Beautiful Ruins (65)

“My parents tried everything. Therapists and psychologists, inpatient treatment. My ex thinks that’s when they really started becoming so overprotective—I don’t know. What I remember is lying in bed one night and hearing my mom weep and my father trying to comfort her, Mom just saying over and over, ‘My baby is starving to death.’ ” Shane still has the sock in his hand, but he doesn’t put it on. He just stares at it.

“What happened?” Claire asks quietly.

“Hmm?” He looks up. “Oh, she’s fine now. The treatment clicked or something, I guess. Olivia just . . . got over it. She’s still got some food hang-ups—she’s the sister who never brings food for Thanksgiving, always makes a centerpiece instead. Little pumpkins. Cornucopias. And don’t even mention the word brownie around her. But she came out okay. Married this jackass, but they’re happy enough. Have two kids. The funny thing is . . . the rest of my family never talks about that time. Even Olivia shakes off that whole period like it was nothing. ‘My skinny years,’ she calls them.

“But I never got over it. When I was seven or eight, I’d lie awake at night, praying that if God would make Olivia better, I’d go to church, become a minister . . . something. And so when it didn’t happen right away—you know how kids are—I blamed myself, connected my sister’s starving to my own lack of faith.”

He stares off, rubs the inside of his arm. “By high school, Olivia was fine, and I was over my religious phase. But after that, I was always fascinated by stories of starvation and deprivation. I read everything I could find, did my school reports on the siege of Leningrad and the Potato Famine . . . I especially liked stories of cannibalism: the Uruguayan rugby team, Alfred Packer, the Maori . . . and of course the Donner Party.”

Shane looks down and sees the sock in his hands. “I guess I identified with poor William Eddy, who escaped himself, but who could do nothing while his family starved in that awful camp.” He absentmindedly puts the sock on. “So when I read in Michael Deane’s book how pitching a movie is all about believing in yourself, pitching yourself—it was like a vision: I knew exactly the story I needed to pitch.”

A vision? Believing in yourself? Claire looks down, wondering if this Just-Do-It-Dude confidence is what Michael was actually responding to yesterday. And what had attracted her last night. Hell, maybe they can make Donner! based on nothing more than this kid’s passion for it. Passion: another word that sticks in her throat.

Claire glances back down at her BlackBerry and sees an e-mail from Michael’s producing partner, Danny Roth. The subject line is Donner! Michael must have called Danny about Shane’s pitch. She wonders if Danny talked some sense into Michael. She opens the e-mail, written in the tortured, hurried, moronic, electronic shorthand that Danny somehow believes is saving him great amounts of time:

C—Rbrt says your setting up pitch for Unvsl Mnday on Donner. Has to look gd, re: contract. See if writr has storybords or bakstory, anthing that looks lk wre furthr down the road. Straigt faces. Danny





She looks up at Shane, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her. She looks back down at Danny’s e-mail. Has to look gd . . . Why would it look good and not be good? And storyboards to make it look like they’re further down the road? Straight faces? Then she recalls Michael’s boast yesterday: I’m going to pitch an eighty-million-dollar movie about frontier cannibalism.

“Ah, shit,” she says.

“Another text from your boyfriend?”

Would they really do this? She recalls Danny and Michael talking about the lawyers looking for a way out of Michael’s contract with Universal. What a stupid question: of course they would do this. They would never not do this. This is what they do. Claire’s hand comes to her temple.

“What?” Shane stands and she looks over at him, his big doe eyes and those bushy sideburns framing his face. “Are you okay?”

Claire considers not telling him, letting him have his weekend of triumph. She could just put on blinders and finish out the weekend, help Michael with his doomed pitch and his missing actress, then on Monday accept the cult museum job . . . start stocking up on cat food. But Shane is staring at her with those moon-eyes, and she realizes that she likes him and that if she’s ever going to break away it has to be now.

“Shane, Michael has no intention of making your movie.”

“What?” He laughs a little. “What are you talking about?”

She sits on the bed next to him and explains the whole thing, as she sees it now, starting with the deal Michael made with the studio—how, at the low point of his career, the studio took on some of Michael’s debt in exchange for the rights to some of his old films. “There were two other parts to the deal,” she says. “Michael got an office on the lot. And the studio got a first-look deal, meaning that Michael had to show them all of his ideas and he could only go to other studios if they passed. Well, the first-look was a joke. For five years the studio rejected every script Michael brought in. And when he took those scripts and treatments and books out to other studios—if you already know that Universal has rejected an idea, why would you ever want it?

“Then came Hookbook. When Michael started developing that idea, he figured a reality show and Web site was beyond the scope of his contract, which he assumed was for film development only. But it turned out the contract stipulated the studio got the first shot at all material ‘developed in any media.’ Here was Michael, with this potentially huge unscripted TV business, and it turned out the studio basically owned it.”