This Is Where We Live (3 page)

Frankly, Claudia was grateful that there was a premiere at all. These days, with Hollywood still reverberating from last winter’s strike, the lavish parties were limited strictly to lent–pole films with hundred-million-dollar marketing budgets. Claudia’s was a low-budget movie with a small distributor—no Angelina or Jennifer or Will in a lead role, just an ensemble cast of semirecognizable indie-cinema stalwarts and television actresses. But her distributors, buoyed by advance reviews and a handful of Sundance awards and smelling the possibility of a breakout hit (“The next
Juno,”
Claudia had heard them say more than once, in recent weeks, occasionally swapping in
Lost in Translation
or
Garden State)
, had ponied up the money for the free cocktails and the Mediterranean buffet and the rented carpet, so here she was, at her very own Hollywood premiere. Having attended so many of these events as a guest, where officious publicists typically funneled her straight past the red carpet toward the “nobody of importance” entrance, she found it hard to accept that this time the press line was waiting for
her
.

They parked a few blocks away and walked back toward the theater. Claudia’s phone chimed persistently as congratulatory text messages and voice mails arrived from her parents and older sister back in Michigan, who had attended the Sundance festival in January but were forgoing the premiere. The evening air was soupy with late-July humidity; sweat dripped down the nape of her neck as they approached the red carpet. She reached out for Jeremy’s hand, and Jeremy gripped hers back with a damp palm. By now, she could see her investors waving at her, the publicists smiling toothily in her direction. For a brief moment, as she stepped into the turning crowd, she remembered the sensation of walking down the aisle at her wedding, of a hundred eyes turned in her direction and the realization that this one day was inviolably
hers;
then she and Jeremy were swallowed up by the heat-seeking crowd, which had pinpointed Claudia as tonight’s fuel source. There was her producer, grabbing her in a bear hug; and the stars of her film, doing interviews with a reporter from a film magazine; and a clutch of her friends, smiling from the sidelines as the flashes popped off around her. The rest was a blur, just as her wedding had been three years earlier: a series of high-voltage encounters, each spinning off from the last, each one landing her at the next, as little by little she made her way across the red carpet and into the lobby and down the aisle of the theater; until finally she found herself sitting in a seat in the center of a crowded room as the lights went down and her own name floated up on the screen in four-foot-high letters:
Written and directed by Claudia Munger
.

The crowd applauded warmly; a few crew members whooped in the back of the room. As the opening sequences spun across the screen, Claudia found herself suppressing a hiccup of hysteria: It was all so bizarrely surreal. Really, if you’d told the other ninety-two members of Claudia’s graduating class at Mantanka Senior High that their classmate would someday become a filmmaker who would attend her Hollywood premiere accompanied by her famous-on-college-radio husband, they would have laughed in your face. Not just because people in Mantanka didn’t tend to stray far from the confines of Kallington County, but because Claudia was not the likeliest candidate for even minor celebrity. Prematurely tall, slightly plump, and suffering from a vicious overbite (the result of a childhood car accident), adolescent Claudia had suffered as the target of the mean girls in her class, a gaggle of acid-jeans-wearing, Whitesnake-listening, Sun-In-lightened featherbrains who used her as the butt of every joke.
Claude the Clod
. The torturous orthodontic headgear she wore throughout her junior and senior years—a byzantine contraption that encased her entire head in reflective steel—didn’t help matters. Crippled by self-consciousness, Claudia spent the better part of high school locked in her bedroom, losing herself in classic movies that she watched on the VCR her parents had given her to compensate for their guilt about her dentistry.

But her orthodontist knew what he was doing. By the time she arrived at university, as far from Mantanka as she could imagine—which, at that point, was still only Madison—Claudia had lost the extra weight and the oral accessories and had, in their place, a perfect set of gleaming white teeth and a new understanding about the power of reinvention. She dyed her hair black, got a lizard tattoo on her ankle, and immersed herself in Alterna-Culture (Lite Version). What she wanted to be, she eventually decided, was a filmmaker. Not an actress—she didn’t have that theatrical bent, and she would never be mistaken as the prettiest girl in the room—but the person behind the camera, the one who controlled what you saw on the screen. The visionary. To imagine an entire world and then just
will it
into being: That was power.

