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As a really interesting side note to the central story, Lopez talks about his own situation as a journalist. With the viability of print publications dwindling to an all-time low, Lopez casts an occasional glance at the nature of print journalism with the media technology and world culture being in flux. It's not a real strong undercurrent, but it adds to the overall experience of the novel, giving it firm grounding in a very contemporary reality. Homelessness and mental illness have always been a part of society, but with Lopez's firm grounding in current affairs, he's reminding us that these issues are still very much a going concern that isn't going away any time soon. Above all, we get the impression that Lopez is very, very sensitive to the idea that he may be exploiting Ayers with the book, the columns and ultimately the film that's been based on it. Overall, we get the impression that if he IS exploiting Ayers, he's doing it to cast light on a problem that simply will NOT go away on its own. It's an admirable goal and it makes The Soloist a profoundly emotionally dynamic book.

The Movie

With LA's immersion in the film industry, Hollywood descended on Lopez pretty quickly. Numerous producers asked him for the opportunity to do the film, so presumably he had his pick. He seems to have chosen pretty wisely in the team of Russ Krasnoff and Gary Foster. What with Lopez being as sensitive to Ayers' needs as he had been in the book, gaining his trust on a project like this must've been a task akin to Lopez's work getting Ayers to trust him. The producers ended up going with screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) to do the script. Grant met with Lopez and promptly went to work.

Grant did an admirable job of streamlining the novel into a feature film-length drama. What with Lopez's writing style being as straight ahead and journalistic as it is, she had to do a considerable amount of work framing the information that Lopez relates in the book. Why she didn't keep it at as simple as that is anybody's guess.

The story of Lopez and Ayers' friendship is solid and dramatic enough without having to mess with it any further. Perhaps it was pressures that were put on Grant by the producers that caused her to change Lopez's character significantly, perhaps not. Regardless of what the situation was, Grant elected to make Lopez divorced. Rather than dealing with the stress of working extensively on a project with Ayers that seemed to have questionable results - working with a man who seemed so opposed to his help at times, the stress of dealing with that while realizing that he was not spending nearly enough time with his wife and daughter - that internal stress is completely taken out of the story. Instead, we get a Lopez who is afraid to get too close to anyone because love hasn't been good to him. One loner helping another out seems much less dynamic than a happily married man with a young daughter trying to help someone else out while sacrificing time he could be spending with his family. Instead of this, we get shots of Lopez drinking alone in a vacuous apartment and hanging bags of coyote urine to ward off pests.

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