Modern-Day Thoreau Takes a Lighter Look at Nature in ‘Side Out’ Script : Movies: David Thoreau makes no apologies to his distant relative about the theme of his first screenplay. His movie about beach volleyball is playing in theaters across the nation.

Like his distant relative, Henry David Thoreau, Laguna Beach writer David Thoreau has an affinity for nature and the great outdoors.

So for his first screenplay, “Side Out,” this Thoreau chose as his setting a late-20th-Century Walden Pond where millions of Southern Californians head for reflection: the beach.

“With apologies to Frankie and Annette, it’s the best beach movie ever,” says Thoreau, who makes no apologies of his own to Henry David about the good-time subject material of the movie that currently is playing across the country.

“I think it’s an excellent spring-summer movie,” he said. “It’s uplifting, energetic. It’s for the audience that falls somewhere between ‘Ninja Turtles’ and ‘Driving Miss Daisy.’ ”

That “Side Out” isn’t “Walden,” nor does it try to be, doesn’t bother Thoreau, though it did result in an unfavorable comparison raised in Michael Wilmington’s movie review for The Times.

“That’s like killing a sand flea with a sledgehammer,” Thoreau said. “My five novels have all been reviewed extensively, and no reviewer has ever compared my books to ‘Walden,’ one of the great works in American literature. Besides, this was a story about beach volleyball, hardly a transcendental subject.

“The irony is that, unlike a novelist, where you’re totally responsible for the finished product, a screenwriter quickly becomes an interested bystander,” he said.

Thoreau, who grew up in San Francisco but has lived in Laguna for nine years, decided on the subject of beach volleyball as a means of capturing what he calls “the essence of the California lifestyle.” While first attempting the script four years ago, he consulted his friends, Greg and Jon Lee, both beach competitors. Jon Lee is editor of Volleyball Monthly.

“It’s healthy, a total game, with no specialists like in some sports,” he said. “The way I approached the story was to write a movie about what it would be like for a Midwesterner to see the beach for the first time. Visually, it’s a fantastic sport.”

For Thoreau, this was his first attempt at breaking into the movie business, although he has done extensive work in television in recent years, having written for “Highway to Heaven,” “The Street,” “Miami Vice,” “Quantum Leap” and “Dirty Dozen.”

This month promises to be a big one for Thoreau, the modern author. His new mystery novel, “The Book of Numbers,” is being published in paperback (Pocket Books, $3.95). It’s a sequel to his 1988 novel “The Good Book,” a mystery revolving around sports betting and a fictitious Los Angeles football team, the Los Angeles Marlins, whose owner dies of unnatural causes and whose wife takes over the team.

Times sports columnist Jim Murray called it “a crackling good, gritty Southern California mystery in the best hard-boiled (Raymond) Chandler tradition.” It has been optioned for a movie.

The new book is the second in a series revolving around his lead character, Jimmy Lujack, a former vice cop who becomes a bookie in Los Angeles. “The Book of Numbers” stars Lujack again. In it, Lujack picks up his partner’s niece from the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs. The next time he sees her, she’s been decapitated in a ritualistic killing. The suspects include characters from the kinky Melrose nightclub scene to the Southern California defense industry and the Japanese underworld, the Yakuza.

As far as writing goes, Thoreau doesn’t seem to prefer one medium over the other. “A screenplay is a completely different process than writing a novel. It’s much more collaborative. You work with the director, the producer and the actors,” he said.

He’s currently working on a new screenplay, not about beach volleyball. But he’s hopeful that the limited opening run of “Side Out” will get to reach a wider audience. It opened two weeks ago in Los Angeles and Orange counties, Seattle, Cincinnati, Tampa, St. Petersburg and Denver.

“I’m hoping for the best,” he said.