comically ineffectual at first blush but is actually both lethally dangerous and sexually depraved.
“Hopefully it will prod some people down the road to get a bit edgier, which I felt was needed. We needed some explicit perversion here, at least that’s how I saw it.”
Sure, great. Can’t wait to see the Google ads on this one.
Before contributing pages 56-60 to our collaboration, Mitch naturally spent some time going over the existing script. “So far, it had done a nice job of melding the eccentric with the real and laid out a lot of good potential conflicts,” he said.
But he felt we were losing Sydney, who should emerge as the key player in our many intertwined subplots. “It made perfect sense that he was manipulating the entire family, and it went against type, but still with logic that it would be him in the car.”
Napolitano, though, would probably think different, which is why Mitch has him planning to visit The Order in our script’s next pages, where our next contributor will no doubt have him lock horns with the powerful quasi-cult’s Prefect Patrick Duvane.
But first the mayor has to make his way, car-less, to City Hall, where he has a chance to shake loose some cobwebs, take a shower and arrange an attack plan with his two shaky police allies and his top aide.
“We needed to get him back downtown to see him in his element,” Mitch said. “After all, it’s all about politics, ain’t it?”
