Barefoot In The City Of Broken Dreams Part 20

"Enough of what?" I said.

"The bulls.h.i.t, I guess. Bryce was sure right about him."

"About what? What bulls.h.i.t? When did all this happen?" But I already knew part of the answer. I'd seen some of it myself.

"Oh, G.o.d, where to start?" the guy said. "I guess it's been going on since the beginning. I don't even know the whole story - I was just the casting director. Look, I don't want to tell you what to do, but you need to get the h.e.l.l out. Brander's a crazy old man."

The black hole in my stomach? Somehow it was sucking my whole body in, so fast I didn't even feel the pain.

"Sorry to lay this on you all of a sudden," the casting director was saying, even as concern washed down his face. He looked at Kevin. "Is he going to be okay?"

"Yeah," Kevin said. "He's fine. Thanks for telling us. Nice to meet you."

I guess I'd suddenly gone sort of catatonic, but I saw the casting director walking away, giving me another concerned glance or two, and I felt Kevin pulling me down the street, toward something, I don't know what. What had we been doing? What city were we in again?

"Russel? Talk to me," I heard Kevin say to me, once we were underground, in the subway station, waiting for the red line to take us back to our apartment in Hollywood. "Tell me you're okay."

Finally, I managed to speak. "I need to call Mr. Brander." I fumbled for my phone. "I need to find out what's happening."

"Russel, maybe-"

"d.a.m.n it!" This far underground, there wasn't any reception.

I turned for the exit, but Kevin stopped me. "Come on, let's wait till we get home." I didn't want to wait, but the train was arriving, and somehow Kevin pulled me onto it.

I didn't say anything the whole ride back, just let the train jerk and jostle me.

When we were up out of the subway station again, Kevin said, "You can call him now."

"No," I said softly, evenly. "I'm going over there. I need to talk to him in person."

"Russel, I'm sorry. I tried to tell you."

I whipped back at him. "Really? Now?"

"I just meant-"

"I know what you meant! You were right all along, and I was an idiot."

"No, I-"

I started up the hill to our apartment.

"Russel!" Kevin called after me, but I ignored him. I was already running for our car.

I drove over to Mr. Brander's house. It was a Sat.u.r.day, so the traffic on Sunset Boulevard wasn't actually that heavy, but I had somewhere to be, somewhere I needed to get to fast, and I couldn't believe how pokey everyone else was being.

An Infiniti hybrid stopped at an intersection right in front of me, even though it totally could've made the yellow light - and then I could've made the light after him.

"Oh, please," I muttered.

A black Tesla tried to pull out from a parking spot right in front of me, expecting me to stop for it.

I laid on the horn.

A Mazda convertible slowed to let a pa.s.senger out, but they hadn't even pulled over to the curb.

"Get out of the f.u.c.king street!" I yelled.

It wasn't until I was almost to Mr. Brander's house that I realized what I was doing - that I'd become an a.s.shole driver just like everyone else in Los Angeles. When had that happened? I hadn't even noticed it.

I parked the car on the street, but I wasn't about to wait for anyone to buzz me in. I walked past the intercom right up to the gate itself. I jostled it some, but it didn't open, so I climbed over it and jumped down to the other side.

I walked straight to the front door, and I was on the verge of barging my way in. I had left my car behind, but I still had road rage.

The door opened before I could touch it.

Lewis peered out at me from the darkness, guarded, wary.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?" I said.

"You'll have to talk to Mr. Brander," he said. But to his credit, he opened the door wider and sort of nodded me toward the office.

I lowered my voice. I was still angry, but not necessarily at Lewis.

"Please," I said. "Just tell me what's going on."

I was standing there in the dark of that foyer, in that house made of wood and dust. My eyes still hadn't adjusted, but I could make out the whites of Lewis' eyes. They locked onto me.

"Russel, I'm really sorry," he said. "I wanted to tell you the truth at the very start. That first day when I overheard what you said about interracial casting? And not just that. You didn't deserve this. No one does. But, well, Mr. Brander pays me, so it didn't feel right. Plus, I'm a screenwriter too, and I really need this job."

Lewis was trying to make it as a screenwriter? Somehow this figured. I thought back to the night of the dinner party, when I'd thought Lewis had been trying to tell me he and Mr. Brander were a couple. That wasn't it, I realized. What had he wanted to say? What exactly was he trying to tell me now?

"He's done this before, hasn't he?" I said to Lewis, suddenly understanding. "Mr. Brander brings in a writer, tells him he's going to produce a movie based on his screenplay, gets them all excited. But it doesn't ever happen."

I don't know how I knew this, that this wasn't the first time Mr. Brander had done this. But I knew in my bones he had.

