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Ah, Hollywood—you damned, dirty ape. Every time we're just about ready to throw in the towel, convinced the entire L.A. basin is nothing but a giant, detritus-clogged drainage pipe filtering humanity's run-off, you come along with a story so improbable, so life-affirming, so gosh darned wonderful, it makes us want to hop right in our cars and collide into the first motorist we see. Today, that story comes to us via Scriptland, LAT's love letter to Hollywood's hard-working Final Draft-miners, and stars a couple of Eastsiders, an ex-con, and a hole:

Three years ago, talent manager Danny Sherman moved with his then-wife, Wendy, into a home in an un-gentrified Silver Lake neighborhood. While Sherman was at work, a vaguely threatening-looking guy with a teardrop tattoo under his eye would toss wolf whistles Wendy's way when she came outside.

After ignoring him for a few weeks, Wendy finally struck up a conversation and learned he was a 15-year veteran of the neighborhood named Darryl Francis who had recently been released from prison.

Apparently, Francis, incarcerated most recently at Wayside county jail (now called the North County Correctional Facility) on a 32-month stretch for receiving stolen property, had found himself in solitary confinement after a little misunderstanding with some Latino inmates. A previous tenant had left a contraband pencil, so Francis used the quiet time — 43 days, all told — in the hole to sketch out a comedy idea called "Tow Truck," chewing away at the pencil tip to sharpen it whenever it got too low. (He also worked on it during a stint at Avenal State Prison.)

What Francis handed Sherman after cornering him on the sidewalk one day with "Are you the manager man?" was 200 pages of handwritten material in different colors of ink and pencil, including 20 pages that a girlfriend had typed up before dumping him. Sherman nervously took the pages, thanked Francis and quietly hoped he'd never see the guy again.

Even the hackiest solitary-confined screenwriter can finish this one: The material is hilarious, a seasoned pro is brought in to turn the 200 hole-scribbled pages into something resembling a screenplay, and the script is eventually optioned by Our Stories Films, makers of Who's Your Caddy?. It's perhaps the most improbable spec script success since Ron Howard scooped up a 17-page treatment by an unknown, donut-loving screenwriter, which would go on to become the blockbuster hit The Terminizor: An Erotic Thriller, the unforgettable story of killer robot driving instructor who travels back in time for some reason.

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