Los Angeles
The sun hit differently in California. Lilly forgot how afternoons felt hotter, somehow.
The sunlight made her anxious, the sense that the day was always going on, things were happening, she needed to do something.
It made her remember the passage of time and how tomorrow she was supposed to visit her parents.
Her parents, who had no interests and no hobbies and no friends, were bound to love Glenn, who shared their lack of passions.
She also knew that at some point her father was going to say something racist and Glenn would either not notice or not react.
The lights illuminating Grauman’s Chinese Theatre were blindingly bright even though the sun was still out.
(It wasn’t really Grauman’s anymore, Lilly noted, though Glenn still called it that.
It was the FedEx-DraftKings Chinese Theatre.) Two floodlights, one on each side of the entrance, shot bright beams into the sky, while a series of LED screens covered the walls, rotating through photos of actors and sets.
Several large faux-marble columns made of plastic and rubber lined a red carpet that led out of the front of the theater and rolled down Hollywood Boulevard.
Lilly watched the mass of crowds standing in the risers outside the theater, with even more fans lined up against a rope that cordoned off the street.
She stood a few feet behind Glenn, who waved at them.
“Hey!” shouted a woman behind the rope at Glenn. “You’re in the trailer!”
She asked for his autograph and Glenn fumbled for a pen.
He scratched his name onto the piece of paper she held out—a receipt from Starbucks.
He signed a few more autographs before the crowd’s attention suddenly shifted to someone behind him.
The fans screamed and Lilly turned around to see Marvin Powell, the real Marvin Powell, personality restored for the premiere, in a double-breasted tuxedo, smiling and shaking hands.
He radiated the calm magnetism of someone who knew that everyone, everywhere, wanted to speak to him.
Glenn walked back toward Lilly. She held his hand but he stood limply, watching Marvin. Lilly began to walk forward, toward the theater, but Glenn dragged behind. Eventually Marvin noticed him, gave another wave to the crowd, then walked over and placed an arm over Glenn’s shoulders.
“How’s my wizard?” he whispered into Glenn’s ear.
They continued up the red carpet, stopping for publicity photos in front of a large canvas poster of the film, Marvin smiling widely while the camera flashes forced Lilly into a spasm of blinking, teary eyes.
Eventually they arrived at the theater entrance.
Once they passed through and out of sight of fans and cameras, Marvin sighed loudly.
“They’re still making me do the publicity racket,” he said. “Contracts only go so far.”
Glenn nodded. “Uh, yeah. It’s really nice to meet you, like for real.”
“You’ve done a good job. I’ve seen it all, you know. You hardly flub lines at all.”
“Oh, thank you,” Glenn said, taking the compliment. “It’s been a real honor to work with you.”
“Well, not with me really, right? I’ve found it to be pretty relaxing, personally, not having to think all the time. Still feel every blow and bruise, though. What about this new chick of mine? She’s pretty hot, eh?”
Lilly doubted Marvin actually found the act of being sequestered as Prion relaxing—she knew he’d feel every strenuous or uncomfortable action Prion participated in.
On the other hand, what would actually be relaxing was the enormous amount of money Marvin was making and could daydream about as Prion went about his business.
They stepped up to a small bar cart in the corner of the lobby. Marvin asked for two whiskeys, neat, handing one of them to Glenn. Lilly ordered a glass of wine herself.
“I think this movie is going to be really good,” Glenn said, “just based on the work you and the others have done.”
“No, it’ll probably be shit,” Marvin said, “like the last two. It’s okay, I make five percent gross. And after tonight I’m spending two weeks detoxing in Palm Springs before they ship me back to set. You going anywhere?”
“Uh, Pasadena?”
“Want some advice? Don’t get comfortable. The fans will always want your autograph but that doesn’t mean they don’t hate you. They’ll love your character but you can get in the way of that for them.”
“I’m more worried about the executives,” Glenn said. “Maybe one day they’ll fire me and replace me with another scanned actor.” He laughed, but Marvin just gulped down his whiskey.
“Don’t worry about the suits,” Marvin said. “They don’t care about you.”
“Yeah, that’s what concerns me.”
“No, you don’t understand. They. Do. Not.
