Chapter Fifteen:  The NDA

This was how he knew something unpleasant was attached and it was, Localad would think later, remarkably efficient in its cruelty. No accusation, no acknowledgment that anything had happened, simply a document attached to a message.

The document was described as a “standard supplemental confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement intended to support a constructive launch environment.” It was twelve pages long and meant: do not tell anyone what they have done.

It read, in its entirety: Standard update to your agreement as per our recent discussion with Desmond. Please review and sign it at your earliest convenience. Thanks!

Priya Reyes, when Localad forwarded it to her, called him within the hour, and her voice had a sharpness to it he hadn't heard since the first negotiation.

"This isn't standard," she said. "This is a public criticism restraint clause. It's asking you to agree not to make negative public statements about the film, the studio, or any individual associated with the production, in perpetuity, across any platform, for the life of the agreement plus five years."

“Do not sign this.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. I enjoy unnecessary miracles.”

Priya went through the clauses one by one.

The studio wanted Localad barred from publicly criticising the screenplay, casting, production, marketing, final cut or “creative evolution” of the project. And in return, it promised a continued consultation, access and invitations whose practical value Priya described as “nothing more than ornamental.”

"Can they do that?"

"They can ask. Whether you sign it is up to you. I want to be clear: nothing in your original contract required this. This is new, and it's being introduced now, after you've already visited the set and, I'm guessing, seen something you weren't too happy about."

Localad hadn't told Priya about the soundstage, hadn't told anyone except Marjory, but the timing wasn't difficult to interpret, someone at the studio, or possibly Desmond himself, had noticed a writer growing visibly unhappy and had decided, sensibly from their perspective, to close the door before he found a reporter to complain to.

“Can they make me sign?”

“No.”

"What happens if I don't sign it?"

Priya was quiet for a moment, weighing an honest answer against a comfortable one. "Nothing happens to your existing rights," she said. "Your story credit stands. Your option and purchase payments, already received, stand. But Desmond's office has made it clear, informally, that continued access, set visits, input on the mythology, being kept in the loop on further cuts, is being framed as contingent on 'a good working relationship going forward.' That's their phrasing, not mine. It's not technically extortion. It's persuasion with consequences attached."

“Simply put, they stop inviting you into rooms where decisions have already been made.”

“They already do that.”

“Yes. This just formalises the whole process.”

"So, sign it, or lose whatever say I may have left."

"That's a fair summary, yes."

He thought about Marjory's question from weeks earlier — is there still something worth staying for? — and found, sitting with the legal document open in front of him, that the honest answer had started to shift. There was less to protect now than there ever had been. The character's gender had changed. The ending had been compressed into a shouted line over an explosion. The knights he'd loved building had been consolidated into a version he barely recognized. What remained that was worth staying for had gotten smaller with every draft, and he suspected, looking at the restraint clause, that it was about to get smaller still.

Desmond came to the apartment that evening.

He did not bring charm. This was how Localad knew the situation was serious.

“The studio is nervous,” he said.

“About me?”

“About narrative control.”

“That sounds like something a dictatorship puts on a stationery order.”

“They know you’re unhappy.”

“I watched them close the Wound with an explosion.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Desmond sat down.

He looked older than he had in Meridian Cove, when he carried Purradise out of the shop with the greedy wonder of a man rediscovering belief.

“I thought I could shepherd it,” he said. “That’s what producers tell themselves. We say we’ll stand between the work and the machine. Then the machine offers us a larger budget on the condition that we move slightly to one side.”

“And you moved.”

“Yes.”

Priya negotiated the agreement down as much as she could. Localad retained the right to discuss his original novel, his writing process and general principles of adaptation. However, he could not criticise the film directly at any time before its release.

“Signing preserves access for you,” she said. “Not control. I want to make that distinction very clear.”

“What would you do?”

“I would decide whether this access gives you any realistic chance to protect something that remains. If not, your silence is being purchased with imaginary currency.”

Localad thought of Marjory’s three conditions.

Jasmine was gone.

The Wound was closed.

Grief had become revenge.

He signed it anyway, three days later, in the specific, resigned way that people sign things when the alternative feels like giving up the last small handle they have on a situation already mostly out of their hands. He signed it not because he believed the agreement was fair. Not because Desmond had in any way persuaded him. But because some stubborn, irrational part of him still thought proximity might become leverage if he remained long enough.

Afterward, Priya said nothing for several seconds.

“You are not weak for doing this Localad,” she said at last. “But you are still hoping the contract describes a relationship that no longer exists.”

Localad looked at his signature.

For the first time in his life, he had finished writing something and wished he could take the words back.

Desmond called to thank him, sounding relieved in a way that told Localad, without either of them saying it directly, how close the studio had come to cutting him out of the process entirely.

"This doesn't mean you can't have opinions," Desmond said. "It just means the opinions stay in the room. Not on Twitter, not to reporters, not in interviews. In the same room, with us, where they can still occasionally do something special and make a difference."

"How much longer until it's finished?"

"Post-production wraps in about four months. Release is scheduled for next spring."

Four months. Localad hung up the phone and looked out at the city, the endless glass and neon he still hadn't fully learned to read, and thought about how strange it was that a story he had once controlled completely; every word, every choice, every quiet ending he'd been brave enough to finally write down, now belonged, almost entirely, to people whose names he hadn't even known a year earlier, and that the only leverage he had left was a clause in a contract that mostly obligated him to say nothing at all.

Thank you for reading thus far. Click here to read the full story from the beginning. Or here for the start of Act II.