Dutch Waggoner and Patricia Franchini

They can’t properly be called “cameos”….  but in a form of homage I borrowed character names from movies (and to lesser degree other works of art) I’ve loved and salted them throughout “Easy to Like”.   I won’t list those characters, some of them small, some of them even off screen, from films like “Chinatown” and “Fargo”; that would spoil the fun.  I didn’t expect anyone to make much of the fact that Elliot changes his name to from Johnston to Jonson. Nobody mentioning the TVC-15 reference makes me feel old.

A couple of names from The Pat Hobby Stories do make proper, if anachronistic cameos, playing a writer and a director just as they did in Scott Fitzgerald’s taut and hilarious original.

I visited Fitzgerald’s last residence when I was in Los Angeles, researching some of my novel’s geography.  It is now completely obscured from view by a high hedge, likely because of gawkers like myself.  Yes, street addresses too, have walk-ons in the novel.  The home of Charlie Chaplin is there.  The sight of a drunken Herman Mankiewicz car crash got cut. It was a G.P.S.apalooza in the hills.

Jean Seberg

Okay … one clue … that’s Patricia Franchini above.