 "Photo: Photo Courtesy of François Duhamel")
Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, was walking around downtown L.A., looking for a story to meet his deadline. Four years ago, he heard classical music played on the street that would begin a lasting friendship, a series of columns that captured a city and, now, a major motion picture starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jaime Foxx.
The man he met that day was Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a former musical prodigy whose battle with paranoid schizophrenia left him homeless. Nathaniel, once a promising student at Juliard, was living on the streets of L.A.'s notorious Skid Row, but his soul was able to escape in the music, which gave him temporary relief from illness. He would go so far to play in the tunnels of Los Angeles because he found the spaces to be orchestral.
In a conference with college journalists, Steve Lopez discusses his relationship with Nathaniel, the new film and social justice.
Student: What's it like to see a big part of your life being put into a motion picture with different people playing people you know? Steve Lopez: It's pretty surreal, except that this process has been going on for a few years now, so I have kinda gotten past that. It is a little strange. I have seen the movie a few times and to see Robert Downey calling himself Steve Lopez is a little bit strange. But I am flattered by the portrayal and very gratified by what they did with this movie. I mean, there was a lot of different ways to make this movie, and I must say that from the beginning I had some concerns about whether the issues might be simplified, or the story might be changed so much that it would be unrecognizable to me. But the producers I met with on day one, Gary Foster and Russ Krasnoff, shared with me what their vision of this movie was, and I gotta tell you that they made the movie they said they were going to make. And I am very gratified in part because I have become very passionate about all of the themes here, friendship and the redemptive power of music and just the simple power of human connections. The way two people could come upon each other from two different walks of life entirely and have an impact on each other and a lasting change that results from it. The movie gets that and it's a great movie and I am really pleased.
S: Do you feel that the situation on Skid Row has improved since you wrote your series of columns on it? SL: Well, there is no question that Skid Row is a different place than it was when I met Nathaniel four years ago. There is no question that far fewer people are sleeping on the streets. The question, though, is where did those other people go? And its, its also obvious that some of them got into housing, because one of the points I was trying to make when this adventure began four years ago, was that it's not as if we don't know what works to help people, especially those with mental illness come in off the streets. The problem is that we haven't made a commitment to what does work, and that is something called permanent supportive housing. And there has been a lot more. And there's more in the pipeline since Nathaniel's story put a spotlight on all of these issues. But, unfortunately, there is a long way to go, and they were heavier on the police action on Skid Row rather than substantive, you know, provision of new services. So, I think we have got a way to go and the report card is pretty mixed and some people think that, you know, although there are fewer people there, it's simply because they have been scattered by police to other parts of the city. It's not as if we have fewer people overall in L.A., in greater L.A., out on the pavement. It is still around 70,000. So, there have been some improvements, and we need more.
S: Are you and Mr. Ayers still friends? And where is he now? SL: I just saw Mr. Ayers about twenty minutes ago. The L.A. Times has asked him to write a tribute to Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is the conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic and a guy that Nathanial has gotten to know a little bit in our four years of making frequent trips up to Disney Hall for concerts. We are guests up there now and we have friends in the orchestra who invite us, keep inviting us back. So yeah, I saw Nathanial just this morning and he had two violins that need to be tuned up, so he left the violins with me. He said he switches to the viola for the time-being until I fix the violins for him. He was also carrying a trumpet. He has a French horn, a clarinet; he asked if I would buy him a flute. He has an upright bass, he has a piano. And he comes to the L.A. Times because we have a basement music room where he plays the drums. So, Mr. Ayers and I have been in pretty steady contact, and we have been to three concerts in the past month, I would say. And he's very excited about the baseball season because we go to Dodgers' games together. As for where he is, he is still indoors. And at the end of the book, or near the end of the book, he moves into an apartment, and it took a year to make that happen with a lot of help from Lamp Community, the mental health agency that's still is his caretaker. And he is still in that room. Three years later, he is still in that room. He still has good days and bad. He is still progressing, and he still has a ways to go.
S: What extra insight does your book have compared to the movie? And has this experience changed your method of writing columns and profiles? SL: The book is 300 pages long and the movie script is about 120 pages long, so there is a little more of everything in the book. And you know film is, by necessity, a reduction. But the film is true to all of the essential themes and just does a great job of framing the relationship, the issues, my conflicts, so I am really pleased with that...It actually has, in the sense that I never gotten so personally involved in a story I was working on. I never jumped into the story and became a character in it to the extent that I have done in this story that began four years ago. And, we are taught as journalists to keep some distance and to not become advocates…even as a columnist, to hold onto some of your impartiality. But this was a special circumstance. It was a guy I wrote about, and readers responded and they gave him instruments. And there was the possibility that he could be mugged on the street. And I felt that it was just the right thing to do, morally, to try to help him get off the street, which got me involved in negotiating the whole mental health system and all of that. So, it did change the way I approached at least this column, in particular. And, based on the support, from readers who seemed so engaged, I think that it was kinda cool for readers to see a writer become so involved. So, maybe I have, you know, rethought a little bit my history and tradition of keeping so much distance from the subject.
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