by Jess Walter
And that’s when a single wistful thought escapes her otherwise made-up mind: a wish, or maybe a prayer, that amid today’s crap she might hear just one . . . decent . . . pitch—one idea for a great film—so she won’t have to quit the only job she’s ever wanted in her entire life.
Outside, the sprinklers spit laughter against the rock garden.
Also naked, eight hundred miles away in Beaverton, Oregon, Claire’s last appointment of the day, her four P.M., can’t decide what to wear. Not quite thirty, Shane Wheeler is tall, lean, and a little feral-looking, narrow face framed by an ocean-chop of brown hair and two table-leg sideburns. For twenty minutes, Shane has been coaxing an outfit from this autumn-leaf pile of discarded clothes: wrinkly polos, quirky secondhand Ts, faux Western button shirts, boot-cut jeans, skinny jeans, torn jeans, slacks, khakis, and cords, none of it quite right for the too-talented-to-care nonchalance he imagines is appropriate for his first-ever Hollywood pitch meeting.
Shane absentmindedly rubs the tattoo on his left forearm, the word ACT inked in elaborate gangster calligraphy, a reference to his father’s favorite Bible passage and, until recently, Shane’s life motto—Act as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you.
His was an outlook fed by years of episodic TV, by encouraging teachers and counselors, by science-fair ribbons, participant medals, and soccer and basketball trophies—and, most of all, by two attentive and dutiful parents, who raised their five perfect children with the belief—hell, with the birthright—that as long as they had faith in themselves, they could be anything they wanted to be.
So in high school, Shane acted as if he were a distance runner and lettered twice, acted as if he were an A student and pulled them, acted as if a certain cheerleader was in his wheelhouse and she asked him to a dance, acted as if he were a shoo-in for Cal-Berkeley and got in and for Sigma Nu and they pledged him, acted as if he spoke Italian and studied abroad for a year, acted as if he were a writer and got accepted to the University of Arizona’s MFA creative writing program, acted as if he were in love and got married.
But recently, fissures have appeared in this philosophy—faith proving to be not nearly enough—and it was in the run-up to his divorce that his soon-to-be ex-wife (So tired of your shit, Shane . . .) dropped a bombshell: the Bible phrase he and his father endlessly quoted, “Act as if ye have faith . . . ,” never actually appears in the Bible. Rather, as far as she could tell, it came from the closing argument given by the Paul Newman character in the film The Verdict.
This revelation didn’t cause Shane’s trouble, but the news did seem to explain it somehow. This is what happens when your life is authored not by God but by David Mamet: you can’t find a teaching job and your marriage dissolves just as your student loans come due and the project you’ve worked on for six years, your MFA thesis—a book of linked short stories called Linked—is rejected by the literary agent you’ve secured (Agent: This book doesn’t work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English). Divorced, jobless, and broke, his literary ambition scuttled, Shane saw his decision to become a writer as a six-year detour to nowhere. He was in the first funk of his life, unable to even get out of bed without ACT to spur him on. It fell to his mother to yank him out of it, convincing him to go on antidepressants and hopefully rescuing the blithely confident young man she and his father had raised.
“Look, it’s not like we were a religious family anyway. We only went to church on Christmas and Easter. So your dad got that saying from a thirty-year-old movie instead of a two-thousand-year-old book? That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, does it? In fact, maybe that makes it more true.”
Inspired by his mother’s deep faith in him, and by the low dose of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor he’d recently begun taking, Shane had what could only be described as an epiphany:
Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway—its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it! That summer, the one you’ll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images—the same Avatar, same Harry Potter, same Fast and the Furious, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion?
Also, movies paid better than books.
