This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  But then, just when she was beginning to tinker with the Wisconsin job listings on Craigslist, she showed up at a friend’s barbecue at a rundown Craftsman in Venice. There, she found herself meeting the slightly sad eyes of the shaggy musician standing across the mud-stricken lawn and realized, to her surprise and great delight, that he was walking straight toward her.

  The morning after their first date (a screening of Bonnie & Clyde in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, talking until dawn on the roof of Jeremy’s apartment building over a bottle of warming Chianti), she began writing a new script, this time starting from a place of inspired pragmatism. This one would be a comedy (comedies sell) with a boy-meets-girl story at its center (everyone loves a love story) and a cast in their twenties (prime moviegoing demographic). It would be more commercial but still sufficiently indie; and maybe it wasn’t the original direction she’d intended to go with her career but it might actually get made. She would give it another try. More than anything, suddenly, she wanted to stay in LA.

  Still, it took a year to cobble together the financing for the film, as she coaxed the money, one zero at a time, from friends and friends of friends and one miraculous Israeli hedge fund investor. Her budget was still so modest that she’d had to borrow her video camera from a friend; instead of a craft services table, her Aunt Betsy sent out home-baked cookies from Indiana; since Claudia couldn’t afford stars, her lead actress was a refugee from a television sitcom. Jeremy—by that point, her husband—served as production assistant, fetching her coffee and rubbing her feet when she got home from the set. They still went over budget, a shortfall she personally fronted on a series of credit cards. There were days when it felt like she’d just made an audacious losing bet.

  But then Spare Parts was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, and there her movie won a directing award and was nominated for two others, and finally she sold it to a respected film distributor for a sum that felt enormous to her (although, put into perspective, was probably the equivalent of one day’s catering budget for the average Hollywood blockbuster). Sitting in her lawyer’s hotel room overlooking the snowy Rockies on the day she signed the deal, she felt high—not just from the altitude up there in the mountains, but also from a certitude that she had never felt before. She had taken a gamble on her own future and drawn a winning hand despite the odds.

  That was how she’d ultimately ended up here, in the packed lobby of this theater, surrounded by friends and film industry acquaintances and people who had worked on her movie and a vast number of complete strangers. The movie had finished screening; and even though there wasn’t a standing ovation at the end, the audience cheered and sat through the entire credit sequence before making a beeline for the free bar. Now, the crowd drew together in small clusters, chatting and shaking hands and exchanging cards and then breaking apart to form new clusters, a hive of bees performing some kind of intricately orchestrated honey dance.

  A group of grips loomed over the food tables, guzzling their sponsored-vodka cocktails as they double-dipped in the hummus. The suits stood in the corner, rapidly typing on their BlackBerries. Claudia’s film-school peers, led by her friend Esme, stood in a protective semicircle around her, eyeing the strangers who approached. Jeremy was in position by the crudités with his friend and bandmate Daniel, who’d brought her a bouquet of yellow lilies. Even Jeremy’s father, Max, had come out and shuffled around in his corduroys and flip-flops and untucked dress shirt, lingering lasciviously near a clutch of twenty-something actresses who played bit parts in the film.

  Claudia stood in the center of it all, feeling vaguely like a stuffed pheasant in a display vitrine. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She was the axis around which the entire room seemed to turn. She arranged herself directly in front of her movie poster—SPARE PARTS in capital letters, the faces of her lead actors in profile against the Los Angeles skyline, the Variety quote (“Sharply funny …. Addictive!”) just below—and dizzily accepted the congratulations, the pressed hands and overenthusiastic hugs. “Huge fan, huge fan,” a total stranger whispered in her ear.

  Standing at the center of all this adulation, it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect Spare Parts to be a hit. Didn’t she have glowing reviews from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and, now, Entertainment Weekly? Even the Academy Awards was dominated by plucky little independent films these days, especially upbeat ones like hers. Yes, Spare Parts was opening in only twenty-three theaters this weekend, but next weekend it was scheduled to open in two hundred more, and yet more after that. She was days away from signing a movie development deal with a major motion picture studio; her next film was going to be big budget, cast with stars, a serious endeavor about issues of real importance (human smuggling on the Mexican border!). Maybe she’d revive her drug addiction script next.

