Reel: A Forbidden Hollywood Romance

God, I missed LA.

Give me seventy-five degrees and sunshine in October over cold, gray New York. And you have to walk everywhere. Or take the subway. I mean, I get the appeal, but I grew up in San Diego County, in Lemon Grove, with beaches and mountains and canyons all in easy reach. Where rain is rare. I’m a Cali boy, born and bred. I didn’t dream of going anywhere else for college. Plus attending the USC film school kept me close to Mama when she needed me most.

She would have liked Neevah.

I bat away that useless thought when I enter the office of Scripps Productions. Most people assume my company name is a play on words, me ghettofying scripts, but Scripps Pier was actually one of Mama’s favorite places to watch her sunsets.

“Boss!” Graham, our assistant, says when I walk through the door. “Welcome home. We missed you.”

“Missed you, too.” I fish a Statue of Liberty figurine from my messenger bag and place it on her desk. “I got you something for your landmark collection.”

“It’s pink!” She snatches it, eyes bright with delight over the cheesy thing.

“Yeah. I figured that was unusual so I grabbed it.”

She crosses around the desk to hug me. “I’ve never seen a pink one. Thank you!”

I squeeze her back briefly and then pull away to head toward my office.

“It’s nothing,” I call over my shoulder. “Is he in yet?”

Evan and I don’t come to the office all the time, but we agreed to meet here today. I already know he’ll try to talk me out of casting Neevah. That’s his job—to make sure my creative impulses don’t bankrupt us. But every once in a while I have to remind him it’s my creative impulses that have gotten us this far. Today is one of those times.

“Said he’s grabbing a smoothie from that place around the corner and is only a few minutes away,” Graham shouts from the reception area.

“Cool. Let me know when he’s ready.”

I close the door and sit at my desk. I haven’t been here in weeks, which is not unusual. I’ll probably be in New York a lot more once we start shooting Dessi Blue. So much of the story takes place there. I did the spec script to sell the concept and get Galaxy onboard, but Verity is already reworking it now that she’s attached. Evan will coordinate with the director of photography and the production designer to scout locations once the script is more final, but I can’t imagine we won’t be filming in New York. That would make things even easier for Neevah.

I haven’t even offered her the part, but how could she turn it down?

I pull the headshot she brought to the audition from my bag.

I quickly skirt over the fact that she’s beautiful. Who isn’t, in this business? She has that indefinable quality you can’t teach, can’t Botox or artificially enhance into existence. She was born with it and has cultivated it, and now it’s come to my attention.

And I’m going to use it.

Someone taps on my door.

“Uh-huh,” I grunt, reaching for the bottle of water Graham always stocks in my office.

“You’re back.”

If there was ever a picture of Hollywood privilege, it would be my production partner Evan. Bronze- and gold-streaked hair falling in perfect-cut waves. Year-round tan. Chiseled bone structure and tall, lean frame. Even though he has a Hollywood pedigree dating all the way back to the heyday of MGM and RKO and the studio system, he set out to make a name and fortune for himself. He probably didn’t think it would be with the kid from Lemon Grove, but you never know how life will mix it up.

“My dude,” he says, walking farther into the office and dapping me up. “Welcome home. I thought you were doing the film festival and coming right back.”

Holding his smoothie in one hand, he plucks Neevah’s headshot from my desk, raising his brows and slanting me a knowing glance, even though he doesn’t know shit. “I can see how you might have gotten a little . . . distracted.”

“It ain’t like that.” I grab the photo and toss it onto my desk. “I mean, I did stay longer to audition Neevah, but . . . it ain’t like that.”

“It better not be. We can’t afford another Primal.”

“If I hear one more word about that damn movie.” I sit and take a long draw of my water.

“Believe me. You getting fired from a huge movie over pussy is the last thing I want to discuss.”

“Evan.” His name is a guttural warning in my throat.

“And you better hope it doesn’t come back to bite us that you didn’t at least allow Camille to audition.”

“Auditioning Camille would have been a steaming pile of wasted time. We all know I would never cast her—certainly not after what she did, but probably not even before. She’s not right for Dessi.”

