Chapter 15 The Hollywood Premiere
The Hollywood Premiere
The Uber dropped Natalie two blocks away.
Not because the driver was incompetent. Because the street had been closed for the premiere.
“This is as close as I can get,” the driver said.
Natalie looked through the windshield.
Far ahead, beyond the line of idling cars and barricades, she could see light. Not normal light. Not streetlight or theater marquee or the flat glare of storefronts. This was premiere light: white, hot and industrial.
“This is fine,” she said.
It was not fine.
But she tipped him anyway.
Outside, the evening air was warm and dry. She stepped onto the pavement, dressed to the nines. Her dress was deep green silk from The Row, the one Aaron had sent to the hotel, fitted through the waist and falling cleanly to mid-calf.
The dress was beautiful. It was expensive. It made her look elegant in the hotel mirror.
On her feet were black satin Jimmy Choo Romy heels.
On a sidewalk two blocks from a Hollywood premiere, holding her black intrecciato leather Bottega Veneta Knot clutch while people in jeans and tour-bus hoodies brushed past her.
The crowd thickened as she approached the theater.
Barriers ran along both sides of the carpet.
Behind them, fans had compressed into a single mass: arms over rails, phones lifted, faces bright with sweat and excitement.
Someone had a poster. Someone else had brought a silver marker and was guarding it from the person with the poster.
A girl in a white tank top kept saying, “Oh my God, oh my God,” even though nothing had happened yet, which Natalie had to respect as a life philosophy.
The carpet was not exactly red.
She would have said red if anyone had asked her later, because no one wanted a dissertation on carpet color. But in person it was richer than red, a saturated crimson.
On the far side was a branded backdrop printed with the studio logo and the film title, GOLDEN HOUR, in metallic letters.
The photographers stood in rows, long lenses lifted, bodies angled forward. Beyond them, entertainment reporters occupied marked positions, each with a microphone, a camera crew, and the professional brightness of people trained to seem delighted by everyone.
Natalie found the opening in the barricade and approached a security guard.
“I have a ticket,” she said.
The guard looked at it. Then at his clipboard. Then at her.
“Special guests are around back.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Special guests entrance. Around the corner, down the alley. You’ll see signs.”
She knew this but somehow it didn’t become real until now.
He was not rude. That made it worse.
Natalie looked at the carpet.
“I’m not trying to walk the carpet,” she said.
“I understand. Around back.”
He pointed.
She stood there for one second too long, long enough for the woman behind her to sigh.
Then the crowd erupted.
A black limousine stopped at the curb.
The sound changed instantly, rising from noise to excitement. Phones lifted. Photographers shifted. A reporter from Entertainment Tonight turned toward the car with a smile that switched on so sharply it seemed battery-powered.
The door opened.
Skye Madison stepped out first.
Thirty-two. American. Blonde in the expensive natural way. Famous from the disaster franchise, the pianist drama, the perfume campaign where she walked barefoot through a desert in a silver dress as if dehydration and sexual appeal went hand-in-hand.
Natalie couldn’t help but like her, even knowing what she knew. She admired the way Skye could be fragile without seeming weak, glamorous without seeming vain.
In person, Skye looked regal.
Tall. White dress. No necklace. Hair swept back from her face. She turned toward the cameras as if she had been born to it.
Aaron stepped out behind her.
Natalie felt the crowd’s reaction.
He was in a black tuxedo, classic, perfect, unshowy in the way only men with expensive tailoring could afford to be. He touched Skye’s hand. A light touch. Courteous. Intimate enough for cameras. Ambiguous enough for publicists.
Skye smiled at him.
Aaron smiled back.
The crowd screamed.
Entertainment Tonight got them first.
Natalie could not hear the questions clearly over the crowd, only fragments: chemistry, first Hollywood lead, Skye what was it like, Aaron welcome to America, global audience.
Skye leaned toward the microphone and said something that made Aaron laugh.
He looked at Skye with that attentive warmth with which he always looked at Natalie.
The reporter said something else.
Skye put a hand on Aaron’s chest. Not heavily. Not possessively. Just enough.
The photographers ate it up.
Natalie stood behind the barricade with her ticket in one hand while a teenager beside her shouted Aaron’s name.
Then the carpet became more crowded.
