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ONE
IT WAS A typical Hollywood story: At 10:22 Wednesday morning, Ronnie Deal had Brad Pitt; at 4:51 that same afternoon, she didn't.
These things happened to movie producers, of course. Star players drifted in and out of film projects like children on a sugar high running from room to room. No one understood this better than Ronnie. But sometimes the sudden downturn in a producer's fortunes had nothing to do with the cruel hand of fate and everything to do with simple subterfuge. Sometimes the key talent attached to a project went away not on a whim, but because somebody somewhere pushed a button. That was what had happened to Ronnie today. She was certain of it. Brad Pitt's bailout from Trouble Town had Andy Gleason's handwriting all over it.
From her lonely little corner table in the back shadows of the Tiki Shack bar, Ronnie allowed the realization to bring her to a slow boil.
There were all kinds of rivals in the film business-crosstown competitors, cutthroat wannabes, paranoid old-timers-but the so-called "teammate" who worked in the next office over was by far the worst kind of all. Ronnie and Andy Gleason were junior development execs at the same production company, Velocity Pictures, and the two twentysomethings had been knocking heads ever since Ronnie came aboard two and a half years ago. Their problems started with Andy's thinly veiled hatred of all things female, and blossomed from there, culminating in his wholly undisguised ambition to become the company's VP, a position he rightly feared Ronnie had earmarked for herself.
The good news was that Ronnie knew how to handle the Andy Gleasons of the world. It was something she'd been forced to learn in her early teens just to stay afloat, long before the thought of selling her soul to Hollywood had ever entered her mind. Because Ronnie was smart, single, and beautiful-"heartbreak in a tall, dark hourglass," somebody had once called her-and this was a combination that drew some people's ire like a big, wet spit in the eye. All they had to do was watch Ronnie enter a room-olive-skinned, green-eyed, with straight auburn hair and a cover-girl body-to instantly despise her. Discovering later that she actually had a brain only intensified their disdain. So, by default, Ronnie had developed ways to defend herself, all of which could be summarized thusly: Cut first, and to the bone. Hence, the nickname some in the Business had given her to demonize her, a black heart being a more palatable explanation for her every achievement than mere competence:
"Raw" Deal.
Ronnie actually laughed the first time she heard it, and she'd been laughing off and on ever since. These people didn't know how "raw" she could be. They only knew what they'd seen of her in the three short years she'd been in L.A.; had they any knowledge of her life prior to Hollywood, when the damage she liked to do to herself and others had been far more tangible than anything one could suffer in business, they would all recoil in horror as one. But these Beautiful People had no such knowledge, and never would, and so went blissfully on believing that the extent of Ronnie Deal's ruthlessness could be found in the fine print of a cutthroat deal memo.
"Raw" Deal, indeed.
The moniker made her sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger, for Chrissakes. Men looted and pillaged their way to the top in Hollywood, and got Oscars; Ronnie tried the same thing, and people treated her like a serial killer. The inequity was almost enough to make a woman give up her six-figure salary and do something genuinely meaningful with her life.
Yeah, right.
No, Ronnie was stuck with Andy Gleason, just as she'd been stuck with all the other misogynistic assholes she'd been forced to deal with before him, and she was going to have to devise a way to dispose of him that wouldn't leave blood all over the floor. For few things were admired more in Hollywood than the clean kill. Messy ones were a necessary evil in the Business, but they weren't good for your résumé; better that you were known for having once cut an adversary's heart out with a scalpel than disemboweled him with a pickax. One approach took real skill, the other only enmity, and the latter was about as rare a commodity in La-La Land as a half-empty bottle of Perrier.
Before she could get down to the business of ruining Andy, however, Ronnie had to determine exactly how he had managed to strike this latest death blow to Trouble Town. Andy had no direct connection to Brad Pitt's people that she was aware of, so he had to have sabotaged the actor's participation in the film via a back door of some kind. But what could a junior production exec do or say to make an A-list actor's agent back her client out of a project only six hours after verbally committing him to it?
