I should have run the news yesterday that screenwriter-director Roger Avary has been sentenced to a year in jail for causing a car crash on 1.13.08 that resulted in the death of a friend, Andreas Zini. Avary, the director of Rules of Attraction and Killing Zoe and co-author of Pulp Fiction and Beowulf, pleaded guilty last August to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and other charges in the collision. He also got five years’ probation.

Avary’s attorney, Mark Werksman, told the L.A. Times that his client is heartbroken over the Zini family’s loss. “Roger Avary is a decent man and a good man who has always strived to do the right thing in his life,” Werksman said. “He never meant any harm to anyone, and this was just a terrible accident.”

I posted the following about Roger and his situation on 8.22.09, to wit: “My basic feeling is that after a certain interval of mourning and atonement, you have to move on and make the best of your life in the aftermath of such an event. A writer like Avary should use this tragedy as material. Sometime down the road he needs to write or create something from this.

“I only know that no single event defines a life and that the only way to deal with monumental tragedy is to say, ‘Yes, that happened and I’ll deal with it for the rest of my life, but we all need to turn the page and try to strike a match.'”