My very first morning in residence as a homeowner in the Malibu Colony, I was out on the street with my dogs when three surfers approached from the lagoon side, wetsuits peeled to their waists, carrying their boards. I recognized some new neighbors—Edward Norton, Jonah Hill, and Flea. Norton greeted me—we live in the same building in New York, and I’d run into him during a recent stay in the Colony, while I was visiting a friend. He has a house here—an architectural landmark designed by John Lautner—as do the other two. I returned the greeting as the trio ambled down the road past Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s house. Such was my welcome to the Colony—a mile-long stretch of houses on a south-facing beach, sealed off from the real world behind a guardhouse.
If the Colony, once known as the Malibu Movie Colony, is no longer the exclusive preserve of Hollywood’s upper echelons, as it was in its founding years, nor as raffish and bohemian as it was in the 1960s and ’70s, when it was the seaside outpost of the Laurel Canyon rock and roll scene, it still has more than a vestige of the communal and offbeat vibe that attracted rock stars and directors and screenwriters. It has long been the beach-community equivalent of the Chateau Marmont—which was my home away from home when I toiled as a screenwriter in the ’90s—a refuge for the nonconformists and the outlaws of the entertainment world.
An investment banker acquaintance of mine, hearing that my wife and I had bought in the Colony, expressed his surprise, exclaiming that the houses there were cheek by jowl,