She’d thrown herself into college with the thrilled abandon of a prisoner released from long incarceration, joining every college film club she could imagine, becoming the president of the Cinema Society and the director of the university’s StudentTV and finishing with a straight-A transcript that qualified her for the UCLA film program—even if it didn’t get her the scholarship she needed to afford school.
That
she managed by living with her parents for two torturous years after college, working three jobs, and saving every cent until she could climb on a plane for Los Angeles with enough money in her pocket to pay for subsidized housing and a steady diet of burritos.

By any measure, her early years in Los Angeles were a success, a blur of well-received student films and house parties and love affairs with interesting if generally unavailable guys. But at the center of every accomplishment was always the fear that this Claudia, the attractive ambitious confident one, was somehow a fraud—that the real Claudia was the brace-wearing outcast hiding in her bedroom back in Mantanka. Hollywood was a town built on judgment—your body, your finances, your credentials, all were constantly on parade—and there were moments when she felt she couldn’t bear the scrutiny: She was sure that if they really looked hard she would inevitably come up short. Even after she finished film school with a student Oscar for her experimental short and entered into a coveted (if humiliating) job as assistant to a narcissistic director of blockbuster supernatural thrillers, she felt she didn’t quite belong here in the land of bluster and self-righteousness. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for a life of perpetual anxiety.

Still, she churned out three earnest little scripts, passion projects that because of their so-very-edgy subject matter (prostitutes in North Dakota; suburban parents who murder their kids; a nonlinear drug addiction redemption story) were doomed never to be made. Her film-school friends told her she was crazy to be writing this sort of dark, arty fare. “Are you trying to defeat yourself? Do a broad comedy, get yourself established with the studios, and then go for the fringe indie stuff,” her best friend, Esme, advised her. But she wanted to be successful
and
an artist; was that so unrealistic?

By the time her doctor diagnosed her with an ulcer, she had shown the drug-addiction script to a half-dozen film finance companies and received vaguely positive responses, a handful of rewrite suggestions, but no offers.
They are trying to kill me with encouragement
, she realized. Burned out, dead broke, and still single, she seriously began to consider packing it all in and going back to Wisconsin. Maybe the life that awaited her there—a conventional sort of job, marriage, kids, the whole middle-America Apple Pie package—wasn’t so bad after all. At least she wouldn’t be living a life of incessant rejection.

But then, just when she was beginning to tinker with the Wisconsin job listings on Craigslist, she showed up at a friend’s barbecue at a rundown Craftsman in Venice. There, she found herself meeting the slightly sad eyes of the shaggy musician standing across the mud-stricken lawn and realized, to her surprise and great delight, that he was walking straight toward her.

The morning after their first date (a screening of
Bonnie & Clyde
in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, talking until dawn on the roof of Jeremy’s apartment building over a bottle of warming Chianti), she began writing a new script, this time starting from a place of inspired pragmatism. This one would be a comedy
(comedies sell
) with a boy-meets-girl story at its center
(everyone loves a love story)
and a cast in their twenties
(prime moviegoing demographic)
. It would be more commercial but still sufficiently indie; and maybe it wasn’t the original direction she’d intended to go with her career but it might actually get made. She would give it another try. More than anything, suddenly, she wanted to stay in LA.

Still, it took a year to cobble together the financing for the film, as she coaxed the money, one zero at a time, from friends and friends of friends and one miraculous Israeli hedge fund investor. Her budget was still so modest that she’d had to borrow her video camera from a friend; instead of a craft services table, her Aunt Betsy sent out home-baked cookies from Indiana; since Claudia couldn’t afford stars, her lead actress was a refugee from a television sitcom. Jeremy—by that point, her husband—served as production assistant, fetching her coffee and rubbing her feet when she got home from the set. They still went over budget, a shortfall she personally fronted on a series of credit cards. There were days when it felt like she’d just made an audacious losing bet.

