How to break into screenwriting

Wanted: Co-writer for high-profile Hollywood screenplay. No experience necessary.

Yep, it's for real. My friend Eric Estrin, left, has launched the "LA Observed Script Project," a collaborative venture that's partly an experiment and mostly a writing competition.

Estrin started off the project's screenplay "Right of Way" with a three-page setup. Then it was turned over to the masses. Wanna-be screenwriters are asked to submit a few pages. Each week, Estrin will pick the submission that best advances the story.

Brings to mind "Naked Came the Stranger," a sex novel written by a pack of journalists in 1969. Each writer contributed one chapter. Here, a different screenwriter adds on a few pages each week.

The first winning cowriter was Jerry Lazar, a journalist and magician who cranked out another three pages. Lazar is a man about town in L.A., but you don't have to be:

"Anyone who’s been part of a writers’ room knows how exhilarating it can be to work with a great team on an exciting project," Estrin wrote. "So picture LAObserved as the room and the whole world as the team."

The "Right of Way" story concerns an L.A. mayor dedicating to build a real transit system in that car-obsessed city. Yes, that makes the tale pure fiction.

"It’s going to be a drama, a darkish murder mystery filled with glamour, wit and big dreams, the stuff of life in Southern California," Estrin wrote in his screenplay-contest blog.

I'm thinking "Chinatown" on rails, but who knows what tone the script will take as it moves forward. Estrin seems open to radical suggestions: "If your vision goes off in an unexpected direction, and you can convince me it works in 1-5 pages, bring it on!"

Want in on the action? Next deadline for script submissions is Sunday.