When Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA, was about to publish his new book “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms,” he had to get himself an agent, a notion that he has rejected doing for so long.

This triggered giggles and snickers from family and friends.

"Yeah, he finally got an agent. He is more Hollywood than we think," said a member of Winkler's family.

As the son of Academy Award-winning film producer, Irwin Winkler, Adam grew up in the limelight and used to play small parts in his father's movies as child, even as the son of Robert Deniro once. But such glamour did not appeal to him at all.

He has rejected Hollywood all these years.

He thinks movie sets are boring places, he feels that underneath the glamour sometimes Hollywood is not that nice, and he does not like the uncertainty there: even very successful people, like his father, an Academy Award-winning producer, are hunting for jobs all the time.

“Clearly I went as far in the other direction as you can go from Hollywood,” Winkler said. 

He chose to be a law professor at UCLA, teaching, researching and writing. He is now busy promoting his new book “Gunfight,” a book analyzing gun issues in America with vivid narration and impressive storytelling.

“There's something about storytelling. Whether you're making a movie or writing a book, that's really at the heart of the Winkler family,” said Arianna Huffington in a recent LA Times article.

Winkler thought it was possible that a trait from his father, a master storyteller, slipped in.

“I tried really to be a storyteller,” he commented on his new book, “I want to tell a story about the Second Amendment, about this landmark Supreme Court case, about our complicated secret history with guns.”

Although the book is friendly to average readers, Professor Winkler does have great ambitions. He wanted to clear the ground and be “intellectually honest.” Opposed to obsession with ideology, he agrees with neither right nor left. 

“So much of our culture makes judgment first, and then seek out the evidence to support that judgment. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about addressing issues or analyzing problems,” he said.

That was part of the reason that he went to law school and became a lawyer. He loves storytelling, but he also likes evidence and analysis. 

He worked on some high-profile cases right out of law school, like representing Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson, but he quickly discovered that academia was even more attractive than law practice.

“I took a job where you get tenure. You never have to find another job in your life,” he said.

Winkler is more than sure that he will stay where he is now and do what he is doing in the following 10 years. “I thought that school is just about the best place you could be. Why would you go out the real world when you could stay in school?”

But Winkler was not a stay-at-home person at all. He said he was once fascinated by the idea to go live abroad and work in different places. So he went to study foreign services at Georgetown so that he could join the CIA, but only to find out that the place he really wanted to be was at home in Los Angeles, and the thing he wanted to do was to learn about the stories of America through law practice.

This is also what he tried to achieve in his new book: to tell the stories related to gun issues that reveal the history of America and how the founding fathers expected the country to be.

Reach Reporter Kay here.