Beautiful Ruins (6)

Sincerely,



James Pierce



Museum of American Screen Culture





Claire sits up. Holy shit. They’re going to offer her the job. Or are they? Talk more? They’ve already interviewed her twice; what can they possibly need to talk about? Is this it? Is today the day she gets to quit her dream job?

Claire is chief development assistant for the legendary film producer Michael Deane. The title’s phony—her job’s all assisting, no developing, and she’s nobody’s chief. She tends Michael’s whims. Answers his calls and e-mails, goes for his sandwiches and coffee. And mostly she reads for him: great herds of scripts and synopses, one-sheets and treatments—a stampede of material going nowhere.

She’d hoped for so much more when she quit her doctoral film studies program and went to work for the man who was known in the seventies and eighties as the “Deane of Hollywood.” She’d wanted to make movies—smart, moving films. But when she arrived three years ago, Michael Deane was in the worst slump of his career, with no recent credits save the indie zombie bomb Night Ravagers. In Claire’s three years, Deane Productions has made no other movies; in fact, its only production has been a single television program: the hit reality show and dating Web site Hookbook (Hookbook.net).

And with the monstrous success of that cross-media abomination, movies have become a fading memory at Deane Productions. Instead, Claire’s days are spent listening to TV pitches so offensive she fears she’s singlehandedly hastening the Apocalypse: Model Behavior (“We take seven models and put them in a frat house!”) and Nympho Night (“We film the dates of people diagnosed with sex addiction!”) and Drunk Midget House (“See, it’s a house . . . full of drunk midgets!”).

Michael’s constantly urging her to adjust her expectations, to set aside her highbrow pretensions, to accept the culture on its own terms, to expand her notions of what’s good. “If you want to make art,” he’s fond of saying, “go get a job at the Loov-ruh.”

So that’s what she did. A month ago, Claire applied for a job she saw posted on a Web site, for “a curator for a new private film museum.” And now, almost three weeks after her interview, the crisp businessmen on the museum’s board of directors appear to be close to offering her the job.

If it’s not a no-brainer, this decision is a quarter-brainer at most: their proposed Museum of American Screen Culture (MASC) will pay better, the hours will be better, and it’s certainly a better use of her master’s degree from UCLA in Moving Image Archive Studies. More than that, she thinks the job might allow her to feel like she’s actually using her brain again.

Michael is dismissive of this intellectual discontent of hers, insisting that she’s just paying her dues, that every producer spends a few years in the wilderness—that, in Michael’s clipped, inimitable lingo, she must “sift shit for the corn,” make her bones with a commercial success or ten so that she can later do the projects she loves. And so she finds herself here, at life’s big crossroad: stick it out with this crass career and her unlikely dream of one day making a great film, or take a quiet job cataloguing relics from a time when film actually mattered?

Faced with such decisions (college, boyfriends, grad school), Claire has always been a pro-con lister, a seeker of signs, a deal-maker—and she makes a deal with herself now, or with Fate: Either a good, viable film idea walks in the door today—or I quit.

This deal, of course, is rigged. Convinced that the money is all in TV now, Michael hasn’t liked a single film pitch, script, or treatment in two years. And everything she likes he dismisses as too expensive, too dark, too period, not commercial enough. As if that didn’t make the odds long enough, today is Wild Pitch Friday: the last Friday of the month, set aside for off-the-rack pitches from Michael’s old cronies and colleagues, from every burned-out, played-out has-been and never-was in town. And on this particular Wild Pitch Friday, both Michael and his producing partner, Danny Roth, have the day off. Today—psst hey—she has all these shit pitches to herself.

Claire glances down at Daryl, snoozing in the bed next to her. She twinges guilt for not talking to him about the museum job; this is partly because he’s been out late almost every night, partly because they haven’t been talking much anyway, partly because she’s thinking of quitting him, too.

“So?” she says quietly. Daryl makes a deep-sleep noise—something between a grunt and a peep. “Yeah,” she says, “that’s what I figured.”

She rises and stretches, starts for the bathroom. But on the way she pauses over Daryl’s jeans, which sit like a resting dancer on the floor right where he’s stepped out of them—Psst don’t, the sprinklers warn—but what choice does she have, really—a young woman at the crossroads, on the lookout for signs? She bends, picks up the jeans, goes through the pockets: six singles, coins, a book of matches, and . . . ah, here it is: A punch card for something charmingly called ASSTACULAR: THE SOUTHLAND’S FINEST IN LIVE NUDE ENTERTAINMENT. Daryl’s diversion. She turns the card over. Claire doesn’t have much of an instinct for the gradations of the adult entertainment industry, but she imagines the employment of punch cards doesn’t exactly distinguish ASSTACULAR as the Four Seasons of titty bars. Oh, and look: Daryl is just two punches from a free lap dance. How excellent for him! She leaves the card next to the snoring Daryl, on her pillow, in the indentation left by her head.