Faking Family
Collin ran through the halls of CBS Television Studios like a mad man. He passed framed posters of some of the most successful sitcoms of all time. When he approached a poster of Young Sheldon, Collin stopped and groaned. He looked into the eyes of the literal poster child of Hollywood’s lack of originality and wondered what in the hell he was even doing here.
He was not excited about his upcoming meeting. Collin had turned in six different concepts for development under the blind script deal he’d signed only a month before. This was his first studio deal. It was no overall – hell, it wasn’t even a first look – but it was a start. They knew his name now, and that was half the battle.
All six ideas were snubbed by the studio’s executives, so this meeting was for a “brainstorming session,” which meant they were going to tell him what he had to write. They would try to make him think it was his idea—this was the job of a creative executive. They were tasked with talking indignant artists out of creating something original and in to making something marketable, while simultaneously espousing to the public their unwavering support for new and original voices they’d never actually distribute.
This mostly involved a lot of compliment sandwiches: good news, bad news, good news.
“The good news is we loved the world you’ve created. The bad news is we hated all the characters, the story, and your intended themes. The good news is we have a fix. Have you thought about aging everyone down and setting the show in an apartment no working-class human could afford, preferably in New York City? Maybe add in a wacky neighbor? We’re really trying to find this generation’s Kramer.”
Sweaty and out of breath, Collin startled a skittish receptionist bellowing out, “I’m late.”
After recovering from the shock, she glared at Collin before taking a deep breath.
“And ‘I’m Late’s’ agent,” came a voice from the waiting area.
Sitting behind a magazine was Collin’s well-tailored agent, Gene Berk. He was reading a tattered paper copy of Variety from the year 2022. He didn’t deign to look away from his trade while he updated his client.
“They pushed us twenty minutes, like always. Have a seat.”
Collin took a deep breath and sat down. Gene put down the outdated magazine and pulled out an iPad from his chestnut leather messenger bag. He checked some data; made a connection in his brain.
“Did you know post-apocalyptic thrillers made the most money in 2022?”
“Benefits of a global pandemic,” Collin said.
“You should start thinking about features.”
“Let’s make sure the studio’s not pulling the blind first.”
“They are—” started the skittish receptionist. Collin’s heart dropped.
“What?!” he screeched.
“—ready for you. Ms. Radler is ready for you.”
“Jesus, you scared me.”
The receptionist smiled politely as she showed Collin and Gene into the offices to meet with the studio executive. When they were out of earshot, she added, “One day, everyone will fear me.”
***
Collin sat in the large conference room and tapped his fingers on the table in an attempt to calm himself. Gene could tell Collin would give anything to not be here right now, but he didn’t give a shit. He had the calm confidence of an agent who believed in his client. If nothing else, Gene was Collin’s absolute advocate. He knew how good Collin was, and he wouldn’t let anyone, especially Collin, tell him otherwise.
Gene believed the ten percent he’d earn from Collin’s career was worth making the drive to Radford from Beverly Hills. He wanted to personally make sure the studio executives knew they were idiots. Collin did not know this was what he was planning to do, and Gene was glad of it. Collin was too nice for his own good sometimes, which Gene thought was wild. He had read Collin’s serial killer comedy scripts—that dude was able to conjure some dark but hilarious shit. Dead dick jokes were a hard tone to nail, but streaming paid dead dick. Gene knew he needed to get Collin into network if he wanted to make real money.
Gene and Collin perked up the moment Lana Radler walked in. Her assistant held the door open for her.
“Collin Cassidy here to see you, Lana.” She coldly added, “Gene Berk, too.”
Lana was a force of nature contained by a pantsuit. Old school Hollywood. She rose through the executive ranks in the nineties and waved a middle finger at her enemies as she broke glass ceiling after glass ceiling. Gene heard that she once told Bob Iger to suck her dick at a charity dinner. Some even said she made him get on his knees. She commanded every room she entered. Gene was shocked by the way she managed to do this today.
