Beautiful Ruins (9)
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—