The Book's a Lot Better Than the Movie

A Novel by Localad

Act III: The Silver Screen Betrayal (Chapters 17 – 24)

Chapter Seventeen:  Red Carpet… Red Flags

Localad attends the full-on, glittering, Hollywood premiere of his story, while feeling like a complete stranger to his own work.

Hollywood had closed an entire boulevard just so that several hundred people could walk nearly fifty yards. All while pretending, not to notice one another.

This was what Hollywood called a premiere.

Yes, the premiere was held at a theatre on a boulevard specifically closed off for the occasion. The red carpet began at the kerb of the road and ran full length to the theatre doors with the ceremonial importance of a royal intestine. Along both sides stood photographers, publicists, reporters, security guards and people whose exact function was unclear but whose headsets suggested that civilisation fully depended upon them.

A wall of photographers three deep behind velvet rope, and a crowd of fans held back on the far sidewalk holding their phones aloft, waiting for a glimpse of Brick Holland, whose name had appeared on the marquee in letters considerably larger than the film's title, which appeared, in turn, considerably larger than the small line beneath it that read, at a distance requiring excellent eyesight and a cooperative moon:

based on the novel by Localad.

based on the novel by Localad… a line that Desmond had fought tooth and nail for, apparently, to keep at all, though Localad hadn't learned that until Priya mentioned it in passing several weeks later.

Localad stood at the beginning of the carpet in a dark blue suit selected by the studio. A stylist had described the colour as “midnight authority,” although it looked to Localad like navy with a little financial backing added to the seams.

The tailor had measured him that afternoon with brisk intimacy and no curiosity whatsoever. He had measured him with the efficiency of a person who did this seventeen times a week and remembered none of those seventeen. To be honest, Localad had found this quite restful. In Los Angeles, being touched by someone with absolutely no interest in his intellectual property felt, for a change, almost wholesome. Especially when compared to what he'd already been through.

He stood near the end of the carpet, in the section reserved for "creative contributors," a designation that placed him between a costume designer he'd never met and a second-unit director whose job, as far as Localad understood it, involved filming things that didn't require the main director's presence.

A publicist stopped him and clipped a card to his lapel.

“Creative contributor,” she said.

Localad looked at it. “Is that what I am now?”

“It’s your category.”

“Ah. I had hoped for a name.”

She had already moved on.

He re-joined the procession just behind a composer and ahead of a master carpenter stage hand. The composer wore velvet and had the magnificent sorrowful hair of a man who had been told since adolescence that weather happened for him personally. The stage hand was talking into two phones at once and appeared to be losing both arguments in stereo.

The photographers did not know who Localad was. He watched them call out names as people walked past.

The photographers shouted for the stars.

“Brick! Brick, this way!”

“Farrah, over the shoulder!”

“Desmond! One alone?” 

As Localad passed through, the noise thinned to the thoughtful silence usually only reserved for unidentified luggage.

One photographer near the end glanced at the small card clipped to his lapel, squinted, and said, "Wait, are you the book guy?" before another wave of noise from Brick Holland's arrival swallowed the question whole.

Before Localad could decide whether to answer, Brick Holland arrived.

Brick did not enter a space so much as cause it to revise its priorities. The photographers erupted. Fans screamed. Publicists accelerated. Several fully grown adults began walking backwards at speed, which was how Hollywood expressed respect.

Brick saw Localad and raised a hand.

“Hey, man! Book guy!”

There it was again. Book guy. He turned the phrase over for the rest of the walk down the carpet, feeling it settling into his chest like something with superficial weight.

Localad smiled, only because there were cameras.

Brick crossed over to him and clasped his shoulder with the robust affection of someone checking the quality of a melon.

“Big night,” Brick said. “Your world, up there.”

Localad looked toward the theatre.

“Well, a version of it.”

Brick’s smile flickered. For one second, he looked not offended but uncertain of what Localad had just said, like a man who had just been handed a complicated tool without instructions.

Then a reporter called out his name again and his certainty quickly returned, relieved to be back on familiar ground.

Inside the theatre, he found his seat, not in the front section reserved for the director, the stars, and the studio's most senior executives, but several rows further back, beside Priya Reyes, who had flown out for the occasion at his invitation. She waited beside Localad’s assigned seat. She wore black, carried no visible anxiety and regarded the room merely as if it were a contract attempting to distract her with fancy chandeliers.

“You came,” Localad said.

“You invited me.”

“People often treat that as preliminary information.”

“I wanted to see the evidence.” She laughed.

Desmond arrived just moments before the lights started to dim. He looked immaculate at a distance and tired close up. His success had not improved his face. It had simply given the fatigue a better tailoring.

He squeezed Localad’s shoulder in a gesture that was probably meant as reassurance and landed, instead, as something closer to an apology that hadn't yet found its words.

"Whatever happens tonight. However, this plays out," Desmond said, low, close to his ear, "I want you to remember that eighteen months ago this was just a manuscript in a drawer that nobody but you had ever read. Whatever happens tonight, that part will always be true."

Localad looked at him.

“Is that supposed to be comfort?”

“I’m trying to find out.”

Localad didn't answer, because the lights were already going down, and mainly because he still wasn't sure, in that moment, whether Desmond's reminder was meant to comfort him or brace him for the worst.

He looked around the theatre in the dark before the film began. At the rows of executives and press and invited guests, none of whom, as far as he could tell, had read a single page of the book that had started all of this, all of them here purely for the version that existed now, the one with Brick Holland's face on the poster and an eight-figure streaming deal already signed, the one that had been built, carefully, deliberately, out of the bones of what Localad had written and very little else that he still recognized as his.

He thought, unexpectedly, of Marjory, sitting in a movie theatre two hours inland from Meridian Cove because there wasn't one in town, having driven there with several other people from home. Mrs. Alvarez, Mr. Okafor, and three other townspeople who had formed what Mrs Alverez called “the official local delegation,” despite possessing no real authority beyond a bag full of snacks. They had wanted, badly, to see the premiere on the same night as its Los Angeles debut, even from two thousand miles away.

Before the screening, Marjory sent Localad a photograph. The six of them, his true fan club,  together held up a hand-painted sign:

WE’RE SO PROUD OF YOU LOCALAD!

And Mrs. Alvarez had added, in smaller letters beneath it:

WHATEVER THEY’VE DONE!

Localad laughed when he saw it. Then his eyes watered, which for the sake of any onlookers, he fully attributed to an excess of styling product in the theatre atmosphere.

The lights dimmed to a darkness.

He wished, while sitting in the dark theatre in Los Angeles surrounded by strangers who had never opened the book, that he was in that other theatre instead, surrounded by people who had actually read it, or at least loved or cared for him enough to hold up a sign about a movie they hadn't seen yet.

Studio logos now appeared, each with its own weather system and musical declaration, followed by the production company logos, followed, finally, by the title, rendered in the same jagged, aggressive font from the teaser trailer, nothing like the plain serif Localad had chosen for his single bound copy a year and a half earlier.

Purradise, the screen read, and beneath it, small, almost exactly as small as Desmond had warned him it might be, was: based on the novel by Localad.

Small, but present.

The screen finally brightened and the movie began.

There would be no more notes. No more drafts. No more revising to be done. No more assurances that the next version would restore what the previous version had removed.

The machine had finished its chewing.

Whatever the film was, it was now, finally, finished, and Localad sat very still in his rented suit, holding his breath, waiting to find out exactly how much of him had actually survived the trip.

Now everyone would see first hand, what Hollywood can really do to a book it had fully digested.

Thank you for reading thus far. Click here to read the full story from the beginning.