  “Claudia, I’m so sorry I can’t stay long, but the sitter’s threatening to call the cops on the twins,” she heard in her ear, and turned to see RC. RC’s real name was Renata Calliope, but she’d been going by her initials for the last twenty-five years, ever since she arrived in Los Angeles as a fledgling screenwriter in her early twenties and realized that Hollywood didn’t take women seriously. By now, RC’s screenwriting credits—including a handful of award-winning films and a long-running television hospital drama—were high-profile enough that the androgynous moniker was no longer effective or necessary, but she often told Claudia about the delight she once took in showing up for a production meeting in a miniskirt and heels and seeing the profound confusion on the producer’s faces when they realized they’d accidentally hired a chick to script-doctor their TV pilot.

  These days, RC rarely wore heels. A mother of ten-year-old twin boys, she had traded in the stilettos for sneakers years earlier, and the skirts had been swapped out for a uniform of cargo pants with men’s Hanes T-shirts. Compact, her graying hair cropped short, RC looked more like a teenage boy than a woman nearing fifty, but she spoke with the smoked rasp of a Depression-era film star. She was only fourteen years older than Claudia but seemed of a different era entirely, spawned by 1980s Hollywood, when women in the business had to grow a protective reptilian skin and carry their own set of steel balls in their purse to survive. Claudia had been seated next to RC at a Women in Film symposium at a student film festival years before; two hours and four glasses of wine later, RC had adopted Claudia as her occasional mentee and more frequent friend. When Claudia was struggling to get Spare Parts off the ground, it was RC who lent her an $8,000 HD DV camera, introduced her to the Israeli hedge fund manager who would eventually provide her financing, and talked her off more than one ledge.

  Claudia hugged her, smelled Ivory soap and basil oil. “Jason isn’t home with the kids?”

  RC shook her head. “He’s off shooting a reality show in Singapore. So, quickly, my thoughts about your film, before I have to run: The new ending you cut really worked; that was definitely the right decision. And I know you were worried about the second-act turn but I think—”

  “Claudia!” Carter, Claudia’s agent, slid up beside her and gripped her elbow with a moist palm, interrupting them. His pink tie was loosened and his balding pate gently reflected the overhead lights, and when he leaned in to Claudia the faint scent of cigarette smoke wafted from behind his cauliflowered ears. “There she is, the auteur. You saw that review, I assume?”

  “Hi, Carter,” RC said coolly.

  “RC. Wouldn’t be a premiere without you, now, would it.” Carter bared thirty-two whitened teeth, skipping the requisite handshake.

  Claudia cleared her throat. “Yes, the review. I saw it. A bit hyperbolic on their part,” she said. “I’m hardly Truffaut.”

  “Well, as long as it sells tickets, right? Anyway, great notice. The people who matter will see it.”

  “I’ll take that,” she said. She hesitated, knowing she shouldn’t be talking business at her own premiere, and then turned slightly away from RC to whisper in her agent’s ear. “So, has Fox signed the final
paperwork yet?”

  He whispered back without lowering his voice at all, speaking for RC’s benefit. “We have a sit-down with the lawyers lined up for Monday. But the way things are lining up for Spare Parts, I’m thinking we might even be able to drive the price up a bit. You haven’t signed anything yet; so let’s make them sweat, right? You’re a hot property right now. I’ll have you all set up by the end of the month. Trust me, OK?” He leaned away and smiled. “RC, shouldn’t she trust me?”

  “As far as she can throw you, absolutely,” RC said. She shoved her hands in her pockets and rocked back and forth in her Keds.

  “RC. Always such a card.”

  Jeremy and Esme had joined the circle now, carrying paper napkins filled with gooey baklava. They greeted RC, then turned in unison to offer Carter politely bland smiles, wary of the presence of the suit.

  “Carter, this is my friend Esme, and I think you’ve already met my husband?”