“You injured her pride.”

“What about my pride? Getting fired from a movie I could have directed with my eyes closed because we had a bad breakup? Are you fucking kidding me? What good would it have done to go through the motions like she even had a chance at the role?”

“We’ve seen Camille has a vindictive streak. Just saying . . . hope it doesn’t streak all over us. Turning down one of Hollywood’s hottest names right now, we better cast this right.”

“Neevah is right.”

“I haven’t seen you this set on a particular actress this way . . . well, ever,” he says, taking the seat across from me. “Don’t make the same mistake again. You aren’t—”“Dating her?” I finish for him through tight lips.

“I was gonna say fucking her because I know you aren’t really the dating type, which was why you dating Camille was such a—”

“At some point in this conversation, should we discuss the fact that I found the actress we’ve been searching six months for? Or you gonna just keep talking about useless shit that won’t make us any money?”

“I’m not sure you have found the actress we need for Dessi Blue.”

I take a long draw from the water bottle, cooling my aggravation because you never win a fight with Evan being ruled by emotion. “You saw her audition tape?”

“I did.”

“You watched the reel her agent sent?”

“Yup. Man, that girl can sing. Gorgeous, too.”

“And?”

“And no one knows who the hell she is. You can’t expect Galaxy to sign off on some no-name understudy who just had her first turn on Broadway for a film of this scope. This is a lot of money. It’s a huge investment and they want to make their money back. We need a big name.”

“What we need is the right actress, and I found her. Figure out how to convince the studio.”

“Don’t dig your heels in with me, Canon.” He leans forward to set his smoothie on my desk and gives me a direct look. “You may intimidate everyone else with your grunts and glares, but not me. This is my business, too.”

“This is my story.”

“You’re a producer on this, too. Not just the director. Not just an artist, so act like one and hear me out.”

No one talks to me like this and gets away with it.

Except Evan.

We met at USC, and knew each other casually, but didn’t keep in touch after graduation. Once The Magic Hour won so much critical acclaim, I expected all the doors to fly open, but that’s not really what happened. I struggled to find the right projects for a couple of years, served as assistant director on a few projects, paid my dues. Finally, I managed to make an indie film on a shoestring budget, which garnered more attention. Out of the blue, Evan reached out to congratulate me and proposed we work together. I had the stories, but Evan had a lot to offer. He grew up in the business, had money to invest and perfect instincts.

Most of the time. This time he’s wrong.

“I am thinking like a producer,” I grit out. “If we cast some big name who isn’t right for the part, Dessi Blue will flop. Like Francis Ford Coppola Cotton Club flop. It could easily become some overblown, over-budget albatross that checked all the boxes—right director, lots of money, big-name stars—so no one can figure out why it failed.”

“We won’t let it fail.”

“You damn right it won’t fail. I found this story literally on the side of a country road.” I pound my chest for emphasis. “I interviewed Dessi’s family. I got them to tell me all the things the world doesn’t know about this woman.”

“I understand that, Canon, but—”

“I don’t know if you can understand. Do you have any idea how many Dessi Blues there are? Black artists who shaped our culture, made our music, but whose contributions have gone unacknowledged? Their stories just slipped through the cracks. People who, by all rights, should be household names, but nobody knows their names? All they have to show for what they did is a plaque in their hometown or a line on Wikipedia, if that.”

“You’re making this personal.”

“Black artists getting their due is personal for me. All my life I’ve seen their talents mined and appropriated, even while being told they weren’t as good. They paved the way for me to be sitting in this office arguing with my bullheaded privileged business partner.”

Lips twitching, Evan drops his head back, releases a heavy sigh and stares up at the ceiling. “I hate it when you do this.”

I chuckle, making a conscious effort to loosen the tight muscles in my shoulders. “You hate it when I what? Be right? Or be Black? I’m one most of the time and the other all the time.”

He lifts his head to glare at me, but relents with a smile. “I’ll set up a meeting with Galaxy. They assigned an exec to us as our contact. New guy named Lawson Stone. We’ll start there.”