Care. About. You. So what? Maybe you’ll get fired but you’ll still exist. The fans, though, they’ll turn you into a monster and never let you breathe.
Even later, years later. If I go to town?
I visit a restaurant? Then I’m not me anymore, I’m Marvin Powell. ”
“But you are Marvin Powell?”
“Just be careful.”
Marvin winked at Lilly, then turned and stumbled toward the auditorium with his glass in hand.
“Charming,” Lilly said.
“He’s so famous,” said Glenn, still watching the door Powell had walked through.
“You’ve spent most of the last two years with him.”
“Yeah, but not him him, you know?”
Glenn and Lilly took their seats, a row behind Jules and a few of the producers. Jules was reading the first press review of the film on his phone, shouting out lines he especially hated.
“‘… The story is a conventional team-up plot, so remarkably underwritten it must be intentional.’” Jules waved his phone in the air. “He doesn’t understand how difficult it is to do this!”
“Oh, is this the review from the Times?” Glenn asked.
He leaned over the seat to look at Jules’s phone.
“I thought it was pretty positive. Three stars. Look here: ‘Instead of giving us simply another fantasy adventure, director Clinton Maxwell and the enormous crew working behind the scenes have instead birthed something new.’”
“Clint didn’t do shit.”
At just that moment the theater lights flickered, and Clinton Maxwell himself climbed the stage.
He had clearly overheard Jules, as he spent his entire walk to the center microphone glaring at him.
He droned out a list of thank-yous as Jules kept muttering under his breath, “Thank you to our dear leader for orchestrating such an incredible, real-life experience.”
Glenn continued whispering to Jules, too, but Lilly gave up on the two of them and spent Clint’s speech staring at the carpet. When Clint finished, he left the stage and the lights dimmed. Applause rang up at the sight of the studio logo.
Lilly found it hard to explain what felt wrong about the images projected above her.
Nothing was ugly, exactly. The cinematography was dynamic enough, given so much was sourced from hidden cameras.
The shots of the island were detailed, the opening a long push in from a drone in the sky to a rider on a horse below.
A fight scene followed, quick but efficient.
The audience applauded at the reveal that the rider was Prion.
Lilly heard Marvin Powell drunkenly laughing a few rows ahead.
But there was something else. And maybe no one there noticed, because no one else worked with the scanned characters every day, watched them think and process a little too long, watched them follow orders even when they weren’t quite sure why.
But Lilly did. She quizzed them on lore and backstory that they already knew.
She followed them around sets, testing behavior, ensuring they knew how to be people.
She gave them their personalities, exactly as they needed to have them, and she knew when they deviated.
So when Prion said one of his signature lines and the audience cheered, Lilly could only think about how many times he was coached on exactly that line, how the implementations team struggled to get him to remember it, how his delivery was wrong nine times out of ten, how even on the tenth time it was said at inappropriate moments.
The casual, easy way the line ended up onscreen rested on weeks of prep that did not feel light and carefree.
Glenn’s own performance seemed odd, too, though it was for different, more understandable reasons.
He was stiff where Prion was natural, deliberate when other characters were free.
Every time he was onscreen, Lilly could feel him shifting in the seat next to her, his hands gripping the armrests, his body slowly contorting itself against the back of the chair.
But his funny lines got laughs and his emotional scenes were not met with snickers, so at least it wasn’t a disaster.
What was artifice for Lilly, however, was transfigured into an electric charge for the audience. They laughed and hooted and screamed and cried. The tears—actual loud sobs that Lilly could hear from multiple corners of the large auditorium—came mostly at the end, during the big battle. Kip’s scene.
Watching Kip throughout the film literally repulsed Lilly. Every time he was in a scene, cracking jokes, Lilly could only see the bloody corpse a prop assistant had wheeled down to the lab. When the climactic battle commenced, she looked away from the screen.
The scene was straightforward. The Council approached the demon trolls, who sent out a legion of spiders and giant insects.
A long fight ensued. If the Council of Heroes moved somewhat more slowly than in earlier, CGI-assisted films, the filmmaking at least could be called “visceral.” It cut often, keeping close to the action—the monsters had cameras built into them—focusing on grit and dirt instead of theatrics.
But Kip made it out of the fight all right, and Lilly wondered if perhaps they had reedited the end of the film.