Usually, Ronnie knew, a little dirt on another major player attached to the project would do the trick-"Not sure if you heard this, but we thought you might like to know: Joe (the director/co-star/writer) Blow's rehab just took a major turn for the worse...."-but in this case, there was no such dirt to dish. Both the writer and director attached to Trouble Town were rock-solid citizens; neither had a history of chemical dependency, and each was coming off a big box-office hit. And Pitt had allegedly read the Trouble Town script weeks ago and loved it; his people would never have committed him to the film otherwise. If neither the associated talent nor the script had scared him off...Maybe he hadn't been scared off at all. Maybe he'd just opted out because something better had come along.
"Shit," Ronnie said. That was it.
Every major star of Pitt's caliber had at least one pet project on the back burner that he or she was dying to get green-lit, and Pitt was no exception. Thinking back on it now, Ronnie recalled that, less than a year earlier, the trades had been following the trials and tribulations of a film Pitt was desperate to star in, a sweeping historical romance that would be based on a best-selling novel he'd fallen in love with and optioned with his own money. Ordinarily, a major star and a best-selling novel were combination enough to earn a film deal somewhere, but not in this case; because of the unusual setting of the story (Istanbul at the turn of the nineteenth century), there were only three A-list directors the studios felt comfortable putting at the helm of the project, and all were going to be contractually unavailable for months. So, forced to shelve the film indefinitely until one of the three golden boys became free, Pitt had moved on to other projects, one of which ultimately became Ronnie's beloved Trouble Town.
Ronnie ran the names of the three key directors the studios wanted for Pitt's movie off in her head: Spencer Landis, Walter Wolfe...and Adrian Cummings. The three-time Oscar nominee who was presently attached to another Velocity Pictures project, The Whites of Their Eyes.
Andy Gleason's The Whites of Their Eyes.
Ronnie knocked back the last of a bottled beer, watching the Tiki Shack's bartender work the cash register without really seeing him, and made a silent wager with herself that, by some incredible coincidence, Adrian Cummings wasn't attached to Andy's picture anymore.
And there you had it. The sudden demise of Trouble Town.
It was going to be Ronnie's breakout film, the box-office smash that would elevate her from the ranks of the promising-but-unproven to the must-do-business-with. The script was an action-adventure cop drama (with the requisite "twist," of course) that had summer blockbuster written all over it, and with Brad Pitt attached to star, its crossover appeal to both men and women promised to be unlimited. It had taken Ronnie almost a year to put the whole package together; she had worked countless fourteen-hour days and made dozens of new enemies guiding all the pieces into place. And now that she was finally going to see it all pay off...
The film was in jeopardy, but it wasn't dead. No project of Ronnie's ever was. She lived by a personal motto-"Never let bad news surprise you"-and what it signified was that she was always prepared for the worst. She didn't always have a ready answer for it, perhaps, but the framework of a back-up plan was at least in place, so that disaster recovery was never a completely improvisational proposition. Brad Pitt was gone, and she hadn't seen that coming, but maybe things were still okay, because Ronnie already had a potential replacement for Pitt-give or take some hurried negotiations-waiting in the wings.
And if little Andy Asshole tried to undermine that arrangement...
"Okay, okay, enough already."
Ronnie looked up, saw that the bartender was now standing directly in front of her, an expression of mild agitation fixed upon his face.
"Excuse me?" Ronnie asked.
"The bottle. You don't have to bang it on the table like that to get my attention. A simple wave would be sufficient."
Ronnie glanced at her empty beer bottle, realized that she had indeed been unconsciously using it to rap on the table like a war drum. Imagining, no doubt, that the table was Andy Gleason's soft head.
"Jesus, I'm sorry," Ronnie said, blushing. "I wasn't even aware I was doing it."
"Bad day at the office, huh?"
"You could say that, yeah."
That was as far as she wanted the conversation to go, in no mood to deflect the advances of a man who probably got a headache just reading the spine on a book, and whose teeth seemed to carry remnants of a meal he once ate in high school, but the bartender smiled now, said, "I've seen you in here before, haven't I?"
What could she do? Ignore the question?
"I drop in every now and then."
"I thought so. You an actress?"
"An actress? No. Listen, as long as you're here..." Ronnie gestured with the bottle, gave him a small smile of her own to take the sting off the rebuff. "You wouldn't mind bringing me another, would you?"
Recognizing the brush-off when he was getting it, the guy jettisoned all the charm, freshly annoyed with her, and shrugged. "No p...
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