Who needs distractions? These screenwriters do

Meet Dan Petrie Jr., a screenwriter who can’t keep a secret.

“My favorite feature is the bathroom,” Petrie says. But there’s none evident in his unassuming home office. Just bookshelves, hugging every wall.

“Watch this,” he says, and swings open a bookcase that leads to a full bathroom, a hideaway within his hideaway.

Welcome to the working world of screenwriters and their home offices, the maternity wards of pop culture, birthplaces of creativity. Or not. Surely these spaces are larger than life, just like the scripts that are born there, and the movies that are made from those scripts. This is all about Hollywood, after all, where too much is never enough. A land of enchanted forests, talking whales, impossible romances and asteroids that leap from the screen and seem to land in your $5 popcorn.

Springing from these rooms are the happy endings that color our outlooks about work and play, triumph and failure.

So when Hollywood writers hit it big, they are bound to create happy endings of their own, with a blockbuster-of-a-house featuring more square footage than the average multiplex. And, no doubt, the sort of lavish work space suited to the kings and queens of the scripted word.

But wait. There’s a plot about to twist. Because no matter how grand the home, screenwriters’ home offices tend to be, for the most part, well ... just offices. Not larger than life, really. Just life, and full of distractions and the little things that feel like home -- tchotchkes, computer games and the occasional electric guitar.

“They say that a writer should have no distractions,” Petrie says, finger-punching one of the half-dozen remotes in his Encino office. “There are nothing but distractions in this room.”

On this afternoon, the only sound in Petrie’s sprawling home is the click-click-click of his wife practicing her tap dancing down the hall. It’s like a library here. Who can work like this? Where’s a muse when you really need one?

Petrie, who has “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Turner & Hooch” to his credit, uses the remote to select from a list of songs flashing on his TV.

“I really like this song,” says Petrie, a man among toys. “With this device, I can find out the title in a second.”

Like Petrie, most writers seem to rely on their home offices for a few built-in distractions. Often, they nurture them or seek them out. Apparently, before they can entertain others, they have to entertain themselves.

“A writer is someone who sits down to work and hopes the phone rings,” says David W. Rintels, a three-time Emmy winner who wrote the miniseries “Nuremberg.”

Rintels and his wife, Victoria Riskin, president of the Writers Guild of America, West, and daughter of legendary screenwriter Robert Riskin (“It Happened One Night” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”), write in separate spaces at opposite ends of their Brentwood home. The house seems to be cloaked in 100 shades of green. It even has a sod roof that gives it the feel of a fairy cottage. (Yes, the roof needs watering. Three minutes a day, no more.)

Rintels writes historical epics in an office overlooking the surrounding gardens. With the sod overhanging the edge of the roof, his writing room feels part library, part Hobbit’s nest. The space has a timeless quality, perfect for a writer who focuses on stories from another era.

Riskin, meanwhile, concentrates on adaptations and projects based on her past career as a clinical psychologist. Her office is spare, but opens onto a backyard that is big and lush enough to host a royal wedding.

“I need quiet,” Riskin says. “David can work with a baseball game on while listening to the Brandenburg Concerto.”

“My wife calls them my instruments of mass distraction,” Rintels says.

On the other side of Brentwood, Jeff Melvoin is getting ready to work -- mornings, like many writers -- in an office inspired by Hemingway. “I’d visited his Key West home,” Melvoin says. “The idea was to create a little bit of a roost.”

As roosts go, this isn’t bad. A doorway in the corner leads to a balcony, giving Melvoin the sense of privacy he liked about Hemingway’s office. In the office itself, 16-foot ceilings leave plenty of room for bookshelves, CDs and mementos from past shows. Impressive corner windows let the morning sun sweep through the east-facing room.

Melvoin, who won an Emmy for “Northern Exposure” and is at work on ABC’s “Line of Fire,” talks quickly and proudly of this office, which was a key consideration when he and his wife, Martha, built the house three years ago.

When the scene demands it, Melvoin can push a button and shades descend, blocking out the natural light and creating a proper mood. With the click of another button, jazz blasts from big, Vandersteen speakers.

“Sometimes the kids have to tell him to turn the stereo down,” his wife says.

Kids today. In TV writer Steve Levitan’s home, children are a never-ending distraction, fitting enough for a man who crafts sitcoms for a living.

“One daughter, I call her the leaner,” Levitan says. “She comes into the office and just leans on me while I work.”

Levitan writes and practices electric guitar in a large, handsome office just off the entry. Photos from his days on “Frasier” and “Just Shoot Me!” line the shelves. Behind him sits a collection of vintage microphones and an old typewriter. His bare feet rest atop a desk the size of Wisconsin.

“I’ve written everywhere,” he says. “Where I first started writing was in a TV newsroom [as a news writer], but I was really working on spec scripts.”

No man is an island. OK, writers are islands. But even for a writer, a house with three young children is a tough location to tune out the rest of the world. Here comes Griffin, 5, who shimmies aboard his father’s lap and begins to draw on the computer.

“I think for me, I like to be in the middle of everything,” says Levitan, who is working on the family sitcom “Oliver Beene” for Fox. “I like to be working with the family nearby.”

For screenwriter Chloe King, writing is centered around a much different sort of muse, in what used to be a dressing room. The walls of her home are filled with artwork of Adam and the notorious Eve.

“All drama is that story,” King says while surveying the collection of paintings.

“It’s about dealing with your demons. Temptation, shame, fear, guilt. In my opinion that is the devil,” says King, who worked on the “Red Shoe Diaries” series as well as “Poison Ivy II” and “B. Monkey.”

“The story of Adam and Eve is one of the greatest stories ever written,” King says.

It’s all about Eve here. And there are plenty of versions from which to choose. There’s blond Eve and brunette Eve. Cher Eve and peroxide Eve. There’s even an Eve hanging out at the Paradise Bar and Grill.

“I find a lot of them on EBay,” says King. On her Apple computer, of course.

Maybe productive writers don’t need any more room than anyone else. After all, screenwriter Tom Schulman, who won an Academy Award for “Dead Poets Society,” writes occasionally at the UCLA library.

“There’s some kind of professional memory at work,” concludes screenwriter David Freeman, author of “A Hollywood Education” and “One of Us.” “Writers want their work space to be lean, to remind them of their humble beginnings.”

Rintels believes that, in the end, it is familiarity, not lavish work space, that writers cherish.

In some cases, that might be a favorite desk, or in Rintels’ case, a Red Sox game crackling in the background, reminding him of his New England roots.

As further evidence, he recalls a story about William Faulkner. Unhappy with writing screenplays at the studio, Faulkner went to Jack Warner to see if he could write at home. Warner, notorious for treating writers poorly, agreed to the simple request.

“The next day, Faulkner went home,” Rintels says. “To Mississippi.”