In 2006 it only got better when Haggis won the Academy Award for original screenplay and Best Picture for Crash, a movie he directed. And since it was not an adaptation, it was pure Haggis.

When I saw that film, I was certainly impressed with its author’s chops – the guy could write dialogue and entertain us with arresting scenes. But something disturbed me. Crash was a portrait of Los Angeles as a city of races perpetually at war with each other. I had lived in Los Angeles for over thirty years and did not experience it that way. Not always, anyway. And yes, I lived in Echo Park where the Mexican gangs battled the Vietnamese and was here for the riots and burnings in South Central we all know about. In fact, I had taught screenwriting in Watts and helped organize the fundraiser by the very Writers Guild to replace the torched South Central library in the early nineties.

Still, Haggis - who arrived in LA from Canada in 1975, only a half dozen years after me – and I live in a very different Los Angeles. He sees that horrifying racism where I see the new melting pot with more Iranians than anywhere but Tehran and more Koreans than anywhere but Seoul (not to mention gazillions of Mexicans, Chinese, etc), all getting along as well, or better, than anywhere else in the world I know of, particularly now. Call it the half-full/half-empty syndrome - or maybe I’m just nuts for the ethnic food (I admit it). . . .