Chapter Two
Will
I peeled my eyes open one at a time, as though that would lessen the cringe-worthy impact of the sun on my field of vision.
“Fuck,” I growled as I rolled over in bed. What the fuck had I been up to the night before? I searched my scattered memories, and came back with a bottle of champagne – and a girl. The same girl, incidentally, who was fast asleep next to me in bed.
I glanced out the window of my trailer and tried to estimate the time based on the height of the sun in the sky. Maybe…midday? How long did that give me before I had to be at that meeting with the investors, a half hour? I swung my legs out of bed and my head spun, but I forced myself to get up and tap out a message to my assistant asking for a cup of coffee and something savory to take the edge off my throbbing brain. I raked my fingers through my hair and headed for the shower, the sun feeling good on my bare skin as I wondered how the hell I was going to turf this chick from my bed without coming across as a total asshole.
I mean, what did she expect? I turned on the water loudly, hoping the sound would wake her and remind her that she probably had somewhere to be this morning just like I did. Climbing under the perfectly warm stream, I closed my eyes and tried to wash the remnants of the night before off of me. I was still acting like I was starring in this movie, not directing it – it was so easy to forget that behind the camera was so much more work than in front of it.
I had a meeting with the investors first thing today, and then I had to go down and check out the set to make sure there was nothing else that needed changing before we started shooting the next day. I was confident I had everything in place, but it never seemed to work that simply. Directing was already a pain in the ass, and I hadn’t so much as switched on a fucking camera yet.
I climbed out of the shower and grabbed some clean clothes from the dresser, peering back through the door and seeing, to my relief, that the girl was dressing quickly and quietly as though she didn’t want to alert me to the fact that she was leaving. Thank fuck. I didn’t want to have to deal with turning her out. It was always the worst part of dealing with groupies – they never seemed to know where the line was between “well, that was fun, but you should go” and “I secretly want you to stay and get in the way of my entire fucking day”. She was cute, though, a film student, from what I remembered from the night before. I tugged a shirt over my head as I watched her ass shimmying into a pair of black cotton panties. Maybe I could just…
My phone buzzed and I snatched it off the dresser so it wouldn’t alert her to my voyeurism. It was a message from my assistant, Damien, letting me know that the meeting started in twenty minutes and was a quarter-hour walk across town. I dressed hurriedly, waiting for the girl to start her walk of shame back to the dorms, and then dived out the door myself.
“Morning,” Damien greeted me, glancing after the girl who was scurrying off the lot before anyone got a chance to see her. “Good night?”
“Yeah, thanks,” I replied, plucking the coffee from his hands and taking a sip. He cocked an eyebrow.
“You sure you’re ready for this meeting?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure,” I promised him. “Come on, let’s get this done so I can go back to bed.”
If working in Hollywood had given me one thing, it was a stone-cold ability to work through even the worst of hangovers, and that wasn’t about to change just because I was all the way out in Devina.
There was a reason I’d chosen this place to shoot the movie. It was so far from everything I knew that it felt like a chance to restart, to establish myself outside the world that had put me where I was today. I had never in my life shot a movie there, and figured that now was as good as any to start. I loved this city, loved the way it seemed ripe with ideas and knowledge and people, and that was the perfect place to shake off all the Hollywood shit that was still following me around and actually get this movie done and dusted.
How long had it been since that script had first ended up in front of me? A year, two? I’d shopped it around to all the directors who I’d worked with before, even the assholes who’d insisted on treating me like shit to get the performance they wanted, but no-one was biting. Everyone liked it, but no-one loved it, and I just couldn’t figure out why. As far as I was concerned, it was about the best script in Hollywood that hadn’t been turned into a movie, and why nobody seemed to want to take it on was beyond me.
I still remember the moment it clicked, the moment I realized that I was going to have to be the one to do this – I was sitting in my apartment, Scotch in hand, right after ducking out of the premier of a new release of mine that I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in. I had that sinking feeling in my stomach, not that the movie would bomb or suck, but that I didn’t like what I had produced. I hated feeling that way and would have done anything to avoid it again – but I was at the beck and call of the directors who liked me, and all the roles they had for me seemed…samey. The bad boy with the heart of gold, the antihero who came through in the end.
They were fun for a while, but I wanted something new, wanted something that would make me sit up and take notice. I’d been cruising through that city on autopilot for a long time, and I needed something to snap me out of my coma. Something big, something different. Something like that script that was sitting untouched in my drawer in my desk.
What followed was a flurry of activity as half the world seemed to try and talk me out of it and half the world shoved me in the direction of my new idea. Before I knew it, we had a handful of investors on board who wanted some say over the direction of the movie, and I was getting in touch with the screenwriter for rewrites and running auditions and trying to figure out how in the hell I was going to make this shit work. I would have funded it all myself, but the studio was reluctant to throw their weight behind something that they knew only I was invested in so they insisted on having some other names in the ring. I was a little pissed at first, until my agent pointed out that I hadn’t exactly cultivated a brand known for my reliability. He wasn’t wrong.
“How long do we have before the meeting starts?” I asked, and Damien shot me a look. One of the reasons I’d kept him about so long was because he didn’t take any of my shit, and he never felt the need to protect me from my own fuck-ups.
“Fifteen minutes,” he replied. “And you’re going to need to walk faster.”
“I might fall to pieces if I do that,” I warned him with a wince as the sun appeared from behind one of the neighboring trailers and scorched my retinas once more.
“This movie might if you don’t,” he shot back, and I grinned. He was as invested in the success of this project as I was, and I could always rely on him to give me the kick up the ass I required to keep me on my toes.
We made our way across the lot, and as we did so, I spotted one of the sets being put together for shooting the next day. I felt a warm rush of excitement as I realized how close we were to actually doing this. After all this time, all this effort, all this money, and all that being told that I would never pull it off, here we were, on the eve, poised to actually make it happen. I knocked back a mouthful of my coffee and continued on my way to the investors meeting with a renewed resolve. I could do this. I could do anything.