Early on in Bret Easton Ellis’ “Imperial Bedrooms” (his long-awaited sequel to his debut “Less Than Zero”) this old Hollywood joke is shared between characters. Not because it’s funny, but because it offers a hint to the novel’s central theme: the Screenwriter’s Sexual Revenge. A theme that could have been used in so many effective ways to further the narrative Ellis set in place 25 years ago… but ultimately falls flat.

When I was maybe 16 or 17 I randomly picked a copy of “Less Than Zero” off the Barnes & Noble shelf in my hometown. The bright yellow spine beckoned me like a moth to flame, and the title was so very cool. The red and blue colored sunglasses on the cover didn’t promise much, but a quick glance at the back reeled me in. It was about sex, drugs and rock n’ roll set in Los Angeles. That’s all I needed to know, because I was already entertaining notions of moving out to Hollywood after graduation.

Little did I know that the novel I was about to read was already a cult sensation, having spawned a popular movie by the same name starring Robert Downey Jr. It centered on an apathetic, bisexual college student named Clay returning home to decadent L.A. for the Christmas holiday, and followed his downward spiral around the dirty drain of hedonism before leaving it all behind once again. With its blunt style, and casual approach to shocking content, it cemented Bret Easton Ellis as a literary force to be reckoned with. Hedonist. Misogynist. Nihilist. Love him or hate him, it was the spring-board for a prolific career that has produced controversial works such as “American Psycho”, “The Rules of Attraction” and “The Informers” (all adapted into half-baked, but mildly entertaining cinematic versions).

With each subsequent novel, I became more and more immersed in his bleak, twisted universe – a dark dimension disguised as a sexy party where “hope” and “love” are considered vulgar apparitions. His protagonists are superficial, addicted, oversexed and indifferent to any emotions including their own. College students, Wall Street serial-killers, fashion-model terrorists, socialite vampires and mid-life crisis movie producers – all damned by their own infinite appetites for lust and greed. Scathing, gross and sometimes hilarious, his body of work comprised a colorful Rubik’s Cube of doom, which could never be properly aligned no matter how much you read between the lines.

And at just about the time I thought I had him figured out, when it seemed his bag of tricks would finally become deflated and dusty, he tossed 2005’s “Lunar Park” our way, and completely turned his own world up-side-down – and my head effectively inside-out. This brilliant novel was about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis who is haunted by a book he wrote called “American Psycho”, who becomes a family man in the suburbs in some half-assed attempt to reconcile his relentless demons. Self-deprecating to the point of satire, the novel then miraculously shifted gears from horror story to a bittersweet redemption plot. When I closed that book, I was flooded with conflicting emotions, but none of them were negative. The impossible had happened: I was genuinely moved by the coldest writer in modern American fiction. It seemed as if Ellis had finally turned a corner of some sort. In short, he had elevated his own game.

courtesy of Showtime

So Showtime has a little series called “Californication” about a compulsively hedonistic writer who also happens to be a devout family man. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Tom Kapinos created the splendid walking contradiction that is Hank Moody, who is played with mellow charm by David Duchovny in a performance that makes us forget he once chased aliens for a living. Struggling to reignite his earlier success, Hank is constantly torn between settling down with his girlfriend and daughter, or letting his raging id steer him into one sexual collision after another. Currently en route to its fourth season, the series has become one of the hottest on cable and has recently spawned a literary spin-off in the form of Hank’s infamous novel, “God Hates Us All”. That’s right. You can now purchase and read the book that put Hank on the map, with his very name on the cover and a brief bio on the back. And it’s not only a bona fide work of fiction, but a damn good one at that.

