Chapter Six
Six
PRESENT DAY
A MIGRAINE SIGNALED ITS BIRTH with a flare of pain.
Fuck. Johnny Washington dug into the front pocket where he always kept a narrow tube of Excedrin Migraine and popped a capsule dry.
The bands of pressure around his temples hadn’t started throbbing yet.
Although he had left his shades in the car, the blinding afternoon sun wasn’t hurting his eyes.
No nausea threatened to upchuck the sushi lunch he’d just shared with Money for an early celebration.
Three thirty in the afternoon was late for the pill’s jolt of caffeine—and he would sure as shit pay for that later—but a sleepless night would be worth it to keep a migraine from riding him the rest of the day and beyond.
For as long as he could remember, Johnny occasionally got migraines after sudden excitement, good news or bad, a trait he had inherited from his mother.
And who was he kidding? He wouldn’t get any sleep tonight no matter what.
They were on the Universal lot, where visitors without a pass from the guard gate were barred unless they were on the tour bus.
They were in the village of production company cottages on streets alongside massive sets recognizable from iconic movies, from Psycho to Back to the Future.
Johnny felt like a visitor who had escaped from the bus.
Since COVID, most of his meetings were still online.
But LDR Productions had invited him and Money to the office. It was happening, and just a week before all of Hollywood would shut down for the holidays.
The letter of intent he’d scored from Tennyson Hardwick’s reps was the domino that would knock all the rest down flat.
Which Black actress didn’t want to work opposite Hardwick?
He could wrap up major casting in a week.
He could be shooting by mid-January. The girls could take a week off from school, maybe two, and Tasha had been teaching virtually since 2020, so the whole family could enjoy a stay in Vancouver.
And he could be in postproduction before…
Johnny’s right temple pulsed.
“You good?” Money asked, noticing his slowed pace.
“Headache. Same old same old,” Johnny said.
Money, whose government name was Derrick Gibson, had been his roommate at USC, and for two years after, the only other Black MFA film student in his graduating class.
Money knew about the volcanoes that raged in Johnny’s skull.
The night Johnny sold his first script, he’d gotten such a bad migraine that he puked in their kitchen sink like he was shit-faced. “Today could be the day.”
“Don’t celebrate ’til we cash the check.
” Their catchphrase after twenty-five years of being producing partners, in Money’s We’ll see how it goes singsong.
They had stories. He and Money had finally accepted the death of their last thriller feature, which the Streamer From Hell had kept in cold storage for three years without releasing—and had eventually written off for the insurance.
Another Black story left unborn. That one still hurt.
“Trust—I won’t believe it ’til it’s on the screen. Until the damn credits roll.”
But that was a lie, and Money knew it. After three years of rewrites and false starts, this meeting felt different.
Their execs had been giddy during Monday’s video call about Hardwick.
Armed with talent on board and his latest script polish—executing some of the studio’s less ridiculous notes—the urgency of Hardwick’s March commitment felt like the key to a green light.
Johnny remembered vowing that he would never take working in Hollywood for granted.
It was one of the toughest jobs in the world because movies were magic, period.
For a time, watching movies as a newly minted director had leeched out some of the joy: He noticed bad lighting and sound, poor wardrobe choices, clumsy F/X, tin dialogue.
But after the cynicism he’d earned saddled to his Frat House Haunting horror franchise (four of them!), he’d reclaimed the sense of wonder he’d felt the first time he visited Universal on one of the tour buses in grad school, dreaming of the future he was living now.
He stopped walking to give himself a moment of stillness like the ones Tasha had taught him in their morning meditation in bed.
He noticed his shallow panting, his heart’s hummingbird thrum.
He remembered reading in a book called How We Die that the Germans had a term for people having chest pain who stopped walking to let the pain pass: Schaufenster schauen.
Window-shopping. He didn’t have any heart problems he knew about, but the walk on the lot already had wearied him.
“Why’d they stick us way the hell out here?” Johnny said. “We’ve walked a mile.”
Money whistled, startling Johnny with the loud trill near his ear.