"How many times?" I asked.

Lewis hesitated. My eyes had adjusted at last, and I could see him clearly now.

"Three times before," he said. "Maybe more before I got here."

It wasn't ever real, I thought. It had always seemed too good to be true, because it was.

"So he just pretends to set up movie deals?" I said, angry again. "Why? Because he's old and doesn't want to be alone? He lures people out here with promises of fame and fortune? It makes him feel like he's still a player, like he's important?"

"I suppose so," Lewis said.

"Has he ever actually paid anyone?"

"Not for a while. But for what it's worth, he didn't lie. He never really lies, not to anyone except himself. He honestly always thinks the development money will come through. I guess that's how he keeps getting people to believe in him: because he believes. But he's had to work harder and harder each time. Even now, I think he still thinks he's going to make your movie. He also meant the things he said about your screenplay, that it really did speak to him. Out of all the screenplays he's read since I've been here, I think he really did like yours best. I liked it best too. Which is why I'm so sorry I never told you the truth."

I found Mr. Brander in his office, sitting at his desk. He was holding the phone in his lap - a landline, of course.

"Oh!" he said, noticing me. "Russel, my boy! You're here. I'm glad. There's something I've been meaning to discuss with you."

I didn't say anything, just looked at him from the doorway. Was he finally going to tell me the truth?

"I have a proposal I wanted to run by you, and..." He stopped himself. "No, you're probably not interested. It's foolish. Never mind." He turned away, putting the phone back on his desk. I still didn't say anything, but finally he turned back to me. "No. I will tell you. It would be wrong of me not to. I think we've gotten to know each other well these past few months, and I consider you a friend. Do you consider me a friend?"

He looked at me, as if expecting me to agree. But I didn't give him any reaction at all, not even the smallest nod.

He smiled, a little bashfully. "I'm so glad," he said, as if I'd really responded to him. "And that's very sweet of you to say, my boy." He sat up taller in his wheelchair. "As you know, I make movies. It's what I do. It's what I've always done. It's made me wealthy, and it's made me famous. I'm proud of what I do. But of all the things I've ever done, I'm most proud of this movie I'm doing now. It's going to be big - I can feel it in my bones! People say that movies can't change the world? Of course they can! Of course they do. Those changes can be as small as when men stopped wearing t-shirts when they saw that Clark Gable didn't wear one in It Happened One Night. Or they can be as big as Schindler's List transforming our understanding of the Holocaust. But don't tell me that movies don't change the world!"

It didn't sound like Mr. Brander was telling me the truth, like he was finally coming clean. But I didn't stop him, not yet.

"But this isn't just about changing the world, my boy," Mr. Brander went on. "It's about making money too. By all means! That's the beauty of this particular movie we're making: we can change the world and make money while we're doing it! But, of course, to make money, you first need to spend money. The earlier you invest, the more you make."

This sounds like a pitch, I thought. Like Mr. Brander is trying to get me to invest in my own movie. I was tempted to laugh, because let's face it, the idea that I had enough money to invest in anything was hilarious. Without Mr. Brander's option money, I wasn't even sure Kevin and I were going to be able to pay the rent.

But I didn't laugh. This whole situation was the opposite of funny.

"You've seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, of course," Mr. Brander said. "Charming little movie. What you may not know is that everyone and their brother turned that project down. Everyone until Tom Hanks saw the project and decided he wanted to invest in it. They made it for five million dollars. Do you know how much money it ended up making? Over three hundred and sixty-five million!"

Even as Mr. Brander was talking, I was thinking: My Big Fat Greek Wedding? That was one of the most successful independent movies of all time, true. In fact, it was so wildly successful that it immediately inspired every investor in the world, and even the big movie studios, to start pouring whole s.h.i.tloads of money into "smaller" movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And then, in the years after that, everyone lost whole s.h.i.tloads of money when they discovered that the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding had been a total fluke - a weird combination of luck, timing, and who the h.e.l.l knows what else. Anyone who knew anything at all about the history of independent movie-making knew this. But now here was Mr. Brander telling me that A Cup of Joe was going to be another My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

He's not just pitching me to invest in my own movie, I thought. He thinks I'm a total idiot. He thinks I don't know anything about making movies.

"Just imagine the profit on that, my boy!" Mr. Brander was saying. "Imagine how stupid all the people who turned that project down must feel!"

Or maybe this wasn't Mr. Brander's "idiot" pitch. Maybe it was his actual pitch, the one he and Lewis were supposedly making to investors. Maybe Mr. Brander really didn't know all the changes that had happened in indie movie-making over the last fifteen years. How would he? He hadn't made a movie since the 1980s.

