Film Friday: The Soloist

The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music (2008)

Written by Steve Lopez

Narrated by William Hughes

Run Time: 6 hours 45 minutes

Publisher: Blackstone Audio/Putnam

Downtown Los Angeles is a strange mix. First Street is home to City Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, government buildings and the Los Angeles Times. Fifth Street has the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast, Pershing Square and the LA Central Library. On these streets, it's not uncommon to see men and women in business attire rushing to and from meetings with their lattes and suitcases in tow. But further down Fifth, in the eastern reaches of downtown, lies an infamous place called Skid Row.

Despite using the term 'Row', Skid Row has no defined boundaries. Many of the homeless that call the area home suffer mental illness, addictions, and other hardships. In my travels through downtown over the years, I've seen homeless sleep on benches in and out of the Skid Row area and a college class tour down Fifth Street walked right through a drug deal. Many of my classmates and I were stunned at what we saw, some acted indifferent, while the teacher was either purposefully ignorant so as to not have to mention it or completely unaware. While nonprofit groups like Union Rescue Mission and the Downtown Women's Center help, there are anywhere between 2,000 and 11,000 homeless residents on Skid Row today, according to a recent Daily Beast profile.

Steve Lopez's book The Soloist is a wonderful story about compassion. Lopez, a Pulitzer finalist and longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, met Nathaniel Ayers in Pershing Square. Ayers, who dropped out of Julliard after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, speaks in a stream-of-consciousness style. Lopez befriends him and writes a series of columns on Ayers. The columns eventually attract the attention of then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Lopez writes in a straightforward style and I immediately cared for him and Ayers to succeed and get the latter's life back on track. He thoroughly explains how groups like LAMP assist the mentally ill of Skid Row and the bond between the two men that develops seeps through the pages. For a subject that can be dour, Lopez keeps it honest but never overbearing. As a journalist who has covered mental health issues myself, Lopez's accounts of the mental health system were similar to ones I've seen. In terms of the audiobook itself, the narration by William Hughes is pitch-perfect.

Rating: 4/5 stars. The book is a stellar example of journalistic nonfiction and a testament to compassionate care toward our fellow human beings.

The real-life Ayers (far left) and Lopez (second from left) and their big-screen counterparts in Foxx (second from right) and Downey (far right).

The Soloist (2009)
Directed by Joe Wright
Screenplay written by Susannah Grant
Rated PG-13 for thematic elements
Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes
Distributor: DreamWorks

Initially scheduled for release in 2008, the film version of The Soloist was tabbed as a potential Oscar contender. Robert Downey Jr. was coming off the original Iron Man and Tropic Thunder while Jamie Foxx had won a Best Actor Oscar four years earlier for Ray. However, a schedule shift to April 2009 effectively took it out of consideration.

While I enjoyed the book more than the movie, the film does have some bright spots. Some of my favorite moments were brief sequences where Lopez, played by Downey, is just observing people on Skid Row. The camera just focuses on various people waiting on both sides of the LAMP compound's walls, as if to say they're just waiting for something or someone to help them right their ship. The movie also presents the fears associated with the shrinking of newspapers well.

In the book, Lopez is married, but in the movie, he is divorced from his ex-wife who is also his editor. As part of that change, there's a very awkward dinner scene that felt out of place. I'm not sure why these particular adjustments were made, but they made me think of the book and the true story and not what was happening onscreen.

The performances by Downey and Foxx were commendable and the movie still hits on the book's key points. But, as is mostly the case when a book makes the jump to celluloid, the movie paled in comparison. Grade: 3/5 stars

After the movie was released, Ayers performed at several conventions including one for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI (see video below). Lopez continues to write for the LA Times. In the wake of a shooting involving a police officer in Skid Row last month, Lopez followed up on his experiences with an updated column. As a result of the shooting, CNN also did a profile on Skid Row.

Audiobook Review: Water to the Angels

Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct and the Rise of Los Angeles (2015)
Written by Les Standiford
Narrated by Robert Fass
Publisher: HarperAudio/Ecco
Run Time: 9 hours 11 minutes

Seldom does one get to read books that directly involve their town, but in the case of Les Standiford's Water to the Angels, my hometown of Santa Clarita plays a strong supporting role. Some cities have canals, rivers or lakes as water sources. Our primary source is a lake, but the Los Angeles Aqueduct traverses our hills and valleys as it snakes its way to the big city to our south.

The high school I went to sits next to the aqueduct, or as students called it, "The Pipe." When I was on the JV and freshman volleyball teams, we used to run on a dirt trail next to it. The aqueduct looms over one of Santa Clarita's biggest parks, where families walk their pets and play baseball, soccer and ultimate frisbee on the weekends. At times, it sits at ground level and in other places, is mounted onto concrete stilts as it climbs and descends hills.

