A Writer’s Best Tool: His Ears

His screenplay about the Persian Gulf War is now the basis for the Warner Bros. movie “Three Kings,” starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube, which opens Friday.

He is currently a supervising producer on “Third Watch,” the one-hour NBC drama exploring the gritty world of big-city paramedics, police and firefighters that premiered last week.

And Knopf has just published his third novel, “Everybody Smokes in Hell,” and promptly dispatched him on a cross-country book tour.

So, where does John Ridley, a blossoming Hollywood success story if there ever was one, hang out now that his writing career is on a roll? Does he prefer dining on crab cakes at the Ivy? Munching on the Caesar salad at Le Dome? Sampling the goat cheese pizza at Spago?

“Probably Norm’s on La Cienega,” Ridley says, referring to the steak-and-eggs chain restaurant rooted in declasse Southern California. “It’s so not Hollywood.”

Like all his favorite haunts, Norm’s is just the kind of place on the fringes of Tinseltown where a writer can go to observe ordinary people and listen. Always listen.

“If you want to be a writer,” Ridley explains, “you’ve got to be a listener first.”

Like Borders Books on La Cienega. “I have a couple writer friends and we godown there and pass ideas around,” he says. “Or that desert oasis of neon lights, high-rollers and desperate souls: Las Vegas.

“My wife and I spend a lot of time in Vegas,” Ridley confides. “Vegas is such a great place to get into human nature--greed, what people will do to make money, what they will do to keep money, and what they do when they lose money. Every time I go there, I see little things I will take back and formulate into characters.”

At 33, the Wisconsin-born Ridley is proof that show business success does not always occur overnight. In Ridley’s case, it has been a gradual yet steady ascent stretching back more than a decade, from the days he performed in small New York nightclubs as a stand-up comedian, to Hollywood TV and film writer, to novelist. Piece by piece, year after year, his resume has grown until now, he believes, his writing is beginning to have an impact, which he hopes will showcase African Americans.

“The lead characters of all my books have been black,” Ridley says. In “Third Watch,” he points out, the ensemble cast includes whites, blacks, Latinos and women. And, in “Three Kings,” although director David O. Russell changed the lead character from black to white in casting Clooney, he kept an African American (Ice Cube) in one of the lead roles.

“I’m glad there is a main character who is black,” Ridley says.

“Three Kings” is based on a script Ridley wrote in the mid-1990s called “Spoils of War.” The story, which takes place during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, revolves around some American GIs who find a map that leads them to a treasure cache in Iraq.

“It was sold to Warner Bros. as a spec script,” Ridley recalls. “It got kicked around a little bit--the usual Hollywood course--and then wound up with David O. Russell [the writer-director of “Three Kings”].”

Although the outlines of the story are the same, Ridley says Russell made significant changes in the final script.

“He has made it more of a political story,” the writer explains. “More about America’s role in the war.” Ridley receives a “story by” and a co-producer credit on the film.

While the movie was going forward, Ridley remained busy in television. Last year, he was a writer on the NBC series “Trinity.” While the show was short-lived, it brought him in contact with John Wells and Ed Bernero, who asked him to work on their latest creation, “Third Watch.”

“They’re both good guys, bright guys,” Ridley says. “I didn’t know if I would work in television this year or not, now with the movies and stuff, but they called me up and it sounded exciting. It has turned out great.”

Superhero Comic Book Might Be Next

When he’s not working on “Third Watch” (writing scripts, looking at dailies and editing final cuts), he is conceptualizing his next big project--a superhero graphic novel, or comic book, featuring a black woman as the lead character. But the character’s race, Ridley says, makes the book a difficult sell.

“People said to me, ‘If you wrote this as a white guy [in the lead role], we would have no problem doing this,’ ” Ridley says, “but that’s what makes the story interesting to me.”

Yes, he understands that Hollywood is, first and foremost, an industry about commerce so any project has to be one that can make money, but the fun is the process of creating.

“I really like to create,” he says. “I enjoy writing. I would like to do things that are a bit different, things like writing a movie and making sure that the lead character is a black guy.”

But achieving his goals has required patience.

A native of Milwaukee, Ridley knew early on that he wanted to expand his horizons. He moved to New York with a dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. Meanwhile, he had enrolled at New York University, majoring in, of all things, East Asian studies.

“In the ‘80s, everybody was afraid of Japan,” he recalls. “I was very fond of the culture and the people were very interesting.”

While living in Queens, he would stop in at a dojo (a martial arts gym) a block away. “When you are doing stand-up, you have nothing to do all day,” he says. “You go out at night, tell jokes for 20 minutes, and that is your day. I would spend all day with guys who took classes.”

Ridley eventually became so proficient in martial arts that he joined a karate team, competed in tournaments and rose to the level of third-degree brown belt in shotokan karate (Okinawan karate). He even learned Japanese and lived for a time in Japan.

Back in the U.S., he continued to pursue a career in stand-up, eventually landing spots on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”

In 1990, he moved from New York to Los Angeles, but soon found himself writing comedy on the side. He not only wrote for such sitcoms as “Martin,” “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “The John Larroquette Show,” but was hired to do “punch-up work” on numerous films, including “Boyz N the Hood.”

Meanwhile, Ridley also found time to work on novels. His first book was called “Stray Dogs,” which became the basis of Oliver Stone’s 1997 film, “U Turn.” Critics said his second novel, “Love Is a Racket,” had all the elements of “classic noir.”

In his latest novel, “Everybody Smokes in Hell,” Ridley uses Hollywood as the backdrop as he tells the story of Paris Scott, a night clerk in a scuzzy convenience store, who comes into possession of the last musical works of a grunge band singer just before the star commits suicide. Problems arise, however, when he tries to peddle the tape for $1 million and discovers that others would rather kill for it.

“It’s a story about the American work ethic,” Ridley says. “It’s about a guy who has a lot of ideas and big dreams, but he doesn’t have the capacity to fulfill them.”

The characters that fascinate Ridley most are not your stereotypical Hollywood power players--the arrogant directors, the egomaniacal stars, the screaming studio executives. Instead, Ridley says, he is drawn to the “down-and-out fringe characters” who are so consumed with Hollywood’s lure of riches and fame that they fail to see behind the curtain: so many hollow souls, ruined marriages and lives tortured by addiction.

“You’re always reading about people in Hollywood who are divorced or in rehab or whatever,” he says. “Yet, people say, ‘If only I could get in Hollywood, wouldn’t life be great?’ . . . [But] there is nothing wrong with being a normal American.”