And so Shane decided to take his talents to Hollywood. He started by contacting his old writing professor, Gene Pergo, who had tired of being a teacher and ignored essayist and had written a thriller called Night Ravagers (hot-rodding zombies cruise postapocalyptic Los Angeles looking for human survivors to enslave), selling the film rights for more than he’d made in a decade of academia and small-house publishing, and quitting his teaching job midsemester. At the time, Shane was in the second year of his MFA, and Gene’s defection was what passed for scandal in the program—faculty and students alike huffing at the way Gene shat all over the cathedral of literature.
Shane tracked Professor Pergo down in LA, where he was adapting the second book of what was now a trilogy—Night Ravagers 2: Streets of Reckoning (3-D). Gene said that in the last two years, he’d heard from “roughly every student and colleague I ever worked with”; those most scandalized by his literary abdication had been the first to call. Gene gave Shane the name of a film agent, Andrew Dunne, and the titles of screenwriting books by Syd Field and Robert McKee, and, best of all, the chapter on pitching from the producer Michael Deane’s inspiring autobiography, The Deane’s Way: How I Pitched Modern Hollywood to America and How You Can Pitch Success Into Your Life Too. It was a line in Deane’s book—“In the room the only thing you need to believe is yourself. YOU are your story”—that had Shane recalling his old ACT self-confidence, honing his pitch, looking for apartments in LA, even phoning his old literary agent. (Shane: I thought you should know, I am officially done with books. Agent: I’ll inform the Nobel Committee.)
And today it all pays off, with Shane’s first-ever pitch to a Hollywood producer, and not just any producer, but Michael Deane himself—or at least Deane’s assistant, Claire Somebody. Today, with Claire Somebody’s help, Shane Wheeler takes the first step out of the dank closet of books into the brightly lit ballroom of film—
As soon as he figures out what to wear.
As if on cue, Shane’s mother calls down the stairs: “Your dad’s ready to take you to the airport.” When he doesn’t answer, she tries again: “You don’t want to be late, honey.” Then: “I made French toast.” And: “Are you still deciding what to wear?”
“Just a minute!” Shane calls, and in a burst of frustration—mostly with himself—he kicks at the pile of clothes. In the ensuing explosion of fabric, the perfect outfit seems to float in midair: whisker-washed boot-cut denims and a double-yoke Western snap shirt. Perfect with his double-buckle biker boots. Shane dresses quickly, turns to the mirror, and rolls his sleeve so he can just see the right cross of the T in his tattoo. “Now,” Shane Wheeler says to his dressed self, “let’s go pitch a movie.”
Claire’s Coffee Bean is crowded at seven thirty, every table sporting a sullen white screenwriter in glasses, every pair of glasses aimed at a Mac Pro laptop, every Mac Pro open to a digitized Final Draft script—every table, that is, but the small one in back, where two crisp businessmen in gray suits face an empty chair meant for her.
Claire strides over, her skirt drawing the eyes of the Coffee Bean screenwriters. She hates heels, feels like a shoed horse. She arrives and smiles as they stand. “Hello, James. Hello, Bryan.”
They sit and apologize for taking so long to get back to her, but the rest is just as she imagined—great résumé, wonderful references, impressive interview.
They’ve met with the full museum planning board, and after much deliberation (they offered it to someone who passed, she figures) they’ve decided to offer her the job. And with that James nods at Bryan, who slides a manila envelope forward on the little round table. Claire picks up the envelope, opens it a bit, just enough to see the words “Confidentiality Agreement.” Before she can go further, James puts out a cautioning hand. “There is one thing you should know before you look at our offer,” he says, and for the first time one of them breaks eye contact: Bryan, looking around the room to see who might be listening.
Shit. Claire riffles through worst-case scenarios: The pay is in cocaine; she has to kill the interim curator first; it’s a porn film museum—
Instead, James says, “Claire, how much do you know about Scientology?”
Ten minutes later—having begged the weekend to think over their generous offer—Claire is driving to work, thinking: This doesn’t change anything, does it? Okay, so her dream film museum is a front for a cult—wait, that’s not fair. She knows Scientologists and they’re no more cultish than the stiff Lutherans on her mother’s side or her father’s secular Jews. But isn’t that how it will be perceived? That she’s managing a museum full of the shit Tom Cruise couldn’t unload at his garage sale?
James insisted that the museum would have no connection to the church, except to provide initial funding; that the collection would start with the donations of some church members, but the vast majority of the museum would be up to her to build. “This is the church’s way of giving back to an industry that nourished our members for years,” Bryan said. And they loved her ideas—interactive CG exhibits for kids, a Silent Film vault, a rotating weekly film series, a dedicated film festival each year. She sighs; of all the things they could be, why Scientologists?
Claire mulls as she drives, zombie-like—all basic animal reflex. Her commute to the studio is a second-nature maze of cut-offs and lane changes, shoulders, commuter lanes, residential streets, alleys, bike lanes, and parking lots, devised to get her to the studio each day precisely eighteen minutes after she leaves her condo.
With a nod to the security guard, she drives through the studio gate and parks. She grabs her bag and walks toward the office, even her footfalls deliberating (quit, stay, quit, stay). Michael Deane Productions is housed in an old writer’s bungalow on the Universal lot, wedged between soundstages, offices, and film sets. Michael doesn’t work for the studio anymore, but he made so much money for it in the 1980s and 1990s that they’ve agreed to keep him around, a scythe on the wall of a tractor plant. The lot office is part of a first-look production deal Michael signed a few years back when he needed cash, giving the studio the first crack at whatever he produced (not much, as it turned out).
Inside the office, Claire turns on the lights, slides behind her desk, and switches on her computer. She goes straight to the Thursday night box-office numbers, early openers, and weekend holdovers, looking for some sign of hope that she might have missed, a last-second break in trend—but the numbers show what they’ve shown for years: it’s all kid stuff, all presold comic-book sequel 3-D CGI crap, all within a range of algorithmic box-office projections based on past-performance-trailer-poster-foreign-market-test-audience reaction. Movies are nothing more than concession-delivery now, ads for new toys, video game launches. Adults will wait three weeks to get a decent film on demand, or they’ll watch smart TV—and so what passes for theatrical releases are hopped-up fantasy video games for gonad-swollen boys and their bulimic dates. Film—her first love—is dead.
She can pinpoint the day she fell: 1992, May 14, one A.M., two days before her tenth birthday, when she heard what sounded like laughter in the living room, and came out of her bedroom to find her father crying and nursing a tall glass of something dark, watching an old movie on TV—C’mere, Punkin—Claire sitting next to him as they quietly watched the last two-thirds of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Claire was amazed at the life she was seeing on that little screen, as if she’d imagined it without ever knowing. This was the power of film: it was like déjà vu dreaming. Three weeks later, her father left the family to marry chesty Leslie, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of his former law partner, but in Claire’s mind it would always be Holly Golightly who stole her daddy.
We belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us.
She studied film at a small design school, then got her master’s at UCLA, and was headed straight into the doctoral program there when two things revealed themselves in rapid succession. First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette’s chew toy alone—)
Recalling her Breakfast at Tiffany’s ambition, Claire quit her doctoral program and ventured out of the cloistered academic world to take one shot at making films rather than simply studying them.
She started by applying to one of the big talent agencies, the agent who interviewed her barely glancing at her three-page CV before saying, “Claire, do you know what coverage is?” The agent spoke as if Claire were a six-year-old, explaining that Hollywood was “a very busy place,” people attended by agents, managers, accountants, and lawyers. Publicists handled images, assistants ran errands, groundskeepers mowed lawns, maids cleaned houses, au pairs raised kids, dog walkers walked dogs. And each day these busy people got stacks of scripts and books and treatments; didn’t it make sense that they’d need help with those, too? “Claire,” the agent said, “I’m going to let you in on a secret: No one here reads.”
Having seen a number of recent movies, Claire didn’t think that was a secret.
