Chapter 1
Most of these latter featured Fly Girl, the latest star vehicle for the poutily pretty Nell Temple-Stewart.
Without knowing anything about the movie, Wich knew everything about the movie.
NTS would be a cheerily na?ve pilot candidate in something called—What?
Strike Fighters Weapons Force, maybe?—while Jim Thurlough played her cynical instructor.
“More pop than popcorn,” says the quote from Jordan Frankly of OMM, Online Movie Madness.
He could imagine the pitch. “Top Gun with Nell Temple-Stewart” and since NTS was the queen of high-concept, big-budget movies made for spinoffs, that was all it would have taken.
Fuck you, Nell.
“Excuse?” asked the cabbie.
“I'm sorry, I didn't…” His voice faded away, not that the cabbie cared.
Wich didn’t blame himself for being angry.
For three years, he had spilled blood on the page, scraping together minutes in airplanes, on buses, in waiting rooms and bathroom stalls, writing and re-writing a script that he called Wistful, but his agent insisted on pitching as “A Peter Wichowski Project.”
And that was precisely why the script had to be perfect. Everyone knew what A Peter Wichowski Project was. When a big studio had invested so much in a high-octane clunker that they could no longer afford to take the sucker out to the back lot and shoot it, they called Wich.
He was like Rumpelstiltskin, except instead of turning straw into gold, he concocted whatever outlandish narrative would turn trash into tinfoil with an absolute minimum of principal photography.
It wasn’t what he’d meant to do when he’d first come to LA.
He’d taken on the Nexus Fleet prequel (“War Weary”) because it paid well and because he’d signed a divorce settlement with a rapidity that shocked even Lilian’s attorney.
“Are you sure you don’t want to read it more closely?
” Mr. Pedrad, Esq., had asked. But in his shame and disgust, he’d just wanted to get it over with.
Now he was The Wich Doctor, the Maestro of Mediocrity, and the absolute last person anyone would imagine writing a 90-page character study about an actress of a certain age negotiating the petty indignities and compromises of an industry and a world that pays lip service to experience but gives parts and money to the ingénue.
This woman, Sarah, had been watered from his well of big disappointments and small victories, finally emerging as a character of such tenderness and strength that his agent deigned to call from her treadmill to say that 'Wistful' looked interesting. "But we have to do something about the title.”
She whispered hastily to her assistant.
“Like what?”
“What?”
“You said we need to do something about the title?”
“Oh, that,” she said dismissively. “We'll just slap your name on it, that’ll get some eyes."
“But not the eyes that Sarah deserves,” he objected.
“Trust me, Wich. I’ve got this. Gotta go.”
And that was it.
The next two weeks, he spent pacing his three-foot balcony trying to focus on how to get audiences to suspend disbelief for the attempted resuscitation of the Desert Lords franchise, Desert Lords: High and Dry.
On the day before he was due to fly out to Australia, Megan called to say that none other than Golden Rock was interested in the Peter Wichowski Project.
“Wait? Are you saying they want Wistful?” he asked, stunned because Golden Rock did Big Pictures that had Universes and Spinoffs and Fandoms and High-Concepts, something that Wistful very definitely did not.
“Go figure. Somehow NTS got hold of the script and wants to play Sarah.”
“No.”
“Do you mean ‘no’ like ‘no, you’re kidding’ or—"
“I mean 'no' as in the opposite of yes.”
“You don’t tell Nell Temple-Stewart ‘no’, Wich. You sell your options, count your pennies and thank your lucky—"
“She’s a child, Megan. She can not play Sarah.”
“You're a man, Wich, and you wrote Sarah. So get over yourself or the Peter Wichowski Project—”
“Wistful.”
“Fine, Wistful, is never going to see the light of day.”
Then somehow, even though he knew better, he let Megan flimflam him into squeezing in a lunch—“a coffee, really”—before heading to the airport for his flight to Sydney to serve as midwife to another monstrosity.
Which was how he came to be seething in a back booth at Seraphic on the fucking corner of fucking Brighton and fucking Rodeo.
“Try,” Megan said, as he cracked his knuckles. “Kyle says she’s a much better actress than the parts she gets.”
It was a waste of time. What his agent could not understand was that he cared about Sarah and though Megan thought of him as the great capitulator, his compromises were reserved for all those many projects he didn’t care about.
