“Hi! Is this Kavi? I’m Marnie, actually… This is Charlotte Clark. I wrote a screenplay calledQuiet Treason. You’ve been emailing me?”
“Right.” She sounded much less sleepy now.
An awkward silence ensued.
“You wanted to talk to me about it? I’m sorry I’m only calling you now.”
“Hmm.” She sighed.
I felt myself crumble. I was not cut out for this. No onereallymade it in Hollywood. Not people like me, anyway.
“Is this not a good time?” I asked.
“Let me backtrack for a second,” she said, sounding weary. “You said your name is Charlotte Clark?”
“It’s a pen name.”
I heard the sound of the fridge opening and closing, a mug being placed on a kitchen counter.
“But you’re sayingyouwrote this screenplay?”
“I did. I’m Charlotte Clark. Well, Marnie Redd. But yes, it’s me.”
“Um. It’s funny you’re calling me now because an old friend sent me a new screenplay last night. He told me I should stop what I was doing immediately. It wasthatgood. I read half a page before I realized it seemed very familiar. The title and the author’s name were different, so I hadn’t made the connection. I went through my files and found the screenplay you’d sent me. It was the same one. And you’re calling now, when I’ve tried to be in touch with you for weeks. That’s a strange coincidence.”
All the blood drained out of my body. I was gone, mindless. Unable to speak.
She continued. “I googled your name, and nothing came up.”
“I thought people used pen names sometimes?” I heard myself whisper.
“But here we have two different writers, each claiming they wrote this one screenplay. The two versions are virtually identical.”
“Identical?” Ben had said he’d made it better.
“Pretty much. And it’s amazing. I’d love to make this movie. But I’m not spending the next few years embroiled in a copyright lawsuit. Nothing good ever comes out of that.”
“It’s my screenplay,” I said, sounding meek even to my own ears.
“So you say.”
“What do I do now?”
“Honestly? Unless you have a very good lawyer, I’d probably just give up. That other writer, Ben Something, is represented by one of the best agents in the business. Look, I don’t know what happened and I don’twantto know. But if I were you, I’d spend my energy writing something new. If you want to make it in this world, you have to think of yourself as a bottomless well. You have to create and create until something sticks. And protect your work. There aren’t many sharks out there, but the ones that exist are savages. You must have really pissed off that guy.”
I didn’t get back to our hotel until hours later, bleary eyed from meetings in hotel lobbies and worn down by the torrent of instructions coming from my increasingly panicked boss. I could hardly breathe as I entered the room; I was too exhausted for another argument.
But it turned out that I didn’t need to worry about that.
Ben was gone. So were his clothes that had been scattered around, his shaving cream on the left side of the sink, where he always kept it at home, and his suitcase. The space stood in eerie silence, the absence of him speaking louder than any mess he’d made before.
I’d come to Cannes on the verge of a promotion, working on a buzzy movie made by a killer woman, accompanied by my leading man, starring in my best life.
And now everything had blown apart.
Was I sad? Yes.
Mad? Definitely.