Standiford's book begins with one of my town's most notorious disasters, the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928. The dam acted as a reservoir for the aqueduct. When it broke, thousands of gallons of water rushed through the Santa Clarita Valley, into the Santa Clara River (which is normally dry) and barreled through the farmlands of Fillmore and Santa Paula before it flowed into the Pacific Ocean at Ventura. The site of the dam is about a 20 minute drive from my house and if you know what to look for, remnants are still visible from the canyon road that passes by the area. Standiford does provide some details and historical perspective about the incident, particularly from the dam supervisor who seemed concerned about the St. Francis when few others were.

Standiford's book primarily focuses on the engineering of the aqueduct and while the planning and building of it is certainly worth writing about, I didn't expect the bulk of the book to be devoted to it. William Mulholland, who would later have the famous curvy mountain highway named after him, is a central figure in the book and rightly so. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, of which Mulholland was the longtime head of in the city's early days, has been highly influential in Los Angeles' development for years and it traces back to the aqueduct and its designer. The portions of the book with Mulholland in them were the strongest parts.

Another strong focus is the battle between Owens Valley residents and Los Angeles. The aqueduct designers put the intake channel so far up the Owens River, it devastated farmers below. As a result, the aqueduct is still a point of contention today.

Since "The Rise of Los Angeles" is part of the subtitle, I was hoping there would be a history as to how the aqueduct helped spur the population boom the city had in the mid-20th century. The San Fernando Valley, home to the reservoir that serves as the endpoint of the aqueduct, went from being farmland to vast cityscape. Communities as far away as Huntington Beach and Pasadena started to flourish in the 1920s and drew residents via the Red Car Trolleys. Were those developments helped by the aqueduct? Also, when we say Los Angeles, do we mean the city or the metro area, the latter of which gives new meaning to the word sprawl?

As a bonus, the end of the book focuses on the 1974 film Chinatown, which is partially based on the early days of the LADWP and the water rights war between Los Angeles and the Owens Valley.

Rating: 3/5 stars. It's a good starting point of early Los Angeles history and its thirst for a sustaining water source. However, I still had questions as to how the aqueduct helped trigger LA's boom and the emphasis on the construction was a surprise, given the human drama of the water wars and the dam disaster. It should also be noted that based on some other reviews, some readers looked to the book for any commentary on our state's current drought situation, but this isn't the book for that.

Audiobook Review: Ghettoside

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (2015)
Written by Jill Leovy
Narrated by Rebecca Lowman
Publisher: Random House Audio/Spiegel & Grau
Run Time: 13 hours 28 minutes

This past weekend, thousands descended onto the University of Southern California campus for the 20th Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. This was my first time attending and it was a blast! Had fun perusing the many booths, scored a good-size book haul and I'm already anticipating next year's event and the panels that go with it. If this year was a toe dip into the proverbial water, next year is the full-on plunge.

A book that was prominently featured in sellers' booths was Ghettoside, written by the Times' own Jill Leovy. The USC campus is south of downtown, but it is a vastly different world than the one Leovy describes a few miles away as part of the 77th Street Division of the LAPD. The division covers 12 square miles of South Los Angeles and neighboring Watts. Many of the homicides are gang-related and black-on-black.

The book follows the murder of Bryant Tennelle, the son of a police detective, and John Skaggs, the man assigned to find the responsible killer. Skaggs is an immediately respectable, if not likable, detective with a low BS-tolerance who genuinely cares about finding justice. His care disarms skeptical residents wary of the LAPD for its past sins, a remarkable feat considering he is white and most of the residents are black.

The entire case, from a gripping interrogation by Skaggs to the courthouse conclusion, is gut-wrenching in its unflinching look at the reality of life in South LA. The sheer number of murders and why they happen caused my jaw to drop.

In an interview with the New York Times Book Review, Leovy referred to residents here feeling "walled in" and sadly, she is right. Commuters from more affluent parts of town like the South Bay will drive by on their way to work downtown via the 110 Freeway, but most wouldn't dare to drive through the actual neighborhoods, even to fill up their gas tank. Leovy also makes the point that many officers of the LAPD do not live in the city itself, but in outlying suburbs like Santa Clarita (my hometown), Orange County and Simi Valley. Tennelle's father lived in the area he policed, so he had a high investment in the safety of his community, making him admirable and sympathetic even before the tragic loss of his son.

Rebecca Lowman delivers solid narration for the audiobook, refraining from dramatic voicing or unnecessary frills when the book so starkly lays out the crime epidemic. A minor gripe I had with the book is that Leovy addresses some solutions to the problem of black-on-black violence at the book's conclusion, but they felt rushed. I wouldn't have minded seeing more details on those ideas and how they would have helped the people of South LA.

Grade: 4/5 stars. In a year of outstanding nonfiction so far, Leovy's journalistic narrative stands out as a testament to the current state of crime in America. As a newspaper reporter myself, there are stories I've covered that were horrific, but needed to be told. Likewise, Leovy has done that with Ghettoside.

Below is a portion of an interview between LA-based PBS host Tavis Smiley and Leovy about the book...