Beautiful Ruins

She’d hoped for so much more when she quit her doctoral film studies program and went to work for the man who was known in the seventies and eighties as the “Deane of Hollywood.” She’d wanted to make movies—smart, moving films. But when she arrived three years ago, Michael Deane was in the worst slump of his career, with no recent credits save the indie zombie bomb Night Ravagers. In Claire’s three years, Deane Productions has made no other movies; in fact, its only production has been a single television program: the hit reality show and dating Web site Hookbook (Hookbook.net).

And with the monstrous success of that cross-media abomination, movies have become a fading memory at Deane Productions. Instead, Claire’s days are spent listening to TV pitches so offensive she fears she’s singlehandedly hastening the Apocalypse: Model Behavior (“We take seven models and put them in a frat house!”) and Nympho Night (“We film the dates of people diagnosed with sex addiction!”) and Drunk Midget House (“See, it’s a house . . . full of drunk midgets!”).

Michael’s constantly urging her to adjust her expectations, to set aside her highbrow pretensions, to accept the culture on its own terms, to expand her notions of what’s good. “If you want to make art,” he’s fond of saying, “go get a job at the Loov-ruh.”

So that’s what she did. A month ago, Claire applied for a job she saw posted on a Web site, for “a curator for a new private film museum.” And now, almost three weeks after her interview, the crisp businessmen on the museum’s board of directors appear to be close to offering her the job.

If it’s not a no-brainer, this decision is a quarter-brainer at most: their proposed Museum of American Screen Culture (MASC) will pay better, the hours will be better, and it’s certainly a better use of her master’s degree from UCLA in Moving Image Archive Studies. More than that, she thinks the job might allow her to feel like she’s actually using her brain again.

Michael is dismissive of this intellectual discontent of hers, insisting that she’s just paying her dues, that every producer spends a few years in the wilderness—that, in Michael’s clipped, inimitable lingo, she must “sift shit for the corn,” make her bones with a commercial success or ten so that she can later do the projects she loves. And so she finds herself here, at life’s big crossroad: stick it out with this crass career and her unlikely dream of one day making a great film, or take a quiet job cataloguing relics from a time when film actually mattered?

Faced with such decisions (college, boyfriends, grad school), Claire has always been a pro-con lister, a seeker of signs, a deal-maker—and she makes a deal with herself now, or with Fate: Either a good, viable film idea walks in the door today—or I quit.

This deal, of course, is rigged. Convinced that the money is all in TV now, Michael hasn’t liked a single film pitch, script, or treatment in two years. And everything she likes he dismisses as too expensive, too dark, too period, not commercial enough. As if that didn’t make the odds long enough, today is Wild Pitch Friday: the last Friday of the month, set aside for off-the-rack pitches from Michael’s old cronies and colleagues, from every burned-out, played-out has-been and never-was in town. And on this particular Wild Pitch Friday, both Michael and his producing partner, Da

Claire glances down at Daryl, snoozing in the bed next to her. She twinges guilt for not talking to him about the museum job; this is partly because he’s been out late almost every night, partly because they haven’t been talking much anyway, partly because she’s thinking of quitting him, too.

“So?” she says quietly. Daryl makes a deep-sleep noise—something between a grunt and a peep. “Yeah,” she says, “that’s what I figured.”

She rises and stretches, starts for the bathroom. But on the way she pauses over Daryl’s jeans, which sit like a resting dancer on the floor right where he’s stepped out of them—Psst don’t, the sprinklers warn—but what choice does she have, really—a young woman at the crossroads, on the lookout for signs? She bends, picks up the jeans, goes through the pockets: six singles, coins, a book of matches, and . . . ah, here it is:

A punch card for something charmingly called ASSTACULAR: THE SOUTHLAND’S FINEST IN LIVE NUDE ENTERTAINMENT. Daryl’s diversion. She turns the card over. Claire doesn’t have much of an instinct for the gradations of the adult entertainment industry, but she imagines the employment of punch cards doesn’t exactly distinguish ASSTACULAR as the Four Seasons of titty bars. Oh, and look: Daryl is just two punches from a free lap dance. How excellent for him! She leaves the card next to the snoring Daryl, on her pillow, in the indentation left by her head.

Then Claire starts for the bathroom, officially adding Daryl to her deal with Fate, like a hostage (Bring me a great film idea today or the strip-clubbing boyfriend gets it!). She pictures the names on her schedule, and wonders if one will magically step up. She imagines them as fixed points on a map: her nine thirty having an egg-white omelet as he goes over his pitch in Culver City, her ten fifteen doing tai chi in Manhattan Beach, her eleven rubbing one off in the shower in Silver Lake. It’s liberating to pretend her decision is up to them now, that she’s done all she can, and Claire feels almost free, stepping openly, nakedly, into the capricious arms of Destiny—or at least into a hot shower.

And that’s when a single wistful thought escapes her otherwise made-up mind: a wish, or maybe a prayer, that amid today’s crap she might hear just one . . . decent . . . pitch—one idea for a great film—so she won’t have to quit the only job she’s ever wanted in her entire life.

Outside, the sprinklers spit laughter against the rock garden.

Also naked, eight hundred miles away in Beaverton, Oregon, Claire’s last appointment of the day, her four P.M., can’t decide what to wear. Not quite thirty, Shane Wheeler is tall, lean, and a little feral-looking, narrow face framed by an ocean-chop of brown hair and two table-leg sideburns. For twenty minutes, Shane has been coaxing an outfit from this autumn-leaf pile of discarded clothes: wrinkly polos, quirky secondhand Ts, faux Western button shirts, boot-cut jeans, ski

Shane absentmindedly rubs the tattoo on his left forearm, the word ACT inked in elaborate gangster calligraphy, a reference to his father’s favorite Bible passage and, until recently, Shane’s life motto—Act as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you.

His was an outlook fed by years of episodic TV, by encouraging teachers and counselors, by science-fair ribbons, participant medals, and soccer and basketball trophies—and, most of all, by two attentive and dutiful parents, who raised their five perfect children with the belief—hell, with the birthright—that as long as they had faith in themselves, they could be anything they wanted to be.

So in high school, Shane acted as if he were a distance ru