The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has unveiled all the goodies on the 2008 schedule, and if you’re not doing anything at 10:30 A.M. on Sunday, April 27, I’ll be moderating a panel called “On Page and Screen” with four very cool writers from the film world: Mark Frost, who adapted his nonfiction book The Greatest Game Ever Played into the screenplay for the film of the same title, which is only the best golf movie ever made; Chris Miller, who co-wrote the screenplay to Animal House and also wrote a memoir about The Real Animal House; Gary David Goldberg, the executive producer of Family Ties and author of the recent memoir Sit, Ubu, Sit; and Tom Epperson, the co-scripter on One False Move and The Gift who’s just written his first novel, The Kind One (which is already on track to become a Casey Affleck vehicle).
So that’ll be fun. Too bad they scheduled the panel on debut writers with my pal Mark Sarvas directly opposite mine, but later in the day they’re having ex-GalleyCat and current Times web columnist Sarah Weinman run a discussion on mystery fiction. She’s got another one Saturday morning, which I’ll probably skip so I can go heckle Lee Siegel about the Internet or something. And there’s Michael Connelly interviewing Joseph Wambaugh, and a Hollywood history panel with Peter Biskind and Mark Harris, and my boyhood idol Frederick Schodt on manga! Plus a couple hundred other equally cool people—to give you a sense of the diversity, I’m alphabetically wedged between Alice Hoffman and Katharine Holabird, the creator of Angelina Ballerina.