  Carter gripped Jeremy’s shoulder instead of shaking the hand Jeremy had proffered. “Of course. Jeremy the rock star!”

  “Ah, well, Carter,” Jeremy said, one eyebrow raised. “I’m hardly a rock star. My band has to finish its album first.” He loosened his tie reflexively, eyeing Carter’s tailored suit. Dressed up like this, Jeremy appeared more defined, handsome in an unshowy, unkempt sort of way. Claudia often thought that he looked more like a second guitarist than the lead singer of a band—he didn’t have the typical ostentatious sex appeal of the man with the microphone and generally hid behind overgrown hair and slouchy jeans. Still, he could wear a suit well when the occasion demanded it.

  “But they’re almost done, and the stuff they’ve done so far is fantastic,” Claudia said. “Audiophone. They have a show at Spaceland next month—you should come. All of you.”

  RC laughed. “Only if you’re planning to go on at seven. I don’t make it past ten these days.”

  Carter reared backward as if Jeremy might somehow infect him. “I don’t do music, sorry. But Jeremy, I can hook you up with the right people. Do you have a manager? We need to make sure you keep up with your wife, don’t we?”

  “That would be impossible,” Jeremy demurred.

  “He’s already been more successful than I am,” Claudia protested. “He used to be in This Invisible Spot—you’ve heard of them?” Beside her, she sensed Jeremy protesting against the attention.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Carter said, unconvincingly. “I think my daughter has an album.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Speaking of, gotta run, but we’ll confab on Monday, OK? Go celebrate; you deserve it. RC, lovely as always.” He patted Claudia on the elbow, ignored Esme and Jeremy entirely, and made a beeline for the door, maneuvering around a table stacked with pyramids of brownies as he flipped the daisy wheel of his PDA.

  “‘I don’t do music,’” Jeremy repeated to himself, laughing. “Who doesn’t do music?”

  “I guess I should be thankful I didn’t go into creative,” Esme said, “if that’s the kind of people you have to deal with every day.” She nervously twisted her hair back into a ponytail, clipped it, and then released it. Esme had very expensive hair, thick and black and glossy, a high-maintenance curtain that only a marketing executive could afford. She was the only person in Claudia’s class at UCLA film school who had come to her senses after graduation and taken a salaried job on the business side of moviemaking. These days, she worked eighty-hour weeks developing high-concept trailers for animated family films, which meant that Claudia rarely saw her except for the occasional Sunday morning coffee runs.

  RC shook her head. “I really should find you a new agent. I remember when Carter was in the mailroom at William Morris; he was an insincere snake even back then. His type likes to devour nice girls like you as an amuse-bouche before the main course.”

  “As long as he gets the deals done, I’m not complaining,” Claudia said. “I don’t have any clout without him.”

  “You’re selling yourself short,” RC observed. Her cellphone began to bleat, and she sighed. “Crap. I’ve got to do some damage control, but call me tomorrow, OK? You two should come for dinner soon. As long as you don’t mind takeout.” She vanished toward the door.

  Esme spun slowly, surveying the dwindling crowd, then turned back to Claudia. “Hey, film star, do you know anyone who might want to teach film appreciation to high school students?” she asked. “My mom just took a job as head of this private high school—Ennis Gates Academy, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s very artsy-fartsy—and she’s looking for a teacher to replace one that just ran off with a student. Oops, right? She asked me for suggestions, but you’re better connected to that world than I am, being that I’m just a corporate drudge these days.”

  Claudia didn’t feel in the least bit connected to teaching, but she didn’t want to tell Esme this. “They teach film appreciation to high school students?” she asked.

  Esme wrinkled her nose. “It’s LA. Of course they do. The school got some enormous endowment from a former student who made a bundle in real estate and started a film production company. Or was it investment banking? Can’t remember. Anyway, they have a whole department, own their own film equipment, all that.”

  “Seriously? At my high school in Wisconsin they cut art classes because they didn’t have enough money for the tempera paints.”