Jonathan Grotenstein taken by Marco Mannone

Fans of the raunchy-yet-bittersweet comedic series will be able to decipher some semi-autobiographical back-story on Hank’s youth in New York, but the novel defiantly stands alone as its own narrative, independent of the show. This is thanks exclusively to the novel’s real writer, Jonathan Grotenstein, whom I had the pleasure of sitting down with at a coffee shop in Eagle Rock to discuss the nuts and bolts of his creative process. Jonathan’s story centers around a young, nameless narrator living in New York City in the late 80’s. He is a blue-collar kid with a psychotic ex-girlfriend, an adulterous father, a flirtatious best friend and no real direction in life. Recklessly quitting the food-service industry, he finds himself running pot all over the city for a powerful dealer called The Pontiff. This new vocation affords our narrator the ability to move into the famous Chelsea hotel, and to begin consorting with a colorful cast of characters that shade-in the term “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll”. But his newfound life in the fast-lane comes with its heavy share of heartache and stark, personal revelations.  From one writer to another, our conversation went something like this…

MARCO MANNONE: How did you get the job to write Hank Moody’s infamous novel?

JONATHAN GROTENSTEIN: I got the job because of the relationship I have with the editor on the book. The first book I ever wrote was “Poker: The Real Deal” with Phil Gordon, and the assistant editor was a woman by the name of Cara Bedick. Cara became an editor in her own right, and she was given “God Hates Us All” as sort of her first book that she was going to shepherd through the process. She needed to find someone who could work quickly and cheaply.

MM: How long did you have to write it?

JG: It’s for a division of Simon & Shuster called Simon Spotlight, that generally has really, really tight deadlines. Probably not more than four months (for a nearly 200-page work of fiction).

MM: Were you a fan of the series before you ever got this job?

JG: Yeah, I watched all of the first season, and when I started writing it, the second season was just about to get underway. I liked the show. I have to confess I didn’t love Season One, but as I was writing the book and watching Season Two, which I thought was much stronger, I very much fell in love with the show. Also getting to meet Tom Kapinos, who created the show, and sort of hearing his voice and realizing what he was trying to do with it, helped develop an appreciation for it. But yes, I had seen all of the episodes (at the time) before I was ever approached to write it.

MM: What aspects of the show did you connect with — as a male, as a writer, also living in Los Angeles… any specific aspects you could identify with?

JG: Yeah. I mean, I like to think that one of the reasons Cara thought of me was… Hank and I are similar in certain ways and very different in other ways. I’m not in any way the ladies man that Hank is, or as brilliant as Hank is supposed to be, but I definitely have my angry moments, my darker moments. I didn’t have an old, beat-up Porshe that I was driving around, but I did have an old, beat-up Mercedes convertible that I was driving around. I’m a guy from New York who’s been out in L.A. for a while, and sort of has the same kind of love-hate relationship with the city that he seems to have. I’m also a recovering entertainment industry person. I found that industry to be a lot more bullshit than I could tolerate. I think that helped me relate to where Hank was coming from, as well.

MM: In the series the book’s story is never revealed. How much freedom were you allowed to create it from scratch?

courtesy of Showtime

JG: A lot. An insane amount of freedom. I’m not even sure how much a huge fan of the book Tom Kapinos is. First of all, it’s very hard for him because Hank is his baby, and has a very specific voice, and he thought of the book in a very specific way.  And having someone else write that, I think… He wasn’t going to write it, not in three months or four months. But he had a very definite idea of how he wanted it to be, and the sort of tone it should have. We met once and talked about it on the phone a couple of times and exchanged a bunch of e-mails. Ultimately, I latched onto the idea that Hank was a writer in the 1980’s, the late 80’s in New York City. The book that Tom and I sort of hit on was (Jay McInerney’s) “Bright Lights, Big City”, and he thought that was a book that Hank might have written. There’s another book called “The Fuck-Up” (by Arthur Nersesian) so I went back and read “Bright Lights, Big City” and “The Fuck-Up” and I thought, alright, if Tom thought that Hank would have written those kinds of books, then I’m gonna sort of go in that vein. But you know, I’m not the writer that Tom is, especially when it comes to Hank’s voice, so I was forced to go with things that I knew. And a lot of the book are things that are semi-autobiographical to my life, or people that I’ve met or encountered and I had as much leeway as I wanted. Especially with the first draft. With the second draft after Tom had a chance to read it, we sort of figured out some ways to help what I had written converge with the idea he had for the book all along.

