Fade In

Thank you for your interest in Peace & Riot.  I'm not sure how you
found out about our production, but I'm glad you can join me on this
fantastic journey.

It started over a decade ago after countless nights of frustration.

In 1999, I was living in a single apartment on Sunset and Gardner at
the border of Hollywood and West Hollywood.  I had just graduated
college and was working days in the mailroom at New Line Cinema and
nights as security at The Palace (now The Avalon and under new
ownership).  I took these jobs to survive while I pursued my dream of
becoming a screenwriter.

This small bachelor unit had a nice sized kitchen and a full bathroom,
but it was also adjacent to an outdoor picnic table that the my
neighbors liked to use at all hours of the night. These assholes would
sit outside my window until the early morning, smoking, drinking,
laughing, doing various drugs, and crying.  I would have complained to
the apartment manager, but she was one of the main culprits.

The noise got pretty bad. At one point I tried to insulate my windows,
but it was useless because the outside noise would pass through the
glass, through the insulation, and even earplugs.

Since I couldn't sleep, I stayed up all night writing.

One of the scripts I wrote during this time was called Peace & Quiet.
It was about an author, Darren (played by yours truly), who decided to
take a working vacation where the mountains meet the sea: Big Sur,
California.  Little did Darren know that the rental was a duplex and
the other unit would be occupied by a beautiful young cello player and
college student named Laura.

Darren was there to transcribe a piece of horribly written pulp
fiction by Armstrong Havelstein, while Laura was in Big Sur to sharpen
her cello playing skills, hoping to be accepted to a fine symphony
orchestra.

Laura was dating her college professor who wasn't able to join her in
Big Sur (and who was banging other chicks), and Darren was a single,
lonely writer.

Darren doesn't get much transcribing done as he is constantly
interrupted by the lady with whom he shares a common wall.  It is
further complicated when we discover Darren has the only working phone
in the duplex (not many of us had cell phones back in 1999) so Laura
would be bothering Darren to call her boyfriend.  The two would bicker
and fight but eventually work things out.

Peace & Quiet was one of my earlier screenplays and it showed. I
completed it and submitted it to New Line Cinema.

They ripped it to pieces.

In fact, everything I wrote was shredded by studio readers.  So like
all my other masterpieces, after I finished Peace & Quiet, I put it
away for a few years to collect dust on a three-and-a-half inch floppy
disk.

I would continue work during the day at New Line Cinema and write
screenplays at night.  I wasn’t getting promoted out of the mailroom,
so I continued to write and rewrite hoping that my passion would lead

to my big break. Five or six years pushing a cart and dragging
around boxes is discouraging, but being from Southern California, I
couldn’t just quit and go home… I was already home.

A few years later, I decided to rework Peace & Quiet. I added comedy
into the romance, granted I wasn’t trying to turn it into a
gross-out-comedy, but just make it more pleasant to read.

The first thing I did was toss Laura's cello.  What’s fun about a
cello?  They are clunky, seem like a pain in the ass to lug around and
their sound just doesn’t appeal to me.  But if I could put a guitar in
her hands, now that’s tits. I apologize to all cello players –
consider it an uniformed opinion.  As I don’t dig accordions either
but I have much respect for the king of the accordion;  Weird Al.

Laura was no longer Laura, but Crystal Green, a punk rock singer with
her middle finger aimed at life's nay-sayers.  And Crystal wasn't
dating the music professor; she was now dating the suave record
producer.

Darren needed to change, too.  He became Scott. Forget about Armstrong
Havelstein, Scott needed a crap job and a dream.  Scott was now a
veteran writing a novel about his service in the Iraq War.

The script went through dozens of changes.  Rather than having them in
a duplex, they were double booked in the same cabin. Living together
would speed things up and cause more interactions.  The cabin moved
from the beach to a lake, taking Crystal and Scott further into
isolation and creating a dependence on each other for companionship.

A few years and many drafts later I was trying to pitch the idea to an
assistant at New Line Cinema, Albert Acosta.  He seemed to dig the
idea of these two opposites sharing close quarters.  I told him about
my dream cast, some heavy hitters in the indie film world.  He took
one look at the title page and said, “It sounds more like Peace and
Riot.”  I agreed.

It's the first week of October and I still have a lot more to talk
about before we get shooting.


Join me.