Chapter Eight
ASTONISHING, REALLY—HOW Afive-thousand-dollar paper check can perk a girl up.
The second Charlie handed it over, I tucked it in my bra for safekeeping.
Which felt like a power move.
We cleared the dining table, and then Charlie sat across from me with a fancy Moleskine notebook and a pen. Like he might—good god—take notes on what I was about to say.
Notes for or against, I wasn’t sure.
He watched while I unloaded my backpack. My pen bag, my laptop, my stack of notebooks, my printed notes, all building to the grand finale of his screenplay, bound with brads and a card stock cover, absolutely bursting with Post-its, annotation tabs, and dog-ears. Not to mention a few coffee rings and a wrinkled corner where I’d accidentally dunked it in the bathwater.
A well-read script, for sure.
Charlie stared at it.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said next when I was all set up. “Do you want me to be honest? Or do you want me to blow smoke up your ass?”
“I want you to be honest,” Charlie said—no hesitation.
But that didn’t mean much.
Writers always want you to be honest—but only if you love it.
“Because I didn’t love it,” I said.
“I figured that out when you called it ‘apocalyptically shitty.’”
I squinted, like I guess you heard that? Then I nodded and said, “Can you handle it?”
“Handle what?”
“Not being loved.”
“Sure. Easy. People don’t love me all the time.”
“Not like this they don’t.”
Maybe it was because he’d been so insulting and so dismissive to me back in the car. But now that I had some food in my stomach and some money in my bra, the idea of giving this guy a little comeuppance felt pretty appealing.
Did I want to tell him what I really thought about his screenplay?
Suddenly, I did.
“You sure you want to do this?” I asked him, in a tone like Last chance.
Charlie nodded, looking less sure.
I took a sip of my water and began: “Let me just start by saying that, up until I met you today, you were my favorite writer of all time. I’ve read everything you’ve ever written. I love your character arcs, your dialogue, your plot twists, your settings, your flawed heroes and heroines, your weirdly relatable villains, your timing, your redemption arcs, your sense of humor, and, maybe most of all, your catchphrases.”
Charlie nodded, like all was right with the world.
“But this screenplay,” I went on, “is a crime against humanity.”
Charlie frowned.
“Still sure about doing this?” I asked, one last time.
“You’ve already put that check in your bra,” Charlie said, gesturing in that direction before abruptly deciding that was a bad idea.
“Buckle up, then,” I said, with a shrug.
The teaching rule I had for myself was to never criticize more than three things about a student’s work at a time. If you hit people too hard with too much too fast, they shut down. They feel attacked instead of advised. It stops helping and starts hurting.
Three criticisms at a time was the magic number.
But was I going to follow that rule for Charlie Yates?
No way in hell.
He wasn’t some beginner kid at community college. He was a ridiculously successful titan of the genre. With a mansion. And a “whole drawer” of Oscars.
He could handle it. And even if he couldn’t—all writers are mushy goo, deep down—that wasn’t my problem.
He was paying me handsomely to share my thoughts, and share them I would.
All of them.
And if they happened to crush him? That was just a bonus.
“First of all,” I began, “this screenplay shouldn’t even be happening. I want to register my objection at the outset. This movie is a beloved classic that brims with rare magic and its legacy should not be defiled by some appalling remake.”
“Noted,” Charlie said.
Now I began in earnest—and maybe I should have been intimidated to say all this to a writing god. But my outrage made me fearless. I had a higher purpose to serve. “Just for an overview,” I said, “when I say this screenplay is ‘apocalyptically shitty,’ I mean that it has no tension, no character growth, no longing, no buildup, no anticipation, no banter, no fun, no play, and no shimmer.”
“No shimmer?” Charlie said.
But I was just getting started. “It is a romantic comedy that is neither funny nor romantic. It doesn’t do any—any—of the things that a rom-com is supposed to do.”
“What’s a rom-com supposed to do?”
“Great question. One you should have asked before you wrote this thing. But let’s talk about it.”
Charlie’s pen was still lying idle atop his open notebook. He wasn’t taking notes. But he was—and I’ll give him credit for this—listening.
“The job of a rom-com,” I said, “is to give you a simulated feeling of falling in love.”
Here Charlie blinked, and I found myself wondering if this might be news to him.
I went on. “A rom-com should give you a swoony, hopeful, delicious, rising feeling of anticipation as you look forward to the moment when the two leads, who are clearly mad for each other, finally overcome all their obstacles, both internal and external, and get together.”
Now I gave Charlie the stink eye.
“This is the first, most sacred rule of rom-coms,” I said, in a tone like You know what you did. “The leads wind up blissfully together in the end.” I paused for effect. “And you broke that rule when you made Claudette Colbert’s character marry the wrong guy.”
Charlie must have read my dramatic pause like I wanted an explanation. “It’s more interesting that way,” he said.
Ugh. The pomposity. “It may be ‘interesting.’ But it’s not a rom-com. And when you rewrite the greatest rom-com of all time, it needs to be a rom-com.”
Charlie considered that.
And here I weaponized my encyclopedic knowledge of Charlie’s body of work. “In The Destroyers, did the aliens win? Did they turn Earth into a desiccated hellscape and eject the little orphan boy into a black hole just so you, the writer, could do something ‘interesting’?”
He didn’t have to answer. Of course they didn’t.
