FINDING ERIC GARCETTI: On the Mayor-elect of Los Angeles, that Great Angeleno Ray Bradbury, and Me

My wife Amanda and I attended and participated in one of Los Angeles Mayor-elect Eric Garcetti’s “Back to Basics” listening tour events this past Saturday. It was a great opportunity to contribute to the ideas that are fermenting among Garcetti and his advisors on how to make L.A. a better city in regard to economic and job growth, our individual neighborhoods, and the effectiveness of City Hall.

The several hundred Angelenos who met at the at the Windward School in Mar Vista were divided into small workshops to discuss and present as many solutions in these areas as they could come up with.  After the workshops the Mayor-elect arrived to address the assembled, to thank us for our time and ideas and to share his goal as Mayor to make Los Angeles not only a big city but a great city. 

The key to that for him—and I assume most of the assembled—is to make Los Angeles more and more a livable city.

I first met Eric Garcetti during the last Writers Guild strike when he was president of the City Council and gave much support to the idea that the Guild should get a fair deal from the producers. 

Myself and other WGA members with then President of the City Council Garcetti at City Hall in 2007

I represented the Guild in front of the City Council and was greatly impressed by how he handled himself and his obvious sincerity in wanting to see a healthy Hollywood, not just for the writers, but for the industry itself.

Because of that connection I was later able to solicit his aid in celebrating the 90th birthday of Ray Bradbury in 2010. At my suggestion he proposed to the City Council that the city declare August 22 through 28 of that year Ray Bradbury Week, having quickly and enthusiastically agreed with me that Ray was too big for just a day. The City Council unanimously agreed as well. 

Garcetti presenting the Ray Bradbury Week city proclamation to Ray as I look on.

This action by Garcetti set off a series of events and efforts on my part that has culminated in my new book, Searching for Ray Bradbury: Writings about the Writer and the Man.

I was happy to be able to present him a copy of my book last Saturday—he figures, of course, into my essay on Ray Bradbury Week—and to thank him again for his support.

I have great confidence in the Mayor-elect. Not just because of big city, urban issues of jobs and growth and crime and potholes, but because I think he’s a man who not only likes and is nourished by the arts, but has an artistic nature himself. If I am correct in this, I hope it gives him a creative, elastic, possibly even an improvisational bent to his mind (See my Huffington Post blog, Does Eric Garcetti Have the Aesthetic Chops to be Mayor of L.A.? from last February), which now must be engaged in many difficult issues on the road to making a more livable Los Angeles.

I inscribed in the copy of Searching for Ray Bradbury that I gave to the Mayor-elect a note saying that I thought Ray, a great Angeleno, would like the L.A. Garcetti envisions and has committed himself to work toward. It’s pleasing to think of Ray in the future sitting up there—somewhere on Mars—looking to the Earth, focusing in on Los Angeles—and smiling.