James insisted that the museum would have no connection to the church, except to provide initial funding; that the collection would start with the donations of some church members, but the vast majority of the museum would be up to her to build. “This is the church’s way of giving back to an industry that nourished our members for years,” Bryan said. And they loved her ideas—interactive CG exhibits for kids, a Silent Film vault, a rotating weekly film series, a dedicated film festival each year. She sighs; of all the things they could be, why Scientologists?
Claire mulls as she drives, zombie-like—all basic animal reflex. Her commute to the studio is a second-nature maze of cut-offs and lane changes, shoulders, commuter lanes, residential streets, alleys, bike lanes, and parking lots, devised to get her to the studio each day precisely eighteen minutes after she leaves her condo.
With a nod to the security guard, she drives through the studio gate and parks. She grabs her bag and walks toward the office, even her footfalls deliberating （quit, stay, quit, stay）。 Michael Deane Productions is housed in an old writer’s bungalow on the Universal lot, wedged between soundstages, offices, and film sets. Michael doesn’t work for the studio anymore, but he made so much money for it in the 1980s and 1990s that they’ve agreed to keep him around, a scythe on the wall of a tractor plant. The lot office is part of a first-look production deal Michael signed a few years back when he needed cash, giving the studio the first crack at whatever he produced （not much, as it turned out）。
Inside the office, Claire turns on the lights, slides behind her desk, and switches on her computer. She goes straight to the Thursday night box-office numbers, early openers, and weekend holdovers, looking for some sign of hope that she might have missed, a last-second break in trend—but the numbers show what they’ve shown for years: it’s all kid stuff, all presold comic-book sequel 3-D CGI crap, all within a range of algorithmic box-office projections based on past-performance-trailer-poster-foreign-market-test-audience reaction. Movies are nothing more than concession-delivery now, ads for new toys, video game launches. Adults will wait three weeks to get a decent film on demand, or they’ll watch smart TV—and so what passes for theatrical releases are hopped-up fantasy video games for gonad-swollen boys and their bulimic dates. Film—her first love—is dead.
She can pinpoint the day she fell: 1992, May 14, one A.M., two days before her tenth birthday, when she heard what sounded like laughter in the living room, and came out of her bedroom to find her father crying and nursing a tall glass of something dark, watching an old movie on TV—C’mere, Punkin—Claire sitting next to him as they quietly watched the last two-thirds of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Claire was amazed at the life she was seeing on that little screen, as if she’d imagined it without ever knowing. This was the power of film: it was like déjà vu dreaming. Three weeks later, her father left the family to marry chesty Leslie, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of his former law partner, but in Claire’s mind it would always be Holly Golightly who stole her daddy.
We belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us.
She studied film at a small design school, then got her master’s at UCLA, and was headed straight into the doctoral program there when two things revealed themselves in rapid succession. First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. （Godard, leave Rivette’s chew toy alone—） Recalling her Breakfast at Tiffany’s ambition, Claire quit her doctoral program and ventured out of the cloistered academic world to take one shot at making films rather than simply studying them.
She started by applying to one of the big talent agencies, the agent who interviewed her barely glancing at her three-page CV before saying, “Claire, do you know what coverage is?” The agent spoke as if Claire were a six-year-old, explaining that Hollywood was “a very busy place,” people attended by agents, managers, accountants, and lawyers. Publicists handled images, assistants ran errands, groundskeepers mowed lawns, maids cleaned houses, au pairs raised kids, dog walkers walked dogs. And each day these busy people got stacks of scripts and books and treatments; didn’t it make sense that they’d need help with those, too? “Claire,” the agent said, “I’m going to let you in on a secret: No one here reads.”
Having seen a number of recent movies, Claire didn’t think that was a secret.