Chapter Sixteen:  The Trailer Drops

The first teaser trailer releases online, sparking outrage from early book fans for its cheap quality.

The first teaser trailer for Purradise premiered online on a Tuesday morning, attached to a marketing push the studio had been building toward for weeks. There was a countdown clock on all the film's social media accounts, a cryptic single image released three days earlier of a sword half-buried in ash, a partnership with a streaming platform that had paid, according to an industry insider newsletter that Desmond had forwarded him with visible excitement, "an eight-figure sum" for exclusive digital rights down the line.

Localad watched the trailer for the first time at six in the morning, alone in his corporate apartment, because Desmond had sent him a private link an hour before the public release "so you can see it first, the way it should be."

It began with darkness.

A voice whispered, “Every wound demands vengeance.”

Localad paused the video.

The Wound had never demanded anything in its life. It was a wound. Its principal activity was remaining open. End of.

He continued.

Drums thundered. Brick Holland strode across a battlefield wearing armour that appeared to have annexed his neck. The single surviving knight said, “You cannot defeat grief.”

Brick replied, “Watch me.”

There then followed six massive explosions, two flying creatures, a kiss with a character Localad did not recognize at all, and a shot of the sword entering the Wound while the title PURRADISE emerged in letters made of fire.

Somewhere down the line, someone had also added a cat noise. Not a cat as such, a noise signifying a cat to a person who had once heard one being described.

The teaser then ended with Brick looking directly into camera.

“This time,” he said, “the sky bleeds back.”

It was ninety seconds long. It opened on Brick Holland's face, lit from below, delivering a growled version of a line that bore almost no resemblance to anything in the book. "They took everything from me. Now I will take it back" spoken over a montage of explosions, shadow-creatures, and a brief, blink-and-you'd-miss-it shot of the Wound itself, rendered as a churning vortex of fire rather than the still, silent tear in the sky Localad had described four hundred times across forty-odd drafts of the manuscript. The trailer then ended on the shouted line from the soundstage. "I don't need you to forgive me anymore!" synced to a bass drop, followed by the title card and a release date that felt, to Localad, both impossibly close and impossibly far away.

Localad closed down his laptop. But he quickly reopened it again.

The apartment became very quiet except for the refrigerator, which chose exactly that moment to issue one of its bureaucratic groans.

Online, the studio had already announced record engagement.

Trent sent an email congratulating the team on “strong cross-demographic heat.”

Bree circulated a chart demonstrating that the sword shot had performed particularly well among males aged eighteen to thirty-four who intended to purchase beverages during opening weekend.

And then the comments began.

He read through the comments before he could stop himself, which he would recognize, later, as a mistake he should have anticipated.

The internet's early reaction was split, roughly, into two camps: people excited for another big loud action movie who had never read the book and had no reason to compare it to anything, and second, a very much smaller, yet a lot more vocal group who had somehow, over the preceding months, found and read the small handful of early excerpts Localad had once posted, a while back, on an obscure fantasy-writing forum under his own name, back when he still fully believed no one but strangers on the internet would ever see the book at all.

This looks nothing like the book, one comment read, with several hundred replies underneath it, most of them agreeing.

Jasmine was a WOMAN. this is such a bait and switch. the ending in the actual book was about grief, not revenge, why does this look like every other generic fantasy trailer I’ve seen the last five years.

One comment even read: Sounds like the book's a lot better than the movie.

It received twelve likes.

Localad stared at it longer than the other larger arguments.

He closed the laptop again before he read any further, and sat for a long time in the silence of the apartment, listening to the refrigerator make its nightly noises, thinking about the town two thousand miles away where none of this. The trailer, the comments, the eight-figure streaming deal, would have made any sense at all if he'd tried to explain it a year earlier, standing behind the counter of a bookstore with a cracked bell, printing a single copy of a story that had, until a stranger's car broke down outside his window, belonged entirely to him.

Marjory texted him that morning, before he'd worked up the nerve to call her: Saw the trailer. how are you?

He looked at the message for a long time before answering.

He typed Fine.

Deleted it.

