Echo Park’s star turn, again

Echo Park is at least a half-hipster hipster neighborhood now, but what it was when Brando Skyhorse was growing up there was quite different: one of the working-class parts of town ringing Dodger Stadium, home to a lot of Latinos, among them Skyhorse’s family.

I talked to him a while back about his novel “The Madonnas of Echo Park,” and just popped off an email to him this week to congratulate him on the news that HBO is working on making “Madonnas” into a dramatic series.

There’s already my old L.A. Times colleague Michael Connelly’s novel “Echo Park,” and a film “Echo Park” about 20 years before that -- one that was pretty much devoid of a big Latino component, from what I can find out about it.

So for me the big question of films about places is whether they’re made in those places. They shot “Cold Mountain,” a Civil War novel, in Romania. Where will this latest account of one of the most authentic of L.A. neighborhoods be shot? Oye, if HBO doesn’t wind up filming at least some of “The Madonnas of Echo Park” in that yclept urban ‘burb itself, there’s likely to be a bit of a stink, from City Hall to Stadium Way.

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