In other words, maybe Mr. Brander's the idiot. No wonder no one was lining up to invest in our movie. Who'd he been pitching to anyway? Retirees in Palm Springs?

Otto had told me all about the Bulls.h.i.t Factor - how everyone in this town lied about their careers by a factor of three. When we had that first development meeting here at Mr. Brander's house, I'd totally accounted for it: I a.s.sumed everyone was lying to me.

Everyone except Mr. Brander. I'd (mostly) believed everything he'd said. Which made sense, I guess. He was the one telling me what I most wanted to hear. But it was doubly ironic because he'd told us at that meeting, right after making his grand entrance, that everything that happened then would make perfect sense in retrospect. It totally did. Mr. Brander had lied about everything else, but he'd been right about that.

"I'm not one of those producers who is asking others to invest in something he's not putting his own money in," Mr. Brander was saying. "I'm putting my money where my mouth is. That's why I feel totally confident asking you-"

"Mr. Brander," I said, interrupting him.

"No, wait, my boy!" he said. "Just let me finish-"

"Mr. Brander, there's not going to be any movie."

He looked at me. At first I thought he was finally seeing me for what I was, that he was actually asking the stone-broke screenwriter for the money to make his own movie. But his eyes never found their focus. It was like watching a rock climber searching with his hands for a grip on a rock wall, looking for some kind of handhold, but never finding any. I guess there wasn't any to find. One way or another, he was going to fall.

Mr. Brander is even crazier than the casting director said, I thought.

"What?" he said softly.

"Mr. Brander, they've all left. The other producers? Andrea, Justin, and Evan?" Their names came to me easily now, even Evan, the casting director. At some point, the anger had drained out of me. What was the point?

Mr. Brander stared beyond me, his eyes still lost in the woods.

This is incredibly embarra.s.sing, but even now some small part of me was thinking: Maybe I can still work with him. I mean, yes, he was a complete crackpot; he'd already alienated every other person on the project; and his pitch to investors was hackneyed and completely out-of-date, so he'd probably alienated all the possible investors too. But maybe I could still make it work! Maybe I could help him with his pitch, or maybe I could somehow even raise the money myself. Who knows, maybe Sally Field really had loved the script!

Thinking all this probably made me a crazy person. It had just been so nice to be able to say to people that I had a movie in development with Isaac Brander, the guy who'd made movies with Sean Connery and Sally Field, even if all three of them were older than G.o.d. For the first time in my life, it had felt like I mattered, like I could finally make a difference.

Just one small problem: it hadn't been real.

I looked down at my hand. I was clutching that signed copy of The Gla.s.s Menagerie, the gift Mr. Brander had given me at dinner the Sat.u.r.day before. I must have left it in our car that night. I didn't remember picking it up earlier. Talk about having tricks in his pocket and things up his sleeve. Mr. Brander hadn't been wrong about that either.

I stepped into his office, just far enough to put the book down on one of the bureaus.

"What are you doing?" Mr. Brander said.

"Giving this back to you," I said.

He eyed it. "What? Why? That was a gift. I gave it to you."

"I know. But it's valuable to you, and it doesn't feel right for me to keep it now. Still, I appreciate everything you did. That you tried to set up the movie. And also that you had faith in me and my work in the first place. You're the first one who ever did, and that really means a lot to me. So thank you."

I turned to leave.

"Where are you going, my boy?"

"I'm leaving, Mr. Brander. I won't be coming back."

"I don't understand. Why not? What about our movie?" He sounded completely baffled, like he had no idea what was going on.

I looked back at him sadly.

"You're wrong!" he said. "There will be a movie! It'll be the best movie I ever made! The best, and the most successful! You'll see!"

Now I started walking away, out the room, down the hallway to the front door.

"Don't you walk out on me!" Mr. Brander said behind me. He must have rolled forward, after me, because a second later, he burst out into the hallway. "We have a contract! If you keep walking away, I'll sue you! Don't you think I won't! I once sued Katherine Hepburn - and I won."

This actually scared me, and I almost stopped. I mean, I was only twenty-four years old, and here was this guy, a former Hollywood producer, threatening to sue me. He was a crackpot, but I still didn't want to get sued. I couldn't afford to get sued.

I worked it through it in my mind: we'd signed a contract, yes, but Mr. Brander hadn't paid me. In other words, he hadn't honored the contract. I didn't know goat s.h.i.t about the law, but I knew enough to know that you couldn't sue someone over a contract that hadn't been honored. And if he did want the screenplay so bad he was willing to sue me, well, he could have it. I could write other screenplays. It wasn't worth me spending more time around a crazy person.