Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 83986 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83986 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
“I’m sure I knew you had a production company…” Owen said. “It had to have come up in my research.”
“Oh, I’m sure it did, but just to refresh your memory, my buddy Bronson Racine and I own Side Hustle Productions. We made three films last year, Petals being one of them, which won everything but the Oscar,” he said irritably.
“But you’re not upset about that,” I teased him.
“What? Me? Bitter? Heavens, no,” he said dramatically. “But later this year we’re putting out Lava Lamp with Julianne Moore, and if that one doesn’t win, I’m gonna be loud about it.”
I was chuckling as Nash said, “I thought Bronson Racine was a music producer.”
“He is, but he also had a dream to make movies, and when he asked me if I wanted to do that with him, I jumped at the chance. We’ve been friends since college, so I know I can trust him and vice versa. We ate a lot of ramen together back in the day.”
We all sat there staring at him.
“Okay, sorry,” Owen said, “it’s just, it looks like you’re sitting with Elliot Voss, and it’s really hard to wrap my brain around the fact that it’s not him. I had questions to ask you about how you knew Voss, like did you invest with him, or did he lose your money, or—”
“No, no. I’ve never met the real Voss, only Kit looking like him.”
“It’s uncanny,” Owen told him.
Ash shrugged. “Well, good makeup will do that.”
“So, are you interested in making a film about a man like Voss?”
“Well, I told Kit if he made some changes, I would be. Not about the fraud part. The way he’s got it in the script now, the fraud is not Voss’s fault. He’s Rhodes’s patsy. And though Kit doesn’t know if that’s true, it makes it more fun that way. It makes the character of Voss more sympathetic, more romantic. In the film he’ll be oblivious to what he’s doing with his charm and power, and that way the audience will like him being the hero at the end,” he explained. “I told Kit I loved that.”
“What didn’t you like?” I asked him.
“At the same time as all the sort of Ocean’s Eleven stuff is going on, Kit has Voss killing his wife. I told him that totally corrupts the character, and if he keeps that part instead of writing the wife in as, let’s say, knowing what Rhodes is doing, that I would pass.”
“I agree,” I told him.
“Kit wants it to be edgy, but it needs to stay fun, and then he’d have a blockbuster on his hands. Plus, if he took an ordinary guy like Voss, again Rhodes’s patsy, a doofus, but a likable doofus, and had him totally become James Bond at the end and save his wife from whatever Rhodes is planning for her, since she knows too much—oh! he’d take her away to the Swiss Alps, I’m thinking… Oh my God,” he said, laughing. “It would be like printing money.”
“But then the story isn’t real,” Nash reminded him.
“That’s where the words based on a true story come in,” he replied, grinning. “As long as there are some facts in there sprinkled like fairy dust over the production, you can do whatever you want. And people are smart enough to know the limits of a guy like Voss. But they’ll root for him anyway.”
“This goes back to your Ocean’s Eleven reference,” Owen agreed. “If the bad guy is stealing, or in this case, saving his wife from a bad guy, then the original bad guy becomes the good guy simply based on degrees of evil.”
“Exactly,” Ash agreed. “In Kit’s script, he takes the character from being a bit of a scoundrel to irredeemable in a matter of frames. He’s smiling and oozing charisma one second, and the next there’s a flashback to him bludgeoning his wife with a hammer.”
“It didn’t work for you,” I surmised.
He glanced at me. “No, it didn’t. The rogue is no longer charming if he hurts the people he’s supposed to love. That goes for pets too. I’m sick of the dog or cat dying. What’s the purpose of that?”
“I agree,” Owen told him. “So basically, you were at that lunch to hear a pitch, nothing more?”
“Yes. That was all.” Ash’s phone rang then, and the ringtone—“Walking In LA” by Missing Persons, a song my mother had loved back in the day—was a surprise. “Sorry, hold on a minute. My agent, Levi Klein, is calling.” He swiped to answer and put it on speaker.
“So is it as bad there as it looks on the Weather Channel?” Klein asked without preamble. “Marida checked this morning and told me it was still raining, and on top of that, you have fog. What the hell? This is March already. You want me to send my plane?”