Hasta La Ideas

Staying in California for a bit longer following that last post, but heading south to Los Angeles and the movie business where two films have caught our attention. First up is the announcement of a possible movie being made surrounding the life and times of John DeLorean, the car designer turned possible drug trafficker who later went on to create the car bearing his last name (and, of course, made famous by the Back to the Future franchise). Sounds interesting, though it seems like if you’ve seen one Robert Kearns/Preston Tucker film, you’ve seen them all, right? We’d be more willing to pay to see something like an Errol Morris-helmed conversation with the newly-retired Robert Lutz about GM. Now there’s a movie. Second, the good people at Curbed LA got a chance to talk to the writer of the upcoming film, 500 Days of Summer, Scott Neustadter, about why his main character is a failed architect and why L.A.’s architecture plays such an important part in the film. In short, the writer is also an architecture buff who isn’t a practicing architect and wanted to call attention to some of the buildings around town. That’s just the sort of thing our former co-editor Alissa Walker was recently doing for Fast Company in her piece, “L.A.’s Best Architecture is on the Ground,” though with a much more modern look at what’s snazzy in that city. And, likely due to bias, the final verdict is that it’s Alissa’s piece that we would most like to see turned into a major motion picture. Early casting note: we’re thinking James Caan for the role of the Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure.