Beautiful Ruins (3 page)

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.”

C
laire’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!