Chapter 1 #2
“Wow. Um … I need a sec. To decide.” She looked up at the menu. But whether she was talking about him or bubble tea she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything, actually.
“And there you have it,” said Marlow. “The Summer Summit would be a strong addition to the industry slate.”
Oscar leaned back, clearly trying to seem relaxed but picking at a cuticle because Victor was not looking at the PowerPoint deck, he was reading his phone.
Akiko was falling asleep; she’d likely been up until all hours working on her Japanese program.
Gustavo shuffled his notes together—he was also behind on Latin American picks for the festival in October.
Marlow could see he wished he were anywhere but here.
She wished she were anywhere but here, too.
If she could be anywhere, where would she be? Like that tongue twister: how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? And what is a woodchuck anyway?
She’d be … not here. Not in this office lit by fluorescents, even if it was HQ of one of Toronto’s two major film festivals.
Her mind flashed to Yves downstairs. Curly locks. Muscles. Pulling off casually hot.
“Thanks, Marlow, for taking everyone through our presentation,” said Oscar. Our presentation?
“Does a four-day filmmaker summit encroach on our industry activity in October, I wonder?” mused Victor.
Argh. Marlow wished she could take back the weeks of work she’d done on the presentation, with its embedded video and slides that faded in and out artfully. That shit took years off your life.
Victor was already on his way out. “Can you flip me the deck so I can take another look?” Diplomatic, but giving Oscar, who followed in survival mode, a thin slice of hope.
“You killed,” said Gustavo as Marlow unplugged her laptop.
“Totally,” said Akiko. “And sorry for the yawning. Don’t take my insomnia personally. I’m a shambles. You know that.”
Akiko was twenty-five, lived in a sprawling condo that her wealthy grandmother had bought her, stayed up most nights watching movies and playing video games, was late on everything at work, and specialized in indiscriminate sex even though she said daily how she was looking for “the one.” As a single mother, Marlow couldn’t afford to be like that in any of those departments.
Even though Akiko had gone to film school like Marlow, she’d somehow fast-tracked herself to becoming a junior programmer, and so she was in a fancy third category: creative gatekeeper.
Marlow should have become a programmer. Then she might not feel so dead inside.
Do not be melodramatic, Marlow told herself. You are not dead. You’re just … napping.
“Listen, dudes,” said Gustavo. “I gave my notice this morning.”
“What?” said Akiko. “No way.”
“My film got greenlit. I’m going to shoot in the fall, so yeah, I’m quitting.”
Gustavo hadn’t gone to film school. He was the keener who borrowed festival equipment on Fridays, made weird, zero-budget, pretentious short films with his friends on the weekends and uploaded them to YouTube Monday morning.
His last short, with no plotline, terrible actors, and zero production values, had passed 500,000 views.
Was Marlow off base? She thought it had sucked, although she’d told Gustavo it was cool, and he’d talked about its visual motifs and how the dialogue had just “come to him.” She’d watched it again, couldn’t see even one of the motifs he’d described, and had ranted to Sabine that NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT.
Maybe Marlow was just boring. Maybe she was old.
Gustavo was twenty-four. That, in itself, was depressing, never mind the half-million views.
So he was making his first bona fide feature and ditching his day job. Marlow was not making her first feature and not ditching her day job.
“Why quit?” said Marlow. “A feature’s a one-time thing.
Rent’s an always thing. You’ll shoot it in what, twenty days, max?
Then you’ll be in post but they’ll expect you to do it all for free, and then they’ll want you to do the festival circuit, and it’ll be more of the same, and you’ll end up like every other self-employed filmmaker: bitter, poor, and sad. ”
Gustavo tried to contain his excitement. “I haven’t said anything because I was told to keep my mouth shut. I signed a DNA and everything.”
“That’s NDA, but who’s counting,” said Marlow, peeved and not hiding it well.
“Right, NDA, because I sold it to this hot-shit American company and now it’s half-animated, half-live action, so post goes for eighteen months with an insane number of special effects and I’m on salary the whole time, I mean, big-time salary, not Renegade part-time programmer salary.
And it’ll be out of LA, so I gave my notice and I’m moving. ”
Marlow and Akiko stared at him.
“I’m going to Hollywood, bitches!” he screamed.
4:57 pm. Could Marlow get out of the office by five, for once, for her kid’s grad celebration?
The day Marlow had graduated from high school, her parents had stewed about her decision to go to film school instead of going pre-med.
There’d been no conversation around the dinner table after the ceremony.
Just silence, looks drowning with subtext, and the ticking clock on the mantel.
Marlow wanted it to be different for Sabine.
4:58. She’d order graduation celebration sushi and send the presentation while she waited. She grabbed her bag and bike helmet, and Oscar appeared. Ambush.
“Have you already sent Victor the deck? He thinks the summit’s too expensive. Let’s cut the budget and bring in local players. Can you make the changes before you press send?”
SO MANY THINGS SHE WANTED TO SAY IN THIS MOMENT. But she was trying to get a promotion from this jerk. “I actually have plans tonight,” she said.
“We’re in a time crunch, Marlow. Can’t you pitch in, be a trooper?
That’d be awesome. Let me know if I can help.
” And off he went. Oscar’s two favorite sayings were “let me know if I can help,” which he never did, and “I can take a pass at the draft,” which then turned into her cleaning up the new mess he’d created. Either way, he always took credit.
Fine. She’d revise the deck tonight after sushi. Marlow was not Yves or Gustavo, stunning the film world one lunch meeting or NDA at a time. She was an administrator of other people’s fine art with no idea how to find the off-ramp.
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
She texted Sabine about sushi, but before she closed her laptop, she looked up woodchuck.
It was a groundhog, belonging to the group of large squirrels known as marmots.
So, a rodent. Also the most solitary of groundhog species, never forming stable, long-term pair-bonds and limiting its sexual activity to copulation during mating season.
Basically, she was not kind of, sort of like a woodchuck, she was exactly a woodchuck. Shockingly depressing.