“Did the Navy SEALs in Night Raid give up after the submarine sank and let themselves drown in a watery tomb? Did the sleuth in The Maharajas’ Express hunt down all those clues just to get to the end and say, ‘Huh. I’m stumped’? Did the protagonist of Live and Let Kill just lose interest in solving his wife’s decapitation and lie down on the guillotine?”
Charlie was watching me.
“Of course not! You know this! All genres have a promise. The Destroyer will save the universe. The soldiers will win the final battle. The sleuth will solve the mystery. The hunted, grieving husband will figure it out just in the nick of time. I can’t believe I have to say this to you, but the same is true for romantic comedies. The two leads will wind up together. That’s what the audience showed up for. The joy of it all. If you don’t give it to them, it’s beyond unsatisfying—it’s a violation of trust. It’s like sex with no orgasm! What was even the point?”
At that, I froze.
Did I just say the word “orgasm” to Charlie Yates?
Charlie looked like he was asking himself the same question.
But the point was valid. I decided to own it.
“A great rom-com,” I said, “is just like sex. If you’re surprised by the ending, somebody wasn’t doing their job. We all know where it’s headed. The fun is how we get there. Seriously—have you ever had fantastic sex that culminated in an epic orgasm and then said to yourself, God, that was so cliché. It should’ve had a different ending?”
Charlie tilted his head. “Do you want me to answer that question—or was it rhetorical?”
It was rhetorical, but I was so worked up, I said, “I want you to answer!”
Charlie gave a solemn nod as he conceded, “I have not.”
“Thank you! Exactly!”
Safe to say, this little tangent had not been in my notes. I had a million legitimate, academic points I could have led with, and yet here I was, just minutes in, asking—no, demanding—to know about Charlie Yates’s personal orgasms.
From Charlie’s expression, he hadn’t expected me to go there, either.
Though, if I’m honest, there was a brightness to his eyes like I’d surprised him.
The idea that I was seeing admiration from Charlie Yates gave me a fluttery feeling in my… everywhere.
I tamped it down. I had to stay focused. I wasn’t here to make friends.
But that’s when he picked up that pen of his and wrote, at the top of his notebook page, “Happy ending—essential.” And then drew a box around it. Like he’d heard me, and he agreed, and he was ready to move on to the next point.
I needed to move away from sex talk. That much was clear.
I consulted my notes.
“Other problems,” I said, in a tone like Where to begin? “I guess the next giant issue is that none of the things that happen in this script correspond to the original. At all. It’s almost like you’ve never even seen the movie.”
“No comment.”
“Have you seen the movie?”
“Of course.”
“Recently?”
“Not sure that’s relevant.”
“I think it’s pretty relevant. You’ve got the characters going to a line-dancing competition!”
“So?”
“So there is no line dancing in It Happened One Night!”
Charlie shrugged. “They said to update it.”
“With line dancing?”
He shrugged again. “It wasn’t taken.”
“It ‘wasn’t taken’?”
“All the other kinds of dancing have been done. Ballroom. Swing. Latin. Hip-hop. Dirty. Not to mention the whole Magic Mike stripping franchise.”
“There was line dancing in Footloose.”
“But that’s not a rom-com.”
“You don’t even know what a rom-com is!”
“I do now.”
I gave him a look, let him have the point, and then said, “Disqualifyingly bad problem number three: there is nothing romantic here. At all. The leads don’t even like each other, as far as I can tell.”
“They like each other. What about when she falls on top of him?”
“That’s an accident.”
“Yes, but it leads to a sexy moment.”
“Sexy how? She gets a concussion.”
“But they gaze into each other’s eyes before she passes out.”
“I didn’t read that as gazing. I read it as glaring.”
“That’s on you.”
“No, that’s on the script.”
“I’m telling you, that’s a turning point for them.”
“And I’m telling you, that’s not how that works.”
“Fine. Fall on me sometime, and I’ll show you.”
“Fine. I will.”
We faced off for a second until Charlie said, “The point is, people fight all the time in rom-coms.”
“At first they do. But then it has to give way to something better. They can’t just fight the whole time and then have hate-sex and call it a day.”
“Don’t knock hate-sex. It has its upsides.”
“I’m sure it does. But it’s not love.”
Charlie paused to write “hate-sex = not love” in his Moleskine and box it.
I built on my advantage. “This’ll take forever if you keep arguing with me. We’ll be here all night.”
Charlie frowned. I was right again.
“So,” I went on, “I’m going to need you to just sit quietly and listen while I rip your screenplay to shreds. ’Kay?”
And here’s the thing: he did it.
He really sat there quietly after that, while I earnestly went through every single sticky note on every single page of that script, enumerating every single way it was terrible—from structure to motivation and everything in between.
By the time we were done, it was after midnight, my voice was getting hoarse, and Charlie Yates had taken five pages of notes. And his handwriting wasn’t large.
It felt like a triumph. Like this whole trip hadn’t been for nothing. Like I’d maybe proved at least a few of his assumptions about me a little bit wrong.
Not that I cared, of course.
But as I repacked my backpack and Charlie read over his notes, I couldn’t help but gloat a little to myself. See that, Charlie Yates? I’m less worthless than you thought.
Was that something to gloat about?
I would have loved to leave it there. But that’s when I remembered I had to get myself to the airport in the morning. And thus I was forced to close out the evening by leaning over to Charlie and saying, “I’m so sorry. Could you explain to me how Uber works?”