Chris Pine appeared near the far end which was weird because if he had been there already people would have noticed. He wasn’t there one moment, then was suddenly there the next. It was like he had beamed in from those Star Trek movies he made fifteen years ago that nobody liked.
Ryan Gosling was apparently in his landing party because he was there, too.
Chris Pine laughed with Ryan Gosling as photographers shouted both their names like commands. Aaron joined them. Chris, Ryan and Aaron posed together briefly.
Sydney Sweeney crossed toward Skye and kissed both cheeks. Charlize Theron joined them a moment later, tall and gold and terrifyingly calm.
The three women turned toward the cameras: Skye in white, Sydney in pale blue, Charlize in black. Three different kinds of blonde in the same photo opp.
A reporter asked Skye about working opposite Aaron. Skye smiled and said the word generous. Sydney said something about chemistry. Charlize said the film reminded her why movies still mattered.
Natalie felt someone bump her shoulder.
“Sorry,” the woman said, not looking at her.
Natalie looked down at her ticket.
Screening pass. Non-transferable. Natalie Chan.
She could go in.
Just not here.
“Miss?” the security guard said.
She looked up.
He was still pointing toward the alley.
“Special guests around back.”
Special guests.
Right.
Natalie walked.
The alley ran behind the theater. It was narrow and practical. It smelled faintly of garbage, equipment cases, and something fried from a restaurant kitchen nearby.
There were no lights except the practical kind. No crimson carpet. No reporters. No fans. Just a line of people holding passes: agents’ assistants, industry friends, minor executives, plus-ones, the category of person important enough to attend and not important enough to be seen arriving.
A woman in a headset checked names against a tablet.
Natalie stood in line behind a man telling someone on the phone that he was “literally walking into the premiere,” although he was literally standing beside a dumpster.
She waited twenty minutes.
By the time she got inside, her feet hurt and her throat felt tight.
The theater was beautiful.
Wide, dark, and old in the way Hollywood liked to preserve when it wanted to message that movies were art as well as commerce. The ceiling was high and carved. The seats were deep. The screen was enormous. Ushers in black guided people with discreet flashlights.
Natalie’s seat was across the theater and several rows in front of Aaron and Skye.
Not the back. A good seat, if the only purpose of the evening was to watch the movie.
She sat.
When Natalie turned around and looked, she could see where Aaron and Skye would sit: center section, reserved row, surrounded by studio people, cast, people who mattered.
The program was heavy in her hand, printed on thick paper with GOLDEN HOUR across the cover.
Aaron’s face and Skye’s face were angled away from each other in the poster’s studied asymmetry, their bodies close enough to suggest longing and far enough to suggest restraint.
Below them: a city at sunset, glass buildings burning orange.
Natalie read the cast list without remembering a single name.
Then the room shifted.
People began turning.
Aaron and Skye entered together.
Not hand in hand. That would have been too much. Skye walked just ahead, Aaron just behind her, his hand briefly at the small of her back as they moved past the row. She paused to greet someone. Aaron leaned in to speak to a producer. Skye laughed at something Ryan Gosling said as she passed him.
Natalie went back to the program.
A few minutes later, she had the sense that she was the object of someone’s attention. She looked around and then turned around to identify the source.
Skye was staring at her.
Not with curiosity. Not with warmth. Not with the vague stare of a public person settling their gaze on someone anonymous because their gaze had to go somewhere.
It was a cold stare.
Natalie didn’t know what to think.
The look was brief. It moved over Natalie’s dress, her face, the seat she occupied, and returned to her eyes with a cool unhappiness that made Natalie’s stomach contract.
Then Skye turned away.
Natalie faced the screen again.
The lights dimmed.
For the first ten minutes, she could not watch the movie.
She watched herself watching the movie. She was aware of her hands in her lap, her feet aching in her beautiful Jimmy Choo heels, the heat in her throat, Aaron somewhere behind her beside Skye.
Every laugh in the theater seemed to come from the wrong direction.
Then the film took her.
Golden Hour was good.
Not the-critics-like-it good. Not good-showing-for-the-actors good. Good. The kind of good that made it an instant classic. The kind of good that made you think that everything on the screen was real and that you wished with all your heart that the guy would get the girl.