Former Lawyer Raises Games

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Typically one of the biggest challenges in writing a book is finding a publisher. But that was the easy part for Barry Sanders.

Out of the blue, he received a call last year from Arcadia Publishing asking him to write a pictorial history of the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

“When the publisher came to me, of course I said yes,” said Sanders, a former lawyer and current city parks department chairman who’s now heading the effort to bring the 2024 Olympics to Los Angeles.

Sanders, 68, expected it would be relatively simple. After all, as principal attorney for the 1984 games, he has access to an archive of photos.

But the task quickly proved challenging. He could not determine how many of the photos of the 1932 games still had copyright protection, so he dropped the ’32 Olympics from the project.

Then Sanders had to sift through nearly 60,000 photos of the 1984 games, all in slide format and many poorly indexed. Once he had chosen the 200 photos for the book, he had to write a narrative and captions.

“It was like writing a graphic novel,” he said.

Of course, there were the iconic photos, such as gymnast Mary Lou Retton coming off the vault. But one photo that stood out was a fundraiser in the 1950s at the famed Biltmore Hotel to launch one of the many drives to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles.

“There was this dessert item on the menu – it looked like some sort of flambé – but it was called ‘Bomb Olympique.’ Needless to say, times have changed,” he said.

The book, “The Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games,” is set for publication next month; Sanders said he expects to appear at several local book signing events over the next few months.

Attorney Booked Up

Trial attorney Vince Green, a partner at Kaufman Dolowich & Voluck in Brentwood, considers himself a storyteller, both on and off the job.

“When you get in front of a jury, you’re telling a story,” he said.

And Green, 59, argues that writing fiction isn’t much different.

In addition to his courtroom cases, he’s spent the last seven years writing a novel, “Conduct Unbecoming.” It’s about a high-powered entertainment attorney in Los Angeles who is forced to defend someone he hates: a military judge accused of a grisly murder.

The novel, which Green recently submitted to an agent, is his third. Each was informed at least in part by experiences he had as a lawyer in the Army, defending more than 200 soldiers at courts-martial.

Green said he hopes his storytelling skills will one day take on even more media. Earlier this year he hired an artist from Indonesia to help him put together a graphic novel called “Strip Mall Legal.” The ultimate goal for that project, he said, would be to film the story as a television pilot.

“To me, (storytelling) is a global thing I do,” he said.


Staff reporters Howard Fine and Bethany Firnhaber contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

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