In Remember Pearl Harbor, Jasper Starkey, a Hollywood screenwriter—cynical, opportunistic, and not without charm—arrives at a Pasadena mansion to research a novel and finds himself entangled with its owner, Patricia Beveins, a young war widow. When her aunt is murdered, suspicion falls on the conveniently absent butler. Jasper isn’t convinced. As his romance with Patricia deepens, so does his unease, and what begins as Hollywood film noir—murders, misdirection, a mansion with secrets—takes on something lighter and more unsettling, where the real mystery may be the people themselves. This is Eve Babitz’s Hollywood—the one she grew up in, the glamour that was always a little too knowing to take entirely seriously. It’s also Elias’s workspace: cramped writers offices, studio commissaries, sound stages, and executive suites.
In The Flute, Babitz and Elias imagine an American director in Paris who refuses to accept the end of his marriage, trailing his estranged French wife through the city as his life quietly unravels. His obsession leads to awkward surveillance, floppy manipulations, and public scenes—while the world goes on without him. An attempt to repair his life with flute lessons offers the possibility of change, if he can let go of his heartbreak. A comic homage to the French New Wave from two writers who grew up on Truffaut and Godard, the story favors mood over resolution, behavior over explanation—and treats Paris the way Babitz always treated Los Angeles: as a character with its own desires.
These two screenplays come out of a particular creative friendship—romantic, dissipated, and faintly dangerous—between Eve Babitz and Michael Elias. One screenplay is soaked in Los Angeles noir. The other dreams in French. Both are written by people who loved movies before they made them.
Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a Los Angeles writer, artist, and cultural chronicler whose work captured the glamour, drift, and contradictions of California life in the 1960s and ’70s. Closely connected to the worlds of music, film, and art, she became known for her books Slow Days, Fast Company and Eve’s Hollywood.
Michael Elias grew up in the Catskill Mountains, a Red Diaper Borscht Belt Baby in a world of blacklisted artists, intellectuals, tummlers, folk singers, boxers, and Jewish gangsters, (some of whom sleep at the bottom of Loch Sheldrake). His childhood heroes were Jerry Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Rocky Marciano, and Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles. Educated in the classics at St. John’s College, Elias took his knowledge of ancient Greek and mathematics to New York, trained at the Actors Studio and acted in The Living Theatre, La MaMa, and the Judson Poets Theatre. From there he moved to Hollywood where he wrote sit-coms, variety shows, screenplays, including The Jerk, The Frisco Kid and Lush Life, and participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement, earning a subpoena to a Nixon grand jury. His is the author of Bender's L.A., published by Sticking Place Books. His website is here.
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