We first meet George Curtis, the protagonist of Patrick Nathan’s “The Future Was Color,” as he steps out of a movie theater into an autumn day in 1956 Los Angeles, a city where “a road named after a flower meets another named after a crook,” a city, George observes, where “most of the Americans ...
seemed seduced.” Curtis makes his living as a Hollywood screenwriter, penning B-horror movies filled with irradiated mutants and monsters. The inspiration for George, Patrick Nathan told The Times during a leisurely chat via video call from his home in Minneapolis, came from his time spent at a local diner, Bad Waitress.
“I went there for years and wrote a lot of work there,” he says. Dozens of old movie posters, especially science fiction, adorned its walls. “One day, I was really bored waiting for my food, and I was reading the tiny print at the bottom of a poster for the 1958 film ‘ Earth vs.
the Spider. ’ And the screenplay was attributed to László Görög.” Although George isn’t based on Görög, Nathan says it was immediately apparent that as a Hungarian living in Hollywood, he must have been a war émigré.
“It got me thinking about what it would be like to leave a very cosmopolitan city [like Budapest] and go to this beautiful but backwatery town that basically has one industry.” Nathan took inspiration from that single name and delivered a riveting novel that explores basic existential questions ranging from “What is life’s pur.