His migraine twinged. Money gestured toward an approaching golf cart driven by a Black woman in her early twenties with electric-blue eye shadow who reminded him of how his older daughter, Sharise, would look in a handful of years.
Her cart eased to a stop under her steady hand.
“Miss, I’m sorry, but can you help a couple bruthas out?” Money said. “We’re goin’ to LDR and they damn near got us parked out in Toluca Lake.”
Johnny noticed Money exaggerating the stiffness in his movement and his blaccent—although he ran 5Ks and had grown up in the suburbs, raised by white adoptive parents.
Money was a shape-shifter. Like Johnny, Money kept his hair shaved close to his head, erasing the gray and making it hard to guess his age.
Youth culture was the main reason Johnny still called himself by his childhood nickname when he had just turned sixty.
“LDR? Why they got you parked out here?” She answered her own question as it dawned on her. “Must be the construction.”
“Can you give us a quick lift?” Money said. “You heard of those Frat House Haunting movies? He wrote and directed all of those.”
“Oh, for real?” She studied Johnny with open surprise that told him she hadn’t imagined the creator of such an aggressively white horror franchise was Black.
In the original, the token Black pledge had died first, falling five stories to be speared on a flagpole waving an American flag—Johnny had meant it as irony, but it stank of a trope.
One of the survivors in his most recent sequel had been Black, but Johnny himself was the Blackest part of the franchise.
Johnny had written his first Frat House Haunting script because a major studio was looking for horror, so he’d dusted off an idea he’d had in college for an eighties-style slasher about the ghost of a dead student who had died during hazing.
Voilà—sold for half a million! Johnny’s scripts had the slasher aesthetic his fans craved: partying teenagers, touches of dark humor, bloody kills, and a ghost killer.
The Wraith’s hooded white cape had been intended to resemble a Klan robe—but no one caught the symbolism.
The sequels, spaced out over fifteen years after swells of fan demand, had paid well, thank you very much.
But Frat House Haunting wasn’t supposed to be his career. It had just turned out that way.
Since Johnny didn’t have time to explain how hard it had been to get financing for Black projects in the desert days between the start of his career and Jordan Peele’s arrival thirty years later, he just said, “We all gotta eat, sis.” His standard answer.
She smiled, instant forgiveness. “Hop on. You should hydrate once you get there, okay?” She raised her voice a half octave, the way she would bond with a puppy she found on the roadside. “Do you need help getting on?”
“Thanks, we’re good.” Money gave Johnny a look as they climbed on the back of the cart. He had heard her voice change too. This grown woman thinks I could be her grandfather and I’m about to have a damn baby, Johnny thought. I might not live to see our baby grow up.
The years had evaporated since he first met Money, and this film might be his last chance to keep his promise to his mother to tell stories he cared about.
The inescapable math of it all was the last thing Johnny wanted to be thinking about on his way to one of the most important meetings of his career with executives who didn’t know shit about daily dread of the calendar.
His head’s throbbing grew urgent, while a stone bloated at the base of his throat, the first sign of nausea.
Was it the migraine, or was Tasha’s morning sickness catching somehow?
Breathe, man. Just breathe.
Bumping past the realistic brownstone sets on the immense studio lot made Johnny realize that watching these movies with his mother at the Omni Mall theater in Miami might be his purest memories of joy. He closed his eyes and breathed his migraine away.
Johnny knew something was wrong as soon as they walked into the conference room.
The assistant brought them cold water bottles with predictable cheer, but the shiny black table was empty although they were technically five minutes late.
With Hardwick’s signing, he’d thought a couple more people might attend, not just their junior execs in feature development—neither of whom had green-light power.
So far, it was just him and Mo staring at the array of snowman Christmas decorations and LDR Productions movie posters lining the walls, from Oscar bait to prestige thrillers.
Some of the films dated to the 1950s, predating the merger that had created LDR. Johnny couldn’t help noticing that only one of the posters featured a Black lead, released back in 2022 after the rush to relevance sparked by George Floyd’s murder.