Typed Complicated.

Deleted that too.

Not great, he wrote back, finally, which was the truest thing he had said out loud, even if in writing, for months.

Do you want to talk about it?

Not yet, he wrote. Soon.

He put the phone down and looked out at the city, and for the first time since arriving, he found himself thinking not about how to fix what was happening to the movie, but about the shop back home. For months he had worried about the film. But now, for the first time, he actually thought about going home. Back to the cracked bell, the missing apostrophe, the counter where he'd once finished a book that had, for twenty years, asked nothing of him except honesty and a few coffee rings. He missed it all with an intensity that surprised him, sharp and sudden, like a hunger he hadn't noticed building until it arrived all at once. Homesickness had arrived, not as sadness but as a recognition of it.

Los Angeles had made everything larger than life except for him.

Outside, the city shone at full volume.

Inside, Localad opened the original manuscript on his computer.

The first sentence appeared. No notes. No tracked changes. No market positioning.

Just Purradise.

He read until dawn.

He did not know yet that the trailer's reception — messy, divided, already generating the kind of pre-release controversy that would follow the film all the way to its premiere — was the first small tremor of something much larger to come.

He only knew that watching those initial ninety seconds of his own story, thoroughly filtered through a year of meeting rooms he hadn't chosen and choices he hadn't fully made, had left him feeling less like a successful writer and more like a man watching a photograph of his childhood home be slowly, professionally, competently demolished, one confident decision at a time.

And here ends part two of my latest book. There's still two more parts to come so stay tuned for the next instalments. And thank you for reading thus far. 

Chapter Fifteen:  The NDA

Under the threat of legal action, Localad is now being forced to sign a contract promising not to criticise the film.

The email from the studio's legal department arrived just four days after the set visit. It thanked Localad for his continued partnership.

Chapter Fourteen:  On-Set Disaster

Localad visits the film set and watches his deeply philosophical climax turn into nothing more than an explosion.

When Localad finally visited the film set it was already three weeks into principal photography. The studio set was all constructed on a soundstage the size of an aeroplane hangar and it all contained far less air.

Chapter Thirteen:  The A-List Star

An all muscle action star is cast as the lead, completely changing the main character's core identity.

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

To be fair, Localad thought this was impressively efficient. In as much as it spared the studio any awkwardness of having to tell him first.

BRICK HOLLAND TO LEAD FANTASY EPIC "PURRADISE” FRANCHISE.

Beneath the headline was Brick’s face: square, expensive and deeply familiar. He had previously starred in five other films, about a demolitions expert whose principal emotional range ran from “building intact” to “building recently otherwise” peppered with a few unnecessary dead bodies along the way.

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

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

"When I first read the script, I knew this character was someone who's been through some real trauma, yet 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've changed the character's gender," Localad stated, without preamble. "They've made Jasmine a bloody man."

"It's Farrah's draft," Desmond replied. "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."

“But the story is about sisterhood.”

“They’re changing the sisterhood to a brotherhood.”

“That doesn’t preserve the storyline.”

“No. It probably doesn't”

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

Localad stopped, searching for words that weren't simply going to insult a man he'd never even met. "That's not a story about someone whose whole public persona is nothing more than blowing things up while looking totally unbothered by any of the consequences."

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

"Believe me, I really fought this one. And I lost it. I want to be completely honest with you about that, because I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve me pretending I have more power here than I actually 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?"

"Well, you can always walk away," Desmond said. "You have that right, contractually. You only signed away any 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 original 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 a surgical calm.

“Yes, you can certainly request a reduced credit but you cannot stop the whole 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 to be asking at this point. I think the correct question is whether there's still anything worth staying for. If there's nothing left of the book you wrote in what they're making, then walking away doesn't cost you anything. There's simply 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 going to be 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 that 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 that it's really that bad yet."

He met Brick Holland exactly once, at a table read specifically 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. Because Brick had been completely industrially simplified. Years of constant reward had taught him that the world wanted just the one thing from him and they would pay him extraordinary sums if he never complicated that 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 had discovered his 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.

Brick 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.