  Esme twisted her hair up into a ponytail again, holding it back with one hand. “Deprivation is a foreign concept to these kids. It’s kind of sad—there’s nothing to strive for, since they have access to everything already. Honestly, I shudder at the thought of my kids growing up in this town.”

  Claudia nodded. “Of course, you and Jeremy grew up here,” she said.

  “And look how I turned out,” Esme observed.

  “My mom let me battle it out in a public high school,” Jeremy said. “But it’s a lot worse now. I don’t think we’ll be able to do that with ours.”

  Claudia glanced at Jeremy, surprised that he had brought up the subject of children. The verdict early on had been “not until our careers take off and we’re financially stable.” Then again, they were almost there now, weren’t they?

  “Anyway, film teachers? Know one?”

  Claudia reluctantly turned back to Esme. “What about Malcolm, the guy who won the Nichols award when we were in film school?”

  Esme curled her lip. “Last time I heard, he was working at a coffee shop and applying to law school. He never even sold a script …. I’ll figure it out. I just thought I should ask while I had you in front of me. Soon you won’t even take my calls anymore. Your movie’s going to be huge and I’ll never see you again.”

  “You’re the one working eighty-hour weeks,” Claudia pointed out.

  “This is true. I should quit.”

  The hummus plates were ravaged; the party was starting to thin out. Claudia squeezed Jeremy’s arm and left her friends to get a last drink before the bar closed. She stood in line by herself, behind two middle-aged women in head-to-toe black carrying leather satchels laden with screenplays—development executives, in all likelihood. One had Chanel sunglasses perched on top of her head, so firmly anchored in her pageboy that they might have been surgically attached.

  “Two million,” Sunglasses was saying.

  “No way,” said the other. “It’s going up against five other films this weekend, including Batman. It won’t even break a half-mil. They should have released it in the spring when there’s no other competition.”

  The bartender poured them matching glasses of white wine from a bottle of cheap chardonnay. “Female audiences will love it,” Sunglasses continued.

  “Women don’t go to the movies anymore, remember? They don’t count.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not a shame.”

  Claudia could feel her feet tremble in her stilettos; the room suddenly seemed to be slipping sideways. It was only when the two women froze in place, clutching their chardonnay with stiff fingers, and the bartender lurched forward to
stabilize the vodka bottle display rattling on the bar, that Claudia realized that they were experiencing an aftershock. “Do you feel—” said Sunglasses, to no one in particular.

  Claudia braced herself, expecting the worst—you were silly to think you’d escape unscathed—but the earthquake had already dribbled away, almost before it had even begun. The noise level in the room briefly dipped, before returning to an even louder volume: A minor aftershock, barely worth mentioning. The women smiled and turned away from the bar, noting Claudia’s presence for the first time. Sunglasses stepped past, screwed her lips into a wretched smile, and moved quickly away. Her friend hesitated and then leaned in toward Claudia. “Loved the film,” she said. “Best of luck.” And then she fled, following her friend.

  Claudia watched them disappear into the waning crowd. Maybe they weren’t talking about my movie, she told herself. Even if they were, Hollywood is full of jaded cynics who are proved wrong every day. Outside the theater’s glass doors, a work crew was beginning to dismantle the crowd-control barriers. Busboys had cleared the trays of crudités away, leaving behind tablecloths stained with tzatziki drips and pita crumbs. Plastic cups littered every ledge, marked with lipstick and then abandoned. Claudia moved back toward Esme and Jeremy, who had retrieved their belongings and were waiting for her to say goodbye. She tried to smile back with the same tipsy contentment that she read on their faces, but it felt forced. The aftershock had left her decidedly shaken.

  Carter’s assistant had the annoying habit of turning every statement into a question. She also repeated Claudia’s name compulsively, an annoying tic that Claudia suspected was intentional, perhaps to make clients feel at ease. To Claudia’s ear, it sounded patronizing. “Carter Curtis’s office?” the assistant queried, her voice squeaky and distracted. “Oh, Claudia again? Claudia, I’m sorry, but he’s in a meeting? I’ll take a message?”