Chapter Ten:  The First Pitch

The conference room had glass walls, twelve chairs and a view of the hills that Desmond's assistant told him, with obvious pride, had cost the studio "an actual fortune" in real estate, reportedly worth several millions. Localad wondered how a simple view could cost so much money when Meridian Cove back home distributed hers all so freely, but this was before he understood that Los Angeles had found a way to invoice anything. Including distance.

There were seven people at the table when Localad walked in, and he lost track of half their titles within the first ten minutes. Trent Vance occupied the central chair. He was lean, immaculately dressed and composed entirely of notes. He spoke almost exclusively in comparisons to other, more successful films and even his firm handshake felt revised.

“Localad,” he said, “we are so excited to have the originating creative voice in the room.”

Localad sat down. He was fairly certain this meant author, but the additional words had evidently been required by policy.

There was Bree from Marketing, who took notes on a tablet with the stillness of a priest recording sins and said almost nothing until the very end; two development executives with matching laptops and water bottles; a finance man who smiled only at numbers; Callum Ash, thirty-one years old and visibly restless, whose two festival wins Localad had, in fact, looked up the night before and found genuinely impressive, small dark dramas that had nothing in common, tonally, with the epic fantasy currently sitting in a folder in front of Trent Vance; and Desmond, seated slightly apart from the others, already looking tired.

“We love the book,” Trent said, just twelve minutes into the meeting. There it was. Localad felt something in his chest lift, briefly, as he waited for the second sentence.

“We just think there are opportunities to help the cinematic version declare itself more immediately. Nothing too major. Just a little… tightening.”

The sentence had clearly survived several committee meetings and at least one all in hostage negotiation.

“What does that even mean?” Localad asked.

Trent smiled as if delighted by the direct language, an endangered species he had once seen in captivity.

The tightening, as it turned out over the following hour, amounted to a fairly comprehensive list.

“Jasmine’s journey is emotionally rich. We like that, but we were wondering whether the first act could give her a more active external objective.”

“She is trying to reach the Wound.”

“Absolutely. But what does she want?”

“To reach the Wound.”

“In an audience-forward sense.”

Jasmine's arc, Trent felt, was "a little too internal for a tentpole. Could she have a more active goal in act one, something with stakes an audience could grip onto immediately, rather than the slow unspooling of grief that Localad had spent two hundred pages building?

Localad looked at Desmond. Desmond gave the smallest possible shrug, a movement with legal review built into it.

Then came the knights.

The fallen order of knights, while "visually rich," numbered eleven distinct characters in the book, and Trent worried that audiences "couldn't hold that many faces in their heads" — could they be consolidated?

The number four was floated. Then three, each one doing more narrative work? Bree suggested just the one, provided he had “strong toyetic armour.”

“Toyetic?” Localad asked.

“Capable of becoming a toy,” Bree said.

“People are capable of becoming toys?”

“Successful people are.” She was talking merchandising, which obviously carried a much higher ranking than a good storyline.

And then, finally, there was the ending.

Trent steepled his fingers.

“It’s beautiful.”

Localad braced.

“We just want to ensure it delivers sufficient event-level catharsis.”

“She puts down the grief, not the sword.”

“Yes. Emotionally, we’re aligned.”

“The Wound stays open.”

“Metaphorically, yes.”

“Literally too.”

A small silence entered the room and discovered it had no parking permit there.

Trent nodded slowly. "The ending is the thing we keep coming back to," he said, in the tone of a man delivering praise. "It's bold. It's really bold. We just want to make sure it lands the way you want it to land, and right now, structurally, it's a little quiet for the kind of finale a movie like this really needs. Audiences want a climax, a real one — the Wound opening, maybe, a battle, something the trailer can sell in fifteen seconds. What you've got is beautiful on the page. We just wonder if it's beautiful in the way a book is beautiful, and whether that's the same thing a movie needs to be."

He nodded slowly. “The concern is whether a non-closing sky portal leaves the audience without a victory image.”

“It isn’t a portal.”

“Portal-adjacent.”

“It’s a wound in reality.”

“Exactly. Very ownable.”

Localad sat with that sentence for a long moment, turning it over, trying to find a part of it he could disagree with cleanly, and finding instead that it had been built, carefully constructed, to make any form of disagreement sound like a complete failure to understand the medium.

"The ending isn't about a battle," Localad said finally. "It's about her choosing to stop needing her sister's forgiveness to be whole. The Wound doesn't close because that's the point. Some things don't get neatly resolved; you just learn to live beside them instead."

"Right, and that's gorgeous," Trent said, nodding along in a way that Localad would come to recognize, over the following weeks, as a specific kind of nodding that preceded a sentence beginning with but. "But we've got two hundred million dollars of marketing riding on people walking out of that theatre feeling something big. Not sad-and-thoughtful big. Big-big."

At last, Callum Ash, the director, spoke for the first time in nearly twenty minutes. "I think there's a version of this that keeps the emotional truth of what you wrote," he said, looking directly at Localad in a way none of the executives had, “The film can become larger without becoming simpler, and still gives Trent his fifteen-second trailer moment. I don't think those things have to be opposites. I read the book three times. I don't want to lose what makes it your book. I just think there's room to talk a little about how we get there."

Trent looked at him with the patient affection of a man observing a talented employee approach a career-limiting sentence. Localad looked at him with gratitude.

It was, Localad would realize much later, the single most honest and reasonable thing said in that entire meeting, and at the time it felt like a life raft. There was someone in the room who had actually read the thing, who seemed to understand what it was for, not just what it could be sold as.

He held onto that sentence for weeks, long after Callum Ash himself had been replaced.

The meeting ended with an assignment, delivered gently, dressed as collaboration: Trent wanted "a pass," a revised outline reflecting "The spirit of the room. Some of what we discussed," within two weeks, before the writers' room officially convened. Localad left the glass-walled room with a folder full of notes he didn't fully agree with and a headache he would come to recognize as a permanent feature of these buildings.

Desmond later caught up with him in the elevator, reading his face with the particular attention of a man checking in on an investment.

"First one's always the hardest," Desmond said. "You did fine."

"Did I lose?”

"You didn't lose anything yet," Desmond said. "You just found out what the fight's going to be about. That's not losing. That's information.”

“It felt like I lost."

“You discovered the battleground."

Localad wanted, badly, to believe him.

“That sounds like losing with a map.”

Desmond gave him a tired smile.

“Most careers are.”

Localad would spend the next coming weeks discovering exactly how much this ‘information’ was going to cost him.