Chapter Thirteen:  The A-List Star

An arrogant action star is cast as the lead, completely changing the character's core identity

The casting announcement went out on a Monday, and Localad found out pretty much the same way most of the world did. Through his mobile. A notification from an entertainment site he'd never subscribed to but which had apparently decided, in the five months since his name first appeared attached to a studio project, that he was worth alerting about developments in his own movie.

This was efficient. It spared the studio the awkwardness of telling him first.

BRICK HOLLAND TO LEAD FANTASY EPIC "PURRADISE” FRANCHISE.

Beneath the headline was Brick’s face: square, expensive and deeply familiar. He had starred in five films about a demolitions expert whose principal emotional range ran from “building intact” to “building recently otherwise.”

Localad had recognised him instantly, the way most of the world would have recognised him; square-jawed, gym-built, star of a franchise about a demolitions expert that had produced, at that point, five instalments and roughly the same number of facial expressions.

Localad read the article twice, standing in his kitchen, waiting for some explanation of how this had happened, and found only the studio's official statement, three sentences of practiced enthusiasm about Holland's "range" and "commitment to bringing depth to the role," and a quote from Brick Holland himself: 

"When I read the script, I knew this character was someone who's been through real trauma and comes out the other side even stronger. That's a story I want to tell."

Jasmine, in the book, was a twenty-six-year-old woman carrying her dead sister’s sword.

Brick Holland was neither of those things.

Localad called Desmond immediately, and Desmond, to his credit, picked up on the first ring, which had become, over the months, a reliable signal that Desmond already knew what the call was about and had been waiting for it.

"They changed the character's gender," Localad stated, without preamble. "They made Jasmine a man."

"It's Farrah's draft," Desmond said. "The studio's read on it is that Brick Holland guarantees a certain opening weekend that a first-time female lead doesn't, not at this budget. It's not a decision anyone loves making. It's a decision the financing requires."

“The story is about sisterhood.”

“They’re changing the sister to a brother.”

“That doesn’t preserve sisterhood.”

“No.”

“The entire emotional structure… The entire book is about a woman carrying her dead sister's weapon and her dead sister's expectations and learning the difference between them. That's not a story about…"

Localad stopped, searching for words that weren't simply an insult to a man he'd never even met. "That's not a story about someone whose whole public persona is blowing things up while looking totally unbothered."

"I know," Desmond’s voice sounded stripped of all salesmanship for once, and genuinely apologetic rather than crisis management.

"I really fought this one. I lost it. I want to be honest with you about that, because I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve me pretending I have more power here than I do. I'm a producer. I'm not the studio. The financing was conditional. Above a certain number, actors become infrastructure and decisions like this one get made by people I don't get a vote against."

“People are infrastructure now?”

“In this town, the successful ones are. Always have been.”

"So, what do I do?"

"You can walk," Desmond said. "You have that right, contractually. You only signed away creative control of the film, not your name off the credits, and there's a clause that lets you request your name be further reduced to 'based on the novel by' rather than a more prominent credit if you feel the finished film has departed too far from your work. Some writers choose to use that clause. It's not nothing, symbolically. But it doesn't stop the film from being made. It doesn't get you the character back. It just means your name's a little smaller on a poster that's going to be happening either way."

Localad sat with the choice for three days, the article's screenshot still open on his phone, the demolitions expert's face still smiling out at him with a confidence Localad found, increasingly, exhausting to look at.

Priya explained his contractual options with surgical calm.

“Yes, you can certainly request a reduced credit but you cannot stop the production. You sold the adaptation rights, not fidelity.”

“I didn’t know those were opposites.”

“They are not legally required to be. That is the difficulty.”

He talked to Marjory every night that week, and on the third night she said something that stayed with him longer than almost anything else anyone had told him during those months.

"You keep asking me whether you should walk away," she said. "I don't think that's actually the right question at this point. I think the correct question is whether there's still something worth staying for. If there's nothing left of the book you wrote in what they're making, then walking doesn't cost you anything. There's nothing left to lose. But if there's still something in there, anything worth protecting, even a little, even just the ending, maybe staying and fighting for that little bit is worth more than a clean exit."

"How do I know which one it is?"

"You go to the set," she said. "You watch them film it. You'll know."

He did not walk away, not yet, though he would come to wonder, in the months following the film's release, whether Marjory's advice had been wisdom or simply the kindest way either of them had known to say, "stay a little longer and see how bad it really gets, because you're not ready to accept it's that bad yet."

He met Brick Holland exactly once, at a table read staged for behind-the-scenes cameras, that felt, to Localad, less like a creative process than a performance of one. Brick arrived with an assistant, a trainer and a publicist who introduced herself before he could.

To Localad’s surprise, Brick was quite polite.

“I loved the book,” he said.

“You read it?”

“My assistant read it and gave me the emotional architecture.”

“That isn’t the same.”

Brick thought about this with visible effort.

“No,” he said. “Probably not.”

There was not an ounce of malice in him. Brick had completely been industrially simplified. Years of reward had taught him that the world wanted just the one thing from him and would pay extraordinary sums if he never complicated the order.

“What do you think the character wants?” Localad asked.

“To avenge his brother.”

“Nope, not even close.”

Brick looked genuinely interested.

“Well, what does he want?”

“To stop living as if grief is a debt.”

Brick repeated the sentence quietly to himself.

“That’s a lot harder to punch.”

“Yes.”

“But maybe better.”

For one brief moment, Localad saw who the actor Brick might have been before the industry discovered the profitable outline and coloured it in permanently for him.

Then the cameras rolled. Executives lined against the back wall, cameras rolling for the featurette, actors reading lines from a script that had drifted so far from Localad's original prose that he sometimes lost the thread of which scene he was even listening to. 

Brick smiled, lifted the sword and delivered a line about vengeance that did not exist in any version that Localad had ever written.

Everyone applauded.

Holland was, in person, unexpectedly gracious, thanking Localad for "creating this whole world," and Localad found himself unable to summon up the anger he'd been carrying for three days, because Holland, up close, seemed less like a villain in this story and more like what he actually was. Just another person hired to do a job in a machine that had already decided, long before he arrived, what shape the finished product would take.

"Hey, do you think it's still your story?" Holland asked Localad unexpectedly during a break, sincerity replacing, for a moment, the practiced warmth of the earlier thanks.

Localad thought about it for longer than the question probably warranted. "I think it's a story that started as mine," he said finally. "I'm not exactly sure whose story it is now."

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