But then
Spare Parts
was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, and there her movie won a directing award and was nominated for two others, and finally she sold it to a respected film distributor for a sum that felt enormous to her (although, put into perspective, was probably the equivalent of one day’s catering budget for the average Hollywood blockbuster). Sitting in her lawyer’s hotel room overlooking the snowy Rockies on the day she signed the deal, she felt high—not just from the altitude up there in the mountains, but also from a certitude that she had never felt before. She had taken a gamble on her own future and drawn a winning hand despite the odds.

That was how she’d ultimately ended up here, in the packed lobby of this theater, surrounded by friends and film industry acquaintances and people who had worked on her movie and a vast number of complete strangers. The movie had finished screening; and even though there wasn’t a standing ovation at the end, the audience cheered and sat through the entire credit sequence before making a beeline for the free bar. Now, the crowd drew together in small clusters, chatting and shaking hands and exchanging cards and then breaking apart to form new clusters, a hive of bees performing some kind of intricately orchestrated honey dance.

A group of grips loomed over the food tables, guzzling their sponsored-vodka cocktails as they double-dipped in the hummus. The suits stood in the corner, rapidly typing on their BlackBerries. Claudia’s film-school peers, led by her friend Esme, stood in a protective semicircle around her, eyeing the strangers who approached. Jeremy was in position by the crudités with his friend and bandmate Daniel, who’d brought her a bouquet of yellow lilies. Even Jeremy’s father, Max, had come out and shuffled around in his corduroys and flip-flops and untucked dress shirt, lingering lasciviously near a clutch of twenty-something actresses who played bit parts in the film.

Claudia stood in the center of it all, feeling vaguely like a stuffed pheasant in a display vitrine. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She was the axis around which the entire room seemed to turn. She arranged herself directly in front of her movie poster—
SPARE PARTS
in capital letters, the faces of her lead actors in profile against the Los Angeles skyline, the
Variety
quote (“Sharply funny …. Addictive!”) just below—and dizzily accepted the congratulations, the pressed hands and overenthusiastic hugs. “Huge fan, huge fan,” a total stranger whispered in her ear.

Standing at the center of all this adulation, it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect
Spare Parts
to be a hit. Didn’t she have glowing reviews from
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
and, now,
Entertainment Weekly?
Even the Academy Awards was dominated by plucky little independent films these days, especially upbeat ones like hers. Yes,
Spare Parts
was opening in only twenty-three theaters this weekend, but next weekend it was scheduled to open in two hundred more, and yet more after that. She was days away from signing a movie development deal with a major motion picture studio; her next film was going to be big budget, cast with stars, a serious endeavor about issues of real importance (human smuggling on the Mexican border!). Maybe she’d revive her drug addiction script next.

“Claudia, I’m so sorry I can’t stay long, but the sitter’s threatening to call the cops on the twins,” she heard in her ear, and turned to see RC. RC’s real name was Renata Calliope, but she’d been going by her initials for the last twenty-five years, ever since she arrived in Los Angeles as a fledgling screenwriter in her early twenties and realized that Hollywood didn’t take women seriously. By now, RC’s screenwriting credits—including a handful of award-winning films and a long-running television hospital drama—were high-profile enough that the androgynous moniker was no longer effective or necessary, but she often told Claudia about the delight she once took in showing up for a production meeting in a miniskirt and heels and seeing the profound confusion on the producer’s faces when they realized they’d accidentally hired a chick to script-doctor their TV pilot.

These days, RC rarely wore heels. A mother of ten-year-old twin boys, she had traded in the stilettos for sneakers years earlier, and the skirts had been swapped out for a uniform of cargo pants with men’s Hanes Tshirts. Compact, her graying hair cropped short, RC looked more like a teenage boy than a woman nearing fifty, but she spoke with the smoked rasp of a Depression-era film star. She was only fourteen years older than Claudia but seemed of a different era entirely, spawned by 1980s Hollywood, when women in the business had to grow a protective reptilian skin and carry their own set of steel balls in their purse to survive. Claudia had been seated next to RC at a Women in Film symposium at a student film festival years before; two hours and four glasses of wine later, RC had adopted Claudia as her occasional mentee and more frequent friend. When Claudia was struggling to get
Spare Parts
off the ground, it was RC who lent her an $8,000 HD DV camera, introduced her to the Israeli hedge fund manager who would eventually provide her financing, and talked her off more than one ledge.