Jeff Hobbs, above, already has one loyal fan, at right, but will likely gain more when his novel, “The Tourists,” becomes a movie.

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As scribes go, the Los Angeles screenwriter — tanned, relaxed and nursing a decaf skim latte — is about as far from the serious, literary Brooklyn novelist as you can get. It speaks volumes about one local author, then, that he seems poised to find success in both worlds.

Jeff Hobbs, whose debut novel, “The Tourists,” was released in April, has been holed up in Los Angeles all summer writing the screenplay adaptation of his book.

“I thought it was really horrible [in L.A.] because it’s so just so nice and peaceful and doesn’t feel like there’s much stimulation,” Hobbs said last week. “When you walk around Brooklyn, you see really interesting things happening all the time, but in Los Angeles everyone is in his car, so when you walk around it’s basically you on the sidewalk and a few crazy people muttering to themselves.”

Local loons aside, he had persevered and was close to finished with his latest draft. And while the novel took a year and a half to write, Hobbs said that it wasn’t anything like preparing his story for the screen.

“I try to not be too precious about changing characters or plot points,” he said. “It’s a movie, and you can’t really pause, it has to keep happening. In the book, you can have longer stretches about the atmosphere or describing New York. But a movie has to be a lot punchier.”

Hobbs’s wife, Rebecca, is a producer on the film and knows that what works on the written page isn’t always fit for film. “Getting the story told without digression is difficult because he is so used to writing in a different format,” she said. “Jeff has a fabulous process for novel writing, but screenwriting has more of a focus on outlining and figuring out how to structurally make it work.”

To get into this screenwriter’s mindset, Hobbs watched movies with dialogue that he admired. “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to watch titles [comparable] to the way we see the movie working,” he said. “We watched an old, creepy Jeremy Irons movie called ‘Damage’ — there’s a whole genre of creepy Jeremy Irons movies. You watch a movie like that and get clues about how to convey tension and secrets.”

The story of “The Tourists” is full of both. Led by an unnamed narrator, it follows a group of college friends as their lives and limbs become intricately intertwined. The character-driven story could be a minefield for a first timer, but the film’s producers — even the ones who aren’t married to the author — have faith.

“We liked the idea [of Jeff writing] for a lot of reasons,” said Ian McGloin of Wild Child Films, one of the film’s producers. “We thought that the novel has a seductive voice and the best way to capture that would be with the person who actually put it to the page.”

Of course, even under the best circumstances, the finished film could be years away from your local theater. But the good news — for Hobbs and his readers — is that he’s comfortably back to novel-writing. “I am just about done [with his second novel] … probably within the week,” he said. “It’s about a man in his 70s whose wife has passed away. He’s a lonely guy and he meets this woman and gets engaged, and it’s about how his five daughters come home and deal with the wedding. It’s a little soapy, but it’s kind of about how people get.”

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper