Chapter Fourteen
I was standing at the stove again, the way I so often seemed to be for the calls that mattered, Birdie’s oatmeal going lukewarm in its bowl while she argued with Wyatt over whose turn it was to feed the lodge’s newly acquired barn cat, and I told Elena to go ahead, and listened to her read, in the flat, unhurried voice of someone who reads contract language for a living and has learned not to let her own opinion color the reading, a letter that identified itself as being sent “in connection with ancillary and promotional content associated with the theatrical and digital release of The Line and related future productions,” requesting a non-exclusive license to use “certain archival footage, including but not limited to material referenced in the production’s supplemental credit update,” for use in behind-the-scenes content, a proposed documentary short about the making of the film, and unspecified “future promotional materials associated with an overall content agreement.”
“Translate that for me,” I said, turning the burner off, because I have learned across twenty years that the moment a number is about to arrive is not the moment to let a pot boil over.
“They want your footage for the EPK — the electronic press kit, behind-the-scenes stuff that runs alongside a digital release. And they want the door left open for whatever comes out of the three-picture deal, without naming it, because it isn’t signed yet.
” A pause, papers shifting. “Specifically: they want a signature now that lets them use what you own without you being able to say later it required your ongoing permission for anything beyond what’s specified.
That’s not sinister on its face — every licensing letter wants that.
What’s specific to you is the timing. They wouldn’t move this fast unless somebody on their side had already flagged that the chain of title has a real gap in it, and they’d rather close it cheap now than unwind a dispute later. ”
“How cheap,” I said, because I have never once found it useful to let cheap sit unpriced in a room.
“They’ve proposed twenty-two thousand dollars for a non-exclusive license covering the specific reels referenced in the letter.
Not nothing, for a deal this size. But I want to be honest about what it isn’t.
” A pause, papers shifting on her end. “It isn’t compensation for nine hundred hours.
It’s the narrowest slice they think they can get you to sign quickly, priced to feel generous enough that a person without counsel wouldn’t ask what the rest of the archive is worth. ”
I said nothing, and let her get to the part she’d been building toward.
“There’s also a clause — standard boilerplate dressed up politely — asking you to represent and warrant you have no other claims against the production, past, present, or future, arising from any of the four expeditions.
That’s the part I’d look at hardest. It’s not really a footage license. It’s a release.”
I stood very still at the stove, the oatmeal forgotten, and understood, the way I’d understood the ninety-one-thousand-dollar tax notice four weeks earlier, that I was looking at a number and a clause that together were worth considerably more than either one alone — twenty-two thousand dollars, and my silence, forever, on every question the last month had raised, wrapped in language boring enough that a person exhausted enough, or in need enough of twenty-two thousand dollars, might sign it without ever fully clocking what she’d agreed to stop asking.
“What happens if I say no,” I said.
“Then they either come back with a better offer, or they structure everything around the footage they already have clean rights to — a documentary short that can’t show any of the real archival material is a thin, unconvincing thing nobody at a studio wants their name on going into an awards season.
You have more leverage than you did three weeks ago, not less.
There’s a signed deal with real money on the table that depends on the footage question going away cleanly, and it isn’t going away unless you decide it does.
” She let that sit a beat. “I’m not going to tell you what to do with that leverage.
I will tell you that twenty-two thousand dollars and a broad release, this week, is the studio betting you’ll take the number that solves your immediate problem instead of pricing what you’re actually worth.
I’ve seen that bet work more often than I’d like. ”
I thought, standing there, about ninety-one thousand dollars in debt sitting on a rolltop desk four hundred miles — no, fifteen minutes, I corrected myself, the distance closing the longer I lived here — from where I stood, and about how cleanly twenty-two thousand dollars could close a quarter of it, and about how easy it would be to let the immediate problem answer a question that deserved a harder one.
“I need a few days,” I said. “I’m not signing anything before I understand exactly what the rest of the archive is worth to them, not just this slice. ”
“That’s the right instinct,” Elena said.
“Take the few days. I’ll draft a response that buys us time without closing any doors — professional, not hostile, the kind of letter that tells Kessler Ostrow you’re represented and paying attention without telling them anything about your actual position.
In the meantime, I’d ask you to think hard about one thing, because it matters more than the number does.
Does your husband know this letter exists? ”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
“You might want to decide, before you decide anything else, whether you’re planning to keep it that way,” she said, “because a letter like this doesn’t usually stay contained to the two parties who received it.
If it surfaces the wrong way — through him hearing about it from Deana Okafor’s office instead of from you — that’s a different conversation than the one you’d be choosing to have on your own terms.”
I hung up and called Simone before I let myself do anything else with the number, because I have learned, across twenty years of pricing risk for other people’s expeditions, never to make a decision about money while the fear of not having enough of it is still standing directly behind me in the room.
She had the lodge’s current position pulled up before I’d finished explaining the letter — a habit I’d come to rely on the way I used to rely on a weather station’s five-day model — and read the numbers back to me: the tax office extension holding, the roof paid off in full that very afternoon, the mortgage refinance and the boiler loan still sitting at a combined shortfall a shade under seventy-four thousand dollars, down from ninety-one, on the strength of two paying groups and a spring booking that hadn’t even run yet.
“Twenty-two thousand dollars would matter,” Simone said, careful, neutral, the tone of an accountant handing a client an honest number rather than a recommendation. “I’d be lying if I told you it wouldn’t. It’s not nothing against seventy-four.”
“I know what it would do to the number,” I said.
“I called to ask you something else. If I take it, and it turns out later the archive was worth four times that to them, or forty times that — is there a version of this where I’ve made the right call for the lodge and the wrong call for everything else I’m actually trying to fix? ”
Simone was quiet a moment, the silence of a woman who has spent her whole career watching other people’s numbers and has learned, the hard way, when a client is asking for math and when she’s asking for something else entirely.
“I can’t answer the everything-else part, Hollis, that’s not my job,” she said finally.
“I can tell you the lodge survives either way, on the timeline we’ve already built, if you don’t sign it.
Slower. Harder. But it survives. I’d hate for you to sign away something that isn’t only yours to sign — because near as I can tell from what you’ve described, that release covers more than footage, it covers you — just because the number’s shaped exactly like the hole you’re staring at right now.
That’s a dangerous coincidence to trust.”
“That’s what I needed to hear,” I said, and meant it, because some decisions get easier the moment somebody else says the sentence you’d already half-built yourself and were only waiting to hear out loud.
I called Juno next, mostly on instinct, standing in the gravel lot with the roofline’s fresh shingles throwing a clean, unfamiliar line against the afternoon sky, and told her, in the same flat register I’d used with Rhys, about the letter and the number and the release buried inside it.
She was quiet longer than the news seemed to warrant, long enough that I heard, faintly, a keyboard somewhere behind her voice go still.
“Twenty-two’s low,” she said finally, clipped, careful in a new way I hadn’t heard from her before, something guarded sitting just under the professional flatness.
“For what they’d actually be licensing, if they want the EPK to have any real footage in it at all instead of B-roll nobody would pay to watch.
I’d want you to know that going in, is all.
I’m not going to tell you what to do with it. ”
“You sound like you know something you’re not saying.”