The Doors are like a religion unto themselves. This may sound utterly pretentious, but 40 years after the fact, they remain the unique kind of band one either chooses to believe in or not. For seculars, The Doors were just a weird rock n’ roll band, good for nothing more than an acid trip in the desert… but for believers such as myself, they are a potent and generous source of dark magic – simultaneously contagious and healing. Tom Dicillo’s epic-yet-intimate documentary “When You’re Strange” manages to contradict itself in a wonderful way: it both deconstructs the lore while also adding new depth to it. Exclusively utilizing vintage footage of the band, including never-before-seen film of a bearded Morrison navigating an existential journey through the desert, “WYS” is a truly transcendental experience. A documentary such as this is proof-positive that The Doors might have opened in 1965 on a sunny day in Venice Beach, CA… but they remain open in 2010 for anyone willing to walk through them.

And on a sunny day at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons in April, I was more than willing to Break on Through. As a recovering entertainment journalist, I was accustomed to doing interviews at this hotel, but it seemed far too posh and clichéd a venue to house The Surviving Doors, even if just for a few hours. But there they were, and there is no decisive way to convey the surreal experience of sitting next to your idols, even if they are barely recognizable and utterly mortal as they sit inches away from you.

Because of a still-unresolved dispute that John Densmore (percussionist) has with Ray Manzerek (organist) and Robby Krieger (guitarist), the trio has yet to coexist in the same room for several years. Such was the case when for their 40th anniversary back in 2006, Ray and Robby played without John at the Whisky A Go Go. This was pretty disappointing, but the fact that I was even standing feet away from half The Doors playing on the same stage they got their start on, was a mini-miracle. My then-literary agent was able to get us close to the front of the epic line wrapping around the block by giving away a bag of weed she got from her apartment across the street. My agent using weed to get us into a Doors concert at the Whisky was one of those classic L.A. moments I will not soon forget.

courtesy Rhino Media

Back at the Four Seasons, Ray and Robby interviewed separately from John and the film’s director Tom DiCillo. For the sake of efficiency, I’ve decided to interweave the questions and answers into one continuous dialogue. Ray and Robby strolled into the Burton Suite and joined us journalists like they were arriving late to a party. Robby was shy and barely made eye contact, while Ray was working on a bottle of red wine that he had been apparently lugging from interview to interview, and by this point, it had thoroughly lubricated his already-philosophical nature.

Let’s face it: Century City is still not happening. Despite the hilarious CAA building, a glass structure with a giant empty hole in the center that seems almost too perfect a representation of Hollywood intelligence, Century City fails to enliven. This is human brokerage central, the hub of deal-making and commerce, where eating is for slackers and the elevators only work if you have an access-fob. And really, who doesn’t love a motivated professional with shark teeth and the ability to balance both a yogurt and a starlet’s career in one hand?

But is Century City really this simple? If you stand on the pedestrian footbridge that arcs over the Avenue of the Stars and look down at the defeated Charles Schwab building, the first thing you’ll notice is not the dusty windows, but the series of grassy knolls that abut the building, almost like a miniature version of the ancient mud earthworks in Mississippi. It’s beautiful, and takes you away from the jouncing thighs and tightly pressed lips of your fellow pedestrians into something deeper, something perhaps more human, than Century City would ever openly admit to.

The closest thing that Century City has to a soul—in this case, the Hyatt Regency that was formerly host to drunken, high-powered meetings amongst the exclusive in the 60’s and 70’s—is slated for destruction by its new owner and developer, who has high-occupancy, low square foot construction cost dreams of his own. Movie stars have decried the move; cultural advocates have mumbled about historical preservation, and architects have shrugged their shoulders indifferently. One gathers that it’s not a keeper unless you drank yourself into the fountain.

In Century City, the sidewalks are more like wind-tunnels, just as the offices are more like fish tanks. The silence, the security, the circular potted ferns and artfully placed lunch tables, all feel like a tableau. This is less a place of business and more a historical theme park; the walkable version of 1987. Too zen and spaced out to be like New York, and far too corporate to really embody the raw artistic vibe of Los Angeles, Century City is its own zone, carved out of ambition and West-coast adrenalin. God bless it; but it still isn’t happening for me.