But she kept that answer to herself and became a coverage reader, writing summaries of books, scripts, and treatments, comparing them with hit movies, grading the characters, dialogue, and commercial potential, allowing agents and their clients to seem as if they’d not only read the material but taken a grad-level seminar on it:
Title: SECOND PERIOD: DEATH
Genre: YOUNG ADULT HORROR
Logline: The Breakfast Club meets Nightmare on Elm Street in SECOND PERIOD: DEATH, the story of a group of students who must battle a deranged substitute teacher who may in fact be a vampire . . .
Then, only three months into the job, Claire was reading a middlebrow bestseller, some big gothic chub of sentimentality, and she got to the ridiculous deus ex machina ending (a windstorm dislodges a power pole and an electrical line whips the villain’s face) and she just . . . changed it. It was as simple as being in a clothing store, seeing an uneven stack of sweaters, and just straightening them. In her synopsis, she gave the heroine a part in her own rescue and thought nothing more about it.
But two days later, she got a call. “This is Michael Deane,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “Do you know who I am?”
Of course she did, although she was surprised to hear that he was still alive: the man once referred to as “the Deane of Hollywood,” a man who’d had a hand in some of the biggest films of the late twentieth century—all those mobsters, monsters, and meet-cute romances—a former studio executive and capital-P Producer from an era when that title meant a fit-throwing, career-making, actress-bagging, coke-snorting player.
“And you,” he said, “are the coverage girl who just fixed the bound pile of shit I paid a hundred K for.” And like that, she had a job, on a studio lot of all places, with Michael Deane of all people, as his chief development assistant, personally assigned to help Michael “get my ass back in the game.”
At first, she loved her new job. After the slog of grad school, it was thrilling—the meetings, the buzz. Every day, scripts came in, and treatments and books. And the pitches! She loved the pitches—So there’s this guy and he wakes to find that his wife’s a vampire—writers and producers sweeping into the office (bottled water for everyone!) to share their visions—Over credits we see
an alien ship and we cut to this guy, sitting at a computer—and even after she realized these pitches were going nowhere, Claire still enjoyed them. Pitching was a form unto itself, a kind of existential, present-tense performance art. It didn’t matter how old the story was: they’d pitch a film about Napoleon in the present tense, a caveman movie, even the Bible: So there’s this guy, Jesus, and one day he rises from the dead . . . like a zombie—
Here she was, barely twenty-eight, working on a studio lot, not doing what she’d dreamed, exactly, but doing what people did in this business: taking meetings, reading scripts, and hearing pitches—pretending to like everything while finding myriad reasons to make nothing. And then the worst possible thing happened: success—
She can still hear the pitch: It’s called Hookbook. It’s like a video Facebook for hookups. Anyone who posts a video on the site is also auditioning for our TV show. We snatch up the best-looking, horniest people, film their dates, and follow the whole thing: hookups, breakups, weddings. Best of all, it casts itself. We don’t pay anyone a cent!
Michael set up the show at a secondary cable channel, and just like that he had his first hit in a decade, a steaming pile of TV/Web synchronicity that Claire can’t bear to watch. Michael Deane was back! And Claire saw why people worked so hard to not get things made—because once you did one thing, that became your thing, the only thing you were capable of doing. Now Claire spends her days listening to pitches for Eat It (obese people racing to eat huge meals) and Rich MILF, Poor MILF (horny middle-aged women set up on dates with horny young men).
It’s gotten so bad she’s started to actually look forward to Wild Pitch Fridays, the one day she still might listen in on a random pitch for a film. Unfortunately, most of these Friday pitches come from Michael’s past: people he’s met in AA, people he owes favors to, or who owe him favors, people he sees at the club, old golf partners, old coke dealers, women he slept with in the sixties and seventies, men he slept with in the eighties, friends of ex-wives and of his three legitimate children or of his three older, less-than-legitimate ones, his doctor’s kid, his gardener’s kid, his pool boy’s kid, his kid’s pool boy.