Also Available as an Time Warner AudioBook

After an injury-plagued stint in the minor leagues in his twenties, Jim Morris hung up his cleats and his dreams to start a new life as a father, high school physics teacher, and baseball coach. Jim's athletes knew that his dream was still alive — he threw the ball so hard they could barely hit it - and made a bet with him: if they won the league championship, he would have to try out for a major league ball club. They did — and he did, and during that tryout threw the ball faster than he ever had, faster than anyone there, nearly faster than anyone playing in the Bigs. He was immediately drafted by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and three months later made his major league debut, striking out All-Star Royce Clayton.

Los Angeles, 1956. Glamorous. Prosperous. The place to see and be seen. But beneath the shiny exterior beats a dark heart. For when the sun goes down, L.A. becomes the noir city of James Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential "or Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels. Segregation is the unwritten law of the land. The growing black population is expected to keep to South Central. The white cops are encouraged to deal out harsh street justice. In "L.A. '56," Joel Engel paints a tense, moody portrait of the city as a devil weaves his way through the shadows.
While R&B and hot jazz spill out of record shops and clubs and all-night burger stands, Willie Fields cruises past in his dark green DeSoto, looking for a woman on whom he can bestow the gift of his company. His brilliant idea: Buy a tin badge in the five-and-ten to go along with his big flashlight and Luger and pretend to be an undercover vice cop. The young white girls doing it with their boyfriends in the lovers' lanes dotting the L.A. hills would never say no to a cop. Into the car they go for a ride downtown on a "morals charge," before he kicks out the young man in the middle of nowhere and takes the girl for a ride she'll spend a lifetime trying to forget.
There's a bad guy on the loose in the City of Angels.
Enter Detective Danny Galindo--he'd worked the Black Dahlia case back in '47 as a rookie. The suave Latino--one of the few in the department--is able to move easily among the white detectives. Maybe it's all those stories he's sold to Jack Webb for "Dragnet." When Todd Roark, a black ex-cop, is arrested, Galindo knows he's innocent. But there's no sympathy for Roark among the white cops on the LAPD; Galindo will have to go it alone.
There's only one problem: The victims aren't coming forward. The white press ignores the story, too, making Galindo's job that much more difficult. And now he's fallen in love with one of the rapist's first victims. If he's ever found out, he can kiss his badge good-bye.
With his back up against a wall, Galindo realizes that it will take some good old-fashioned Hollywood magic to take down a devil in the City of Angels.

Before any lights, camera, or action, there's the script--arguably the most important single element in filmmaking, and "Screenwriters on Screen-Writing" introduces the men and women responsible for the screenplays that have produced some of the most successful and acclaimed films in Hollywood history. In each interview, not only do the writers explore the craft and technique of creating a filmic blueprint, but they recount the colorful tales of coming up in the ranks of the movie business and of bringing their stories to the screen, in a way that only natural-born storytellers such as themselves can. These and other screenwriters have garnered the attention of the movie-going population not only with their words, but with headlines announcing the sales of their scripts for hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars. Anyone interested in writing, making, or learning about movies will enjoy reading this fascinating behind-the-scenes compendium that brings together some of the most prominent and talented screenwriters in modern-day filmmaking. Screenwriters interviewed include:
Bruce Joel Rubin ("Ghost"), Ernest Lehman ("North by Northwest," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"), Amy Holden Jones ("Indecent Proposal"), Ted Tally ("The Silence of the Lambs"), Horton Foote ("To Kill a Mockingbird," "Tender Mercies"), Andrew Bergman ("The In-Laws"), Caroline Thompson ("Edward Scissorhands"), Richard LaGravenese ("The Fisher King"), and Robert Towne ("Chinatown," "Shampoo").

Now a major motion picture from Disney. THE ROOKIE, by Jim Morris, starring Dennis Quaid.

The incredible true story of the thirty-five-year-old physics teacher who broke into the major leagues

HE PLAYED A BOY'S GAME.
HE LIVED A MAN'S LIFE.
AND HE NEVER GAVE UP A DREAM...

As a lonely child, Jim Morris took one thing with him wherever his family moved—his ability to hit and throw a baseball. For Jim, the dream of becoming a major-league ballplayer was his anchor and inspiration, and he had the talent to make it come true...until injuries and life got in the way.

A decade after Jim walked away from the minors and began a life of fatherhood and mortgage payments, he made a promise to the hardscrabble high-school team he coached: If they could win their local championship, he would try out again for the big leagues.

They did—and he did. Now, in this wondrous, heart-tugging book, Jim Morris tells the story of his remarkable life and his amazing journey to the Big Show at the age of thirty-five. This inspirational story is the saga of a dream that wouldn't die, and how a shy, lonely boy finally became...

THE ROOKIE

When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the world lost one of the greatest moral authorities of the twentieth century. We would all benefit from hearing Martin's voice, if only he were alive today. . . .

If anyone would have insight into Martin's thoughts and opinions, it would be Clarence B. Jones, King's personal lawyer and one of his closest principal advisers and confidants. Removing the mythic distance of forty years' time to reveal the flesh-and-blood man he knew as his friend, Jones ponders what the outspoken civil rights leader would say about the serious issues that bedevil contemporary America: Islamic terrorism and the war in Iraq, reparations for slavery, anti-Semitism, affirmative action, illegal immigration, and the state of African American leadership.