Chapter Fourteen:  On-Set Disaster

At one end of it all, stood the Wound. It was a vast construction of steel, green screen cloth and various illuminated fabrics which looked less like a tear in reality than a luxury shopping centre being exorcised.

Localad was given a visitor badge for his lapel reading CREATIVE CONSULTANT.

The badge opened no doors for him.

Instead, a production assistant named Diane guided him through a complete forest made of foam, resin and the best part of three million dollars. Every tree had a number. Every patch of moss was fireproof. Somewhere overhead, rain waited in pipes for permission to become weather and it took him several long minutes, walking through it all with her. Diane’s entire job seemed to be keeping visitors moving and more to the point, out of the way.

It took Localad a short while to understand what he was looking at. 

It was supposedly the story's Wound in the sky. The single most important image in his entire book, the wound that did not close, the wound that Jasmine learned to live beside rather than heal. All rebuilt as a towering, mechanical set piece with visible hydraulics, designed to erupt, on cue, in an explosion of practical effects and CGI fire that the liaison described, with visible pride, as "the biggest single VFX sequence in the studio's entire history."

Yes, they were filming the climax of the story this day.

Brick stood before the Wound clad in his Bree prescribed ‘toyetic’ armour that looked like it was specifically designed to suggest that grief had just joined a gymnasium.

The four remaining knights of the story had also become one, played by an ageing actor whose helmet concealed most of the earlier focus-group difficulties.

Shadow creatures also swarmed around them. There were no shadow creatures in the book, but they had obviously tested better than plain unresolved sorrow ever would do.

“So what happens now?” Localad asked.

“Brick seals the Wound with the sword,” Diane said.

“He what?”

“He drives it into the core. Then his brother appears in the light it all creates.”

“The Wound is not supposed to bloody close!”

Diane checked her pages as though the script might apologise for the change somewhere.

“I'm sorry, the current draft closes it.”

Brick raised the sword.

The director called action.

“I've carried your death long enough!” Brick shouted. “Now I carry your justice!”

Then he stabbed at the Wound.

Explosions travelled across the whole set in a disciplined sequence. Wind machines roared. The single knight was thrown backward onto a padded ruin. The Wound collapsed in a storm of light while Brick screamed at the sky.

“Cut!”

"I don't think that's what they're filming today," the liaison said, not unkindly, checking her clipboard. "Today's the climactic battle. I think the quiet scene got folded into it, structurally speaking. It happens during the fight now, I believe? You'd have to ask the script supervisor for the specifics."

Localad found the script supervisor, a harried, kind woman named Joanne who had clearly fielded this exact question from him before, in an email he'd sent weeks earlier. 

He'd never gotten a satisfying answer to that, she just explained, patiently, that the scene at the Wound, the philosophical climax, the moment where Jasmine chooses to keep the sword and release her grief, all four hundred pages of build-up resolving in a single, still, quiet decision, now took place in the final ninety seconds of a twelve-minute action sequence. It was all delivered up as a single line of dialogue shouted over the extreme noise of an explosion, while Brick Holland's character, no longer carrying a dead sister's sword but a magic weapon retrofitted from an earlier draft's mythology that Localad barely recognized, and fought a horde of shadow-creatures that did not exist anywhere in the original manuscript.

The scene ended anyway and the crew applauded.

Trent, watching on a monitor, turned to Bree.

“That’s the trailer. Well done everybody.”

Localad stood very still.

Desmond found him behind a stack of artificial rocks.

“I didn’t know they were shooting this version today,” he apologised.

“You knew the version existed?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I thought I could get it changed before...”

“Before it became real?”

Desmond looked at the set. The crew reset the ruins. People carried pieces of the broken sky past them on trolleys.

“Yes,” he said.

Localad then approached Brick between takes.

“That line,” he said. “Do you like it?”

Brick removed part of his armour and considered.

“It plays.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Brick looked toward the television monitor, where Trent and Bree were reviewing the explosion.

“No,” he said. “I liked what you told me at the table read much better.”

“Then why say this?”

Brick’s answer was neither defensive nor proud.

“Because this is the line in front of me. The line I'm paid to say.”

There it was again: the ordinary sentence by which the whole of Hollywood's machinery absolved itself. Nobody ever choosing the result. Everyone merely performing the lines in front of them.

"It's supposed to be a quiet scene," Localad grumbled, mostly to himself, standing at the edge of the soundstage watching a stunt coordinator walk a full team of harnessed performers through a choreography that involved considerably more fighting than anything in the last hundred pages of his book. "The ending. It's supposed to be the quietest scene in the whole story!"

"Can I see the line?" Localad asked.

Diane showed him the relevant page of the shooting script, and Localad read it twice, and then a third time, hoping that some crucial context would reveal itself and make the words on the page mean something closer to what he'd spent twenty years building toward.

"I don't need you to forgive me anymore!" the line read, shouted, according to the script's capitalized direction, over the roar of the collapsing sky.

It was not wrong, exactly, in the way a line can be wrong. It wasn't a betrayal of the theme, not entirely. But it had the specific, hollow quality of a thesis statement standing in for the thing it was meant to be a conclusion of the conditional emotional labour of the entire book compressed into a single shouted sentence because there was no time, amid the unwanted collapsing sky and the shadow-creatures, for anything quieter to land.

He watched them filming it that afternoon, take after take, Brick Holland delivering the line with increasing conviction each time, the director calling for "more anger, less sadness" on the fourth take because, as he explained to the assembled crew, "we need the audience to feel like she's won something, not lost something."

Localad stood at the edge of the soundstage, watching his twenty years of grief and forgiveness get reduced, take by take, into nothing more than a triumphant shout, and felt something in his chest go quiet in a way that had nothing to do with peace.

He did not say anything on the soundstage. He had learned, by then, that saying anything rarely changed the outcome, only delayed it by however long it took someone to completely explain, why the change was necessary.

He went back to his corporate apartment that night and sat on the floor of the balcony that still didn't open, and for the first time since Desmond Ferris had walked into his bookstore with a dead phone in his hand, Localad cried. Not loudly, not for long, but completely, the specific grief of watching something he had built alone, in the quiet of a failing shop, get taken apart in public by people who were not wrong that it made for a better trailer, and not right, either, that a better trailer was the same thing as a better story.

He called Marjory afterward, later than he usually called her, and when she asked how the set visit had gone, he found he couldn't answer her in full sentences, and she didn't push him to.

Localad tried and failed to describe what he had seen.

Finally, he said, “They made the grief explode.”

“I know,” she said.

“How?”

“It’s what people do when they’re frightened of sitting with it.”

Localad looked out over Los Angeles.

For the first time during his stay here, the city’s lights did not seem glamorous. They looked more like warning labels.

She just stayed on the line, saying very little, until he fell asleep with the phone still in his hand, the way he used to fall asleep, as a child, listening to his father lock up the shop below.

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