He would not compromise on Wistful.
Megan raised her hand, waving at Kyle whose last name Wich never remembered. All he remembered was the thin black mustache that crept over Kyle’s upper lip, making him look like he’d been interrupted drinking a glass of squid ink.
Then Megan’s eyes swept toward the door, carried along on an irresistible current of craned necks and lifted phones to the bright and beautiful girl.
Everything about NTS was designed to be noticed, from her sparkling sequined jumpsuit spangled with brilliant daisies to the Lucite-heeled mules that clattered across the floor.
She waved cheerily at the photographers outside, then caught sight of Kyle and started toward them in a cloud of her signature perfume that Wich knew from ads was peony and vanilla.
NTS—The scent of spring, the promise of summer.
Table after table, people stopped her. Some she knew; most she didn’t. The latter wanted photographs, proof they had touched her orbit. She obliged, pouting for sultry selfies with the men and smiling cheerfully with the women.
In that moment, he hated Nell Temple-Stewart with everything he had. All those smiles and eyelashes and vanilla and peony and spring and summer. Sarah was fall and winter, raw, strong and wary, but also hopeful with the kind of hope that has to be fought for every day to keep it from dying.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Megan hissed.
“I will burn this script and feed my laptop into the woodchipper before I let that girl play Sarah.”
Swinging his backpack over his shoulder, he stormed through the kitchen, out the back door, past the glass recycling that smelled of old wine and into a cab.
“LAX, please,” he said, sliding into the back seat. “Tom Bradley.”
Then he turned off his phone so he wouldn’t have to ignore his agent’s furious calls about the mess he’d made with NTS, with Golden Rock, with his career.
It would have been easier without all of those stupid Fly Girl billboards.
Now, as they approached the big sans serif letters spelling out LAX, he told the driver to head to Terminal Six instead because having stormed out of Seraphic, he was both early and hungry and The Drill was where he liked to eat at LAX.
The food was American Comfort, (“You know The Drill”) and the drinks well-watered.
There was better food at Tom Bradley, but he liked The Drill because it was the one place with a decent view of the Theme Building.
The Theme Building was the first thing he saw when he’d arrived from Maryland. A flying saucer under two intersecting parabolas, it was a Jetsons-era, future-optimist concoction that hinted at a world, a life, a city, moving relentlessly forward.
He’d decimated his slim cash reserves to eat in the restaurant once housed there but it had been worth it because Wishful, his script about a young writer taking his first terrifying steps, had come out of it.
Then 9/11 happened. A chunk of plaster fell. The restaurant closed down.
From his favorite seat at the corner of The Drill's wooden bar, Wich could see everything, even the reflection of the Juventus game in the mirror.
He watched until the chyron at the bottom said something about Fly Girl and he turned toward the window and the cranes working on the People Mover.
A huge banner with the discordant logo of the 2028 Olympics announced that LA had room for REAL LIVES IN THE CITY OF DREAMS.
It was an AI-generated slogan if he’d ever read one.
How long would it take before the studios decided that AI was faster, cheaper and good enough for Titan City IV: Underground (“Deeper. Darker.”) and he was out of a job?
Taking a swig of weak bourbon, he looked to his fellow inmates. There were only three of them aside from himself. A bartender absently drying the same glass over and over while he watched the game and a single man pretending not to look at a single woman.
The man wore a shirt of thick fabric with a good drape. It must have been expensive when he’d first bought it, but now it strained at the buttons, one of which was tacked on with a different shade of thread.
He imagined a divorce and financial strain. Or a death and the loss of someone who might care. Whatever. Something had happened that led him to be interred in a dark bar on a bright L.A. day.
It was an occupational hazard, this weaving of lives from buttons, but at least AI couldn’t do it.
Not yet, anyway.
The man signaled to the bartender and, after a short, whispered conversation, the bartender glanced toward the woman and nodded.
For her part, the woman cradled her forehead in the blade of her hand, shielding her eyes and leaning over a thick, dinged-up paperback, with a receipt for a bookmark. A barely touched drink sat in front of her.
A whisky sour, judging by the maraschino cherry and the slice of orange.
When the bartender set another of the same in front of her, she looked up. The man lifted his glass and she bent her head back down, turning the page.
“I was just being friendly,” he called. “You could be friendly, too."
“I’m on vacation. I don’t have to be friendly.”