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From 1929 to 2019, Los Angeles had The Samuel French Film & Theatre Bookshop.
It was on Sunset Blvd. and had the widest selection of film and theatre books in the city.
You could spend hours there, and many did.
Unlike the shady shops on Hollywood Blvd., Samuel French sold legitimate titles.
Which means they only sold published stage plays and screenplays.
(They also sold pre-printed address labels for every casting director and agency in town and other various wares for the local struggling artists.)
It was there in 1997 that I found the screenplay to one of my favorite movies, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL.
It was the published edition, so the font was wrong and the number of lines on the page was off. I had to do some math to estimate what the actual page was.
It was 231 pages, so — assuming the actual screenplay was 120 — page 115 was likely page 60 in the screenplay and page 189 was page 98.
I did this math constantly to figure out the timing of these scenes and plot points.
This was back when it took seven months for a movie to come out on home video. I did not have the patience to wait!
What struck me the most about the screenplay was how lean and tight the action lines were.
The action lines were barely there!
I wanted to write like that!
So I tried. Writing leaner and meaner in each screenplay.
I never could get as lean as that script, but I tried.
Later, I discovered my agency, CAA, was more than willing to send me a copy of any screenplay I wanted.