Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin
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The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 1995, 1996, 2016 by Paul Kolsby and David L. Ulin
ISBN: 978-1-939419-88-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933957
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Designed & typeset by Jaya Nicely
Cover illustration by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
For Erik Himmelsbach, who believed.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
EAR TO THE GROUND
THURSDAY NIGHT
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
MEETING OF THE MINDS
A GOOD BOSS IS HARD TO FIND
SATURDAY NIGHT
SATURDAY NIGHT, PART TWO
PRIMARY DISTURBANCE FORCES
THE NUMBERS GAME
INDEPENDENCE DAY
THE WAY OF ZEN
SHAKING ALL OVER
RECOMMENDATION: PASS
HITTING THE FAN
SAN ANDREAS, D–55–8.9–DECEMBER 29, 1995
EYES OF THE WORLD
REASONABLE DOUBT
THEY ALL LAUGHED
BEDTIME STORIES
THURSDAY NIGHT, PART TWO
THE CHILDREN’S HOUR
AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
GREEN MEANS GO
THE LOGIC OF NUMBERS
PARALLEL LIVES
COLLABORATION THERAPY
A MODEL WORLD
CITY UNPLUGGED
POINT OF ORIGIN
DARKNESS VISIBLE
BUYER’S MARKET
SEIZE THE DAY
WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
AND THE EARTH STOOD STILL
THE NUMBERS GAME, PART TWO
PLAYING THE ODDS
END OF THE ROAD
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
APPENDIX
CHARLIE IN KOBE
There is a certain comfort in knowing that although the Los Angeles landscape is always in flux—1920s art deco beauties morphing into 1960s atomic stucco apartments morphing into boxy glass condo monstrosities—the low-grade threat of an earthquake leveling all our architectural mistakes is ever present. In Ear to the Ground, which originally appeared as a serial in the Los Angeles Reader in the 1990s, David L. Ulin and Paul Kolsby put that threat and worry to good use. Capitalizing on potential catastrophe is a winning game in Hollywood, and in the hilarious Ear to the Ground, Ian, a struggling screenwriter who is reminiscent of many a struggling screenwriter in many a coffee shop in the Los Angeles Basin, wins the golden ticket of a million-dollar writing deal in the midst of The Big One’s imminent arrival. The novel is a commiseration on the excess of the 1990s, when screenwriters like Joe Eszterhaus were scoring multi-million dollar deals and directors like Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich were making their stamp on Hollywood with bombastic disaster films like Armageddon and Independence Day.
The 1990s also offers some of our most enduring cinematic visions of Los Angeles and Hollywood. The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece of a screenwriter’s Hollywood hell, Barton Fink, carried on a long tradition of Hollywood send-up novels like Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. These tales of terror are still handed out to eager film school students on their first day and provide more of an education about the wherewithal necessary for a spot on the lot. Necessary too, upon arrival to a Paramount-adjacent studio apartment, is a viewing of the quintessential Hollywood send-up, Swimming with Sharks. Working an agency desk for a week could surely get the first glimmers of anyone’s vengeful reverie going, even now. But the believers still keep coming, enduring humiliation and despair for a chance to grab the brass ring of fame. Ear to the Ground carries on the tradition of these acerbic Hollywood satires as starry-eyed earthquake specialists are caught in the web of disaster movie-making with excitable D-girls, alongside cameos from bad boy European super directors.
Like William Faulkner, Joan Didion and Bruce Wagner before them, writers have long been wading into Los Angeles’s literary waters, myself included. One has to deeply love the strange, lonely pulse of the hidden neighborhoods and haunted canyons and be on the right vibration to “get” Los Angeles and write about it with credibility. It’s a vibration I struggled to tap into over my years in Los Angeles, but I feel lucky to have found it—in all its peculiarity and sunny doom. There’s a reason writers flock here and a reason I couldn’t stay away (five years in New York was all I could muster): Los Angeles is a city of perpetual hope and chance, a 24/7 Vegas casino with a bright sun and glittering blue sky, and a place where reinvention is still an ever-present dream.
There’s an exciting nostalgia that wafts through Ear to the Ground—nestled between the moment Jerry Garcia died and O.J. Simpson’s trial for murder began—and though Ed Debevic’s and Damiano’s are gone from our grid, it’s nice to revisit a time when million dollar movie ideas were still being written down on bar napkins.
— Karolina Waclawiak
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Ear to the Ground was originally published as a weekly serial novel in the Los Angeles Reader, beginning with Volume 17, Number 30, May 5, 1995 and ending with Volume 18, Number 17, February 2, 1996. An additional chapter not published in the Los Angeles Reader, “Charlie in Kobe,” appears here for the first time as an appendix. Minor inconsistencies in the narrative that occurred during the process of serialization have been left intact.
LOS ANGELES IS THE ONLY MAJOR CITY IN THE WORLD, thought Charlie Richter, heading east on Sunset in his red Rent-a-Corsica, where everybody has to drive. The May morning sun was a laser, confounding even the most creative extensions of his car’s visor, so he looked over at the bus to his right, moving along with him at eleven feet per minute. Its passengers seemed uniformly unhappy, and it occurred to him that Detroit had planned its L.A. marketing campaign carefully. Drive and you’ll be happier.