A Columnist, 'The Soloist' And Echoing Tales of Loss

LOS ANGELES -- There are two movies out now that try to tell us that newspapers are vital not only to movie plots but to the community, if anyone still wants to hear it. One is "State of Play," a Washington thriller about power, murder and a ludicrous frenzy of journalistic melodrama in a Post-esque newsroom that culminates with a triumphant rolling of the old presses. Viewers are asked to suspend disbelief in much the same way they've suspended home delivery.

Then there's "The Soloist," opening Friday, which has the benefit of being a true-ish story about a true story. You go in expecting an uplifting drama of a homeless man who loses and finds himself in music -- and it's certainly there. But woven in is an elegiac story of the ongoing demise of the Los Angeles Times, which in recent years has cut its staff and coverage in half and whose owners spend a lot of time now in bankruptcy court. The presses also run in this movie, but they are more sonorously sad.

People who've seen "The Soloist" come out feeling happy for the schizophrenic homeless man on this city's notorious Skid Row. They also leave feeling sort of awful about the prospects for the reporter and newspaper that brought his story to light.

You've probably heard the story of "The Soloist," or know it from the movie trailer, or the best-selling book, or the New Yorker story, or the "60 Minutes" segment: A mentally ill homeless man named Nathaniel Ayers was playing a nearly stringless violin on the streets of downtown L.A. when columnist Steve Lopez found him in early 2005.

Lopez did what Lopez does for a living. After watching and trying to coherently interview Ayers a couple of times, he fact-checked a few of the more incredible details from Ayers's life and then wrote a fast and easily heartfelt column about the mysterious and sad "violin man," who'd once studied at Juilliard until madness claimed him. The column ran in the California section of the Times, where Lopez has worked since 2001. (He's also been a columnist for Time and the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

"I didn't see the reaction coming," Lopez, 55, says. "Even now, I look back and wonder what it was I didn't see in my own column. I knew instinctively there was something compelling in [Nathaniel's] life, but with me it's hit and run and on to the next column."

People's love for Lopez's story about Ayers has never gone away.

After the first column ran, readers sent Lopez more e-mail than he's ever received. One reader even sent Lopez a cello to replace Ayers's beaten violin. (Ayers had trained on the cello as a boy; he plays 10 instruments in all.) Lopez, terrified that Ayers would be assaulted on the streets if he was carrying around an expensive instrument, fell into a series of encounters and dramas with his curious subject that have more or less tethered him to Ayers's well-being.

The dilemmas, for Lopez, are many, even four years later. Should Ayers -- who can be at once as charming and profound as he can be nasty and violent -- be persuaded to take medications that might stabilize his personality? (So far, he has resisted.) Should he live in the sane world even if he finds better acoustics in traffic tunnels and more sublimity on Skid Row? How involved should Lopez be in Ayers's affairs? After several more columns, which resulted in reuniting Ayers with his sister (who lives in Georgia) and led to Ayers moving into a safe apartment, Lopez had to decide if Ayers, who is 58, was a source, or a friend, or a charity case, or all of the above.

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Or more? By 2006, Lopez had signed a book contract to write about Ayers; he had a tight deadline to deliver a manuscript. At the same time, three Hollywood producers were vying for the movie rights to Lopez's unfinished book -- which, in a tricky sense, are also the rights to Ayers's and Lopez's life stories. Lopez met with each of the producers and decided to sell the rights to Gary Foster and Russ Krasnoff, who, after a lunch meeting, wanted Lopez to give them a walking tour of Skid Row.

"Their eyes bugged out of their heads," the columnist says. "Back then, a Third World collapse is really what you would have seen down there -- stark-raving mad, people injecting heroin, hundreds of people camped out on the street."