23. Hollywood Forever
HOLLYWOOD FOREVER
SO WE’VE COME TO the end of the story, or the end of the story that matters, anyway, because it’s what will be adapted in the film.
I wrote the initial script in the fevered hours after I drove away from the burning villa, and then I slipped it to Teddy the next morning in the hospital.
His mother read it while he was still unconscious, and to my surprise, she agreed to direct, with Teddy assisting with cinematography.
Apparently she felt bad about convincing him to work for a man who turned out to be a homicidal maniac, and thus she agreed that nepotism would be easier than a desk job.
The script took some work—I’m really not a writer, and most of my first draft was atrocious. Predictably, the studio had notes.
I used the option check to move out of my mother’s apartment building, and I don’t visit her too often.
I send her gifts, which I know she appreciates.
I help with the costs of the building. She’s recently been elected to the local business council, so she finally has some power.
I laud her in public and credit her with my success, and in return, we don’t discuss the subject of my tarot reading, or what happened to me the day I came home covered in blood.
There is no one left in the de Witt family to criticize the nature of their portrayal, but I’ve made it very clear that this story is fictionalized.
There are true elements, of course. William de Witt’s nonprofit was never doing anything in the humanitarian realm, as it turns out.
He really was just a violent man with a history of sexual assault that was ignored by everyone, particularly the film industry.
Fred Dennings had been the same in tech.
Two competing egos, all the blood their partnership spilled.
In the script, I reference Capote: Had they never met, might some lives have been saved?
Some, yes. Some of the damage toward the end had been collateral. But when it came to the de Witts, there were monsters all the way down.
Killian de Witt was the first link in the chain of violence—he suffered from severe early onset dementia that led him to believe he possessed a god inside him, one whose appetite required satiating by way of young female blood.
Emmanuelle de Witt was a deeply disturbed woman who strategized as best she could to survive the grooming she was given.
We found some pictures of her from her youth, last seen in a missing persons file—her real name was Emmanuelle Santos, and her original face looks a lot like Nessa’s, although the actress who plays her looks more like if a Manson girl grew up in the school of Real Housewives.
Genesis was little more than a zealous acolyte, a groupie for William de Witt with a criminal record and a history of evangelism.
Her role is embarrassingly small and her death deeply humiliating.
It’s not as if anyone looks for the why in a tertiary feminine role, though her actress won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting.
As for Jude, his role is central to the film’s success, and the actor who plays him is already said to be an Oscar favorite.
The role is as meaty as you’d expect: A young man raised from childhood to believe he is a monster, who comes to learn he is the victim of severe post-traumatic stress disorder and a lifetime of gaslighting by his biological mother, who at every opportunity sacrificed his well-being for her own.
And then there’s me. Fictionalized, obviously. But there was a version of this role where I was the victim, the damsel, and I chose not to write her that way. Instead, she is the antihero, the young woman who finds the entrance to hell and follows it willingly, all the way down.
She dies, of course. The studio said it was the only appropriate ending given the choices she made in the film.
As it was my first script and I didn’t have sufficient leverage to argue with the powers that be, I let it happen.
The resulting think pieces have only aided the film’s marketing anyway, and I have other projects lined up, a few I’m loosely attached to that are similarly in the romantic thriller vein.
I’m also in talks with a very large franchise to play a superhero role.
Dan thinks it will be good for me to show some range, and I agree.
So I got what I wanted. And really, fame is wonderful. There are the ironies, the weight I can’t gain despite the cuisine I’m able to eat, the men who still define every stage of my career, the compromises I make each day to be seen as my most palatable version.
Every now and then, someone slides into my DMs to say they think I participated in the massacre at the de Witt villa, and the thing they provide as proof is the fact that Jude doesn’t actually exist. There’s no evidence of Julian de Witt ever being born, and no body fitting his description was ever found in the wreckage of the villa.
So, the men who inevitably feel the need to explain my life to me usually tell me that they’ve figured it out: I was Jude de Witt all along.
They say I must have been jealous of the attention William paid to other women; I must have stewed over his obsession with Emmanuelle, and because I couldn’t have him, I killed her to escalate the circumstances—to drive him to madness and therefore to error, the same thing I’d been trying to do when I left his brutalized bodies behind for the LAPD to find.
They posit that the only reason I wasn’t arrested for murder was that no one could prove anything except that I’d been at the scene—and, according to the police, I couldn’t have killed all those people.
The blows to William’s body were simply too severe, and the mouth of the crypt too heavy for a woman of my size to move.
But the internet detectives think I had adrenaline on my side, and that not only could I have done all that damage single-handedly, I’m also enough of a calculated bitch to write a film where I got away with it all.
They forget that in the movie, I don’t get away with it. I die. But leave it to internet sleuths to miss the point of the story. They’re too busy trying to read conspiracy between the lines.
Everyone always asks me what happened to Jude in the end, because, like all good movies, the love story is what’s so compelling.
And I tell them the truth: that when I left, he was alive, and there were so many bodies buried in that fountain that it’s taking a long time to catalogue everything.
Jude never had a proper social security number or anything like that, so the police don’t really know what they’re looking for when it comes to him.
He could have easily fallen into the abyss below the villa, the chasm the whole house lived so perilously above.
Or maybe he got away, and he’s somewhere out there living his life, finally free of the demons that haunt him.
I like to joke that hopefully he’s in therapy. Everyone usually laughs at that.
Nobody knows how to explain the mold except to say it’s common in old houses.
Let’s see, what else? JR’s still living in the apartment complex, masochist that he is.
The doocot is still there, albeit less of an issue because Alistair is an award-winning doo.
I finally met Tavis Anderson, and to my surprise (and everyone’s) he’s very attractive and not at all some kind of elderly Scottish pervert.
I’m almost positive he and JR are sleeping together. But that’s neither here nor there.
Roro completed her installation, which was generally well received (the L.A. Times reporter came to the opening). She’s getting married next year, to a white guy with a start-up. Her art was also featured in the film, so suffice it to say she’s doing well.
Tita Linda passed away during filming. My mom finally cleaned up her apartment but left her favorite bench untouched, which Roro’s pretty sure she did because she thinks Tita Linda is haunting her. I agree this is probably true.
Before she died, I asked Tita Linda if the devil was still on my back, and she said, “Anak, you’re such a beautiful girl, don’t ruin it with stupid questions.”
I knew then that someone had come to see her.
And probably gone to see Teddy, too. He’s been very good about keeping his distance from me, and in exchange, I kept him out of the film.
I wrote in another character who was played brilliantly by an insufferable former child star.
That was my co-writer’s idea. I think he understood that given how some of this was true, there was crucial importance to everyone knowing where reality ended and story began.
Like knowing when you’re inside a dream. If you start to think something’s only a dream, then you start to behave differently, and we really couldn’t risk Teddy forgetting that if he crossed me again, he’d find himself disemboweled somewhere in the streets of Hollywood.
Haha. Not that anyone would do that specific thing.
As for my co-writer, we rented a house together in the Malibu hills where we could write undisturbed; we both appreciate the quiet remoteness.
He doesn’t like crowds and prefers to be close to the ocean.
I told him that was fine with me, so long as I didn’t get bored.
The last thing I needed was to sacrifice thrill for monotony.
He told me I should wish for boring times, and sometimes, I’ll admit, we fall asleep watching old movies on the sofa.
Other times, when the heat is oppressive and the winds blow strange ideas into our heads, we find ourselves with a sudden urge to venture out into the dark, like creatures of the night.
And there is an ending for that kind of story.
I just don’t have to tell you what it is.