The Rom-Commers
Katherine Center
For my dad, Bill Pannill, who loves words as much as I do. Maybe more.
One
LOGAN SCOTT CALLED just as I was making dinner, and I almost didn’t answer because my dad and I were singing along to ABBA’s greatest hits. There were not too many people I’d interrupt ABBA for—but yes, fine, Logan Scott was one of them.
Logan was my former high school boyfriend, who still felt guilty about the way we broke up, and he dealt with that guilt by sending me job opportunities.
Not the worst way to handle it.
It was the penance he paid for his unscathed life.
Though nobody’s life is truly unscathed, I guess.
His less-scathed life, maybe.
He was a manager. In Hollywood. For screenwriters. A very glamorous job.
Technically, he was my manager—although I’d never made him any money. I was kind of like his pro bono case.
It was fine, he always insisted. I’d pay off eventually.
I’d placed in two different screenwriting contests because Logan insisted I submit. He got me in the door freelancing for Variety. And all those movie reviews I got paid minimum wage to do? Courtesy of him.
He just kept sending me work.
I told him to stop feeling guilty. I was fine. But I didn’t exactly mean it. Not if that guilt of his was going to keep paying my bills.
Some of them, anyway.
All to say, on this particular night, Logan had a doozy of an offer for me.
“Emma,” he said. “I’m going to need you to sit down.”
“I’m flipping pancakes-for-dinner right now,” I said. My sister, Sylvie, was coming home from college, so I was making her favorite meal.
“You will definitely drop them all when you hear this,” Logan said, like he’d pictured me juggling pancakes instead.
I covered the in-progress stack with foil, turned off the music, and gave my dad a “one minute” finger from across the room.
My dad nodded and gave a hearty thumbs-up, like Do whatever you need to do.
“I’m ready,” I said to Logan.
“Are you literally sitting down?”
“No.”
“I’m not kidding. You need to do that.”
I walked to our dining-slash-breakfast table and sat down at my already-set place. “Okay,” I said. “I’m literally sitting.”
“I have a job for you…” Logan said then, pausing for effect.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Writing a feature film script…” he went on, stretching out the moment.
“Sold,” I said, like Moving on.
And then he got to his grand finale: “With Charlie Yates.”
Logan had told me to sit—but at the sound of that name, I stood up.
Then I froze. Then frowned. Then waited. Was this a trick?
“Hello?” Logan finally said. “Are you still—”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I thought I heard you say Charlie Yates.”
“I did say Charlie Yates.”
I sat back down. “Charlie Yates?” I said, like there was room for confusion.
I could sense Logan nodding. “Yes.”
But I needed more confirmation. “Charlie Yates who wrote The Destroyers? Charlie Yates who wrote The Last Gunslinger, and Smokescreen, and Forty Miles to Hell? The screenwriters’ screenwriter, living legend, reason half the country says the catchphrase ‘Merry Christmas, cowboy’—that Charlie Yates?”
“Uh-huh,” Logan said, enjoying the moment. “That one.”
I took a sip of the ice water in my glass—
“He’s written a rom-com,” Logan said.
—and I coughed it back out.
Logan waited while I recovered.
“Charlie Yates wrote a rom-com?” Now I was suspicious. A Western? Sure. A horror flick? Absolutely. A dystopic space adventure where the robots eat all the humans? In a heartbeat. But a rom-com?
No way.
“He didn’t,” I said, answering my own query.
“He did.”
“Is it … good?” I asked, and then immediately shook my head to cancel the question.
Of course it was good.
I’d seen every movie Charlie Yates had ever written, and I’d read every one of his screenplays—produced or unproduced—that I could get my hands on, printing them off the internet and lovingly binding them with brass brads before alphabetizing them on their own dedicated shelf on my bookcase. And I didn’t just read them. I highlighted them. Annotated them. Covered them with Post-its and exclamation points. No question it was good. Charlie Yates couldn’t write a bad screenplay if you threatened to take all his awards away.
“It’s terrible,” Logan said then.
“What?” It couldn’t be.
“It’s so terrible, even calling it terrible is an insult to the word terrible.”
I took that in. “You’ve read it?” I asked.
“My eyes will never be the same, but yes—I read an entire draft.”
“You read a draft?” I asked. “How?”
How was my ex-boyfriend from high school just casually reading the private first drafts of the world’s most beloved superstar screenwriter?