The Husband Hour(4)
On a Thursday at noon, his suite mates were all plugged into their headsets and staring at their computer screens. Matt made a cup of coffee at the community Keurig machine and booted up his machine. Fuck coffee—he needed a drink.
He set the box of doughnuts next to his computer. He figured if he was asking someone for a six-figure check, the least he could do was provide refreshments.
“I’m going to be in Brooklyn anyway, so it’s a good time to stop by,” Craig Mason had said, just like that. As if Matt hadn’t been asking him to look at his reel for six months.
The Rory Kincaid project had been a rough road. Matt sometimes wondered if he had bad karma due to how he’d handled things at the beginning. When it became his passion project, he dropped out of a film he had committed to directing. As a result, he ruined his relationship with Andrew Dobson, the producer who had backed his first two films. Matt’s reputation took a hit, and he suspected that was why he had failed to get a solid financial investment for the Rory Kincaid story; it had nothing to do with the merit of the project. So Matt put his own money into making the movie. Four years later, the money was gone, and he needed a financial lifeline.
But it wasn’t enough just to finance a movie and get it made; you had to be able to market it. Next winter would be the five-year anniversary of Rory Kincaid’s death. It felt crucial to secure distribution by that milestone.
He put on his headphones and clicked open a video of seventeen-year-old Rory Kincaid scoring a hat-trick goal for his high-school team. As the puck slid into the net, Rory reacted with his signature gesture, lifting both hands into the air, then pulling his left arm sharply in, bent at the elbow, his fist tight: score. Next, footage of commentators on CNN: “We have breaking news that former NHL star Rory Kincaid, who walked away from a reported seven-figure contract with the LA Kings to enlist in the military, has been killed in the line of duty.” Matt clicked through to footage of the memorial service. He moved forward through the frames, pausing on the widow standing against a backdrop of American flags next to a blown-up portrait of Rory in his U.S. Rangers uniform. The guy was so ruggedly handsome, he was like the person central casting sent over when you asked for “hero.”
Officers in full military dress flanked the flag-draped coffin in a procession out of the Staples Center. Behind them, the grieving widow walked as if she were wading through water.
A tap on his shoulder. Startled, he turned around. Craig Mason.
Craig Mason was a former Wall Street banker now in his mid-fifties and on his second career. “Second life” was how he had put it to Matt when they’d first met for drinks six months earlier.
“Hey, man,” Matt said, quickly closing the file and standing up. “Let me just find another chair.”
“Didn’t realize it was such tight real estate in here. Maybe we should have met at my office.”
“Not a problem,” Matt said, sliding a chair in front of his work space. Craig was busy looking at the two dozen index cards arranged on the corkboard above Matt’s desk that mapped out all the beats of the film American Hero: The Rory Kincaid Story.
Craig slid into the seat next to him.
“Doughnut?” Matt offered casually. As if he weren’t at the absolute end of the line.
Craig shook his head. “My new girlfriend is a Pilates instructor. The pressure is on. So, how much are we looking at?”
“Just the selects,” Matt said. “Some of the interviews, to give you a sense of where I’m at since we last spoke.”
“Sounds good,” Craig said.
Their first meeting, Craig had told Matt that he was at a stage of life where he wanted to do something “meaningful” with his hard-earned and considerable fortune. But Matt soon realized that even people with money to burn don’t want to burn it.
Still, there was glamour in feature films, and the promise of social progress with documentaries. For people like Craig Mason, that sometimes made films worth the gamble. He’d invested in two features and bought himself a ride to the award-season parties and red carpets. He’d put money into one documentary about clean water because that was his pet cause. But on that project, Craig had learned that documentaries don’t make money.
One of Matt’s buddies on the clean-water doc introduced Craig to Matt. But Craig was in no rush to fund a second documentary. During their initial meeting about American Hero, both of them drinking martinis at a gastro pub on the Upper East Side, Craig told Matt, “I’m just not feeling it on this one. I don’t see the urgency.”
American Hero was originally an examination of why some people answer the call to serve their country, and others don’t—viewed through the lens of the life of Rory Kincaid. But the film had morphed, changed, like a breathing entity. All Matt’s films felt alive to him, growing under his care and guidance. But none as much as this one.
He handed Craig headphones and they both plugged in so they wouldn’t disturb the other filmmakers in the room. Matt clicked on a file. He pressed Play, and an image of the entrance to Rory’s Pennsylvania high school, Lower Merion, filled the screen against the sound of the roar of a crowd. The camera closed in on the school’s motto carved in stone: ENTER TO LEARN, GO FORTH TO SERVE. Then a still photo of Rory, all blazing dark eyes, looking right at the camera. Then footage of the high-school coach. “How many thousands upon thousands of kids have walked through the doors of this school over the years, and how many have actually taken that motto to heart?” And then, video of Rory as a young teenager on the ice, racing toward the net. Voice-over, a woman: “Generations of Kincaids have served. World War Two. Korea. Vietnam. My older son, Emerson, served in the First Gulf War.” This from a sit-down with Rory’s mother that he’d luckily gotten before she passed away. Then the film cut to her. “Rory had a gift. He could skate fast and get the puck in the net. It’s as simple as that.” She pulled out a photo album and flipped through pictures of Rory as a boy, several of him on the ice, a few of him running around with a Rottweiler. “He named him Polaris,” she said. “What kind of name is that for a dog from a six-year-old boy? But he loved the stars.”