By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, July 2012
In mid-July 2012, OC Weekly’s Nick Schou published a cover-story interview with Don Winslow timed to the release of Oliver Stone’s Savages — the film adaptation of Winslow’s Laguna Beach drug-dealing-circle novel. The Schou piece included Winslow’s account of writing his 1997 debut novel The Death and Life of Bobby Z during his Metrolink commute between San Juan Capistrano and downtown LA’s Union Station — chapter per leg, two chapters per day, wrapped up when the conductor announced “Union Station, ten minutes.” The original FishbowlLA framing pushed the OC Weekly piece as a must-read.
Then
Don Winslow had been one of the more durable LA-and-Orange-County crime-fiction writers across the 2000s prior to the 2012 Savages release. His Laguna Beach-and-Mexican-cartel narrative arc — running across The Power of the Dog, The Winter of Frankie Machine, Savages, The Kings of Cool, and other related works — had built a substantial critical reputation and steady commercial sales.
The Savages film release — Oliver Stone’s adaptation starring Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, John Travolta, and Benicio del Toro — was scheduled to land in early July 2012. The Kings of Cool, the prequel novel that Winslow had finished just before the film, was being released into the same theatrical-window cultural moment.
Nick Schou had been one of OC Weekly’s most-bylined long-form writers for years. His subject-matter expertise on Orange County crime, drug-trade history, and the broader Southern California-Mexican-cartel-corridor reporting made him the natural OC Weekly point-person for a Don Winslow feature.
The Metrolink-commute origin story for Bobby Z — Winslow writing chapter-by-train-leg on his day-job commute — was the kind of writer-process anecdote that captures the small documented mechanics of how a particular career trajectory got built. The original FBLA framing by Richard Horgan was admiring; the piece treated the Schou-Winslow conversation as substantive long-form alt-weekly arts-coverage at its best.
Now
Don Winslow continued writing into 2022, when he announced retirement from fiction to focus full-time on anti-Trump political activism. His final fiction trilogy — City on Fire (2021), City of Dreams (2023), and City in Ruins (2024) — closed out a career that had spanned more than two dozen novels. The retirement-into-activism turn has been one of the more substantive recent crime-writer second-act transitions.
The Savages film, despite the high-profile Oliver Stone direction and stacked cast, was a modest commercial-and-critical performer. It grossed about $83 million worldwide on a $45 million budget; reviews were mixed. The Kings of Cool prequel did not produce a sustained sequel-film trajectory.
Nick Schou continued at OC Weekly through the 2019 shutdown and has continued in long-form journalism at various subsequent outlets, including the Voice of OC nonprofit and book-length work (Kill the Messenger, his Gary Webb biography, was adapted to film in 2014).
OC Weekly itself shut down in November 2019 — one of the more substantial Voice Media Group alt-weekly closures of the late-2010s contraction cycle. The kind of substantive long-form arts-and-culture coverage the 2012 Schou-Winslow piece represented has been substantially reduced in the post-2019 Orange County media landscape.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of OC Weekly long-form alt-weekly arts coverage operating at full capacity — a Don Winslow at the peak of his career, an Oliver Stone film release providing the news peg, and a Nick Schou interview producing the kind of writer-process disclosure that gets cited across subsequent profile work. Winslow’s Metrolink-commute Bobby Z origin story has become one of the more-repeated anecdotes in the writer’s broader public record.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.