Lana pulled an I.V. drip full of bright yellow liquid into the room with her. The catheter hub was taped to her left hand, and she wheeled it in with her right.
“Thanks. Tell the doc I’m feeling pukey. Might need that vape pen.”
“On it.” And with that, the assistant was out of the room.
Lana walked over to shake Collin’s hand and got light-headed. He caught her and helped her take a seat at the table.
“Lana, are you OK?”
“What, this?" She held up the hand with the catheter hub, “Oh, don’t worry, just a little chemotherapy.”
Gene cursed under his breath. He was impressed. Even if it wasn’t an intentional power move, she was playing the role of nonchalant executive to perfection. How was he supposed to call out a cancer patient?
“Shouldn’t you do that in a hospital?” Collin asked.
Lana held up the massive rock on her ring finger. “Benefits of being married to your oncologist. Plus, I don’t want any of the sharks around here thinking I’m about to take any time off,” she said as a long, thick, clump of hair fell off her head.
Collin, Gene, and Lana stared at the hair on the table for a long moment, none of them willing to mention it. Gene no longer thought this was a power move and that calmed him. Collin broke the silence.
“Are you sure you’re—” Collin started.
“Let’s get back to the matter at hand.” Lana didn’t want to hear any more about her circumstances. She was here to talk business.
“—I know I owe you a new pitch. I’ve got a few ideas . . .”
Gene tapped Collin on the shoulder and gave him a paternal stop talking look. Normally, agents did not attend these kinds of meetings. Pitching the network concepts to fulfil the requirements of this deal was Collin’s job, not Gene’s.
A blind script deal was simple: the studio paid Collin to write a pilot, and Gene had seen to it that they paid him well above scale for this deal. But because the deal was “blind,” it meant the studio—and their network counterparts—got to develop the idea with Collin from scratch. They could take as long as they wanted to find an idea they would greenlight, and Collin would have to keep coming up with new ones until they sent him to script. It was development hell.
Gene knew that Collin had submitted more than enough A-plus concepts, yet Lana’s team had rejected each one. Every log-line Collin had shared with Gene before he pitched the studio was solid. That’s why Gene was here today. It wasn’t his client’s fault the studio executives didn’t have good taste. It was time to call a spade a shovel.
“Lana, cut the shit,” Gene said. “You knew what you were getting with this deal. Collin writes cable and streaming. You’re network. You shot down all his premium ideas as ‘not on brand,’ whatever the fuck that means. I’ve already got two of the projects you passed on set up at Twentieth, but this deal is in first position so he can’t work until you stop dicking us around. Let’s just make this simple: What. The fuck. Do you want?”
Lana glared at Gene. It was a battle of wills. Agent versus studio executive. The battle ended when Lana’s eyes widened, she ran to the trashcan and vomited into it. She dialed her cell phone and yelled, “Vape pen. Now!”
“Are you sure you’re, OK?” Collin asked again. “We can do this another time . . .”
Lana continued to spit into the waste bin, until she got a hold of herself. “I’m fine. Cancer’s a bitch, but so am I.” She gathered herself, took a long deep breath then sat back down at the head of the conference table.
“All right. We want a family comedy. Something classic, but modern. Something we’ve all seen before, but that has never been on air. You know?”
Collin was a deer in headlights. He hadn’t the slightest idea what in the fuck any of that meant. “I . . . I . . . Those are conflicting—” Gene interrupted him before he could say something honest and, therefore, stupid.
“We hear you loud and clear,” Gene said.
“We do?” Collin said. Clear was not how he would describe the directive.
“We do.” Gene said. He told Collin with his eyes not to say another word.
“Great,” Lana said. “Send me a couple log-lines next week and we’ll talk.”
As Lana stood up to leave, her assistant entered with her THC vape pen. Lana took a long-ass hit and released a giant cloud of vapor. After a few grisly coughs, she relaxed.
“You guys want in on this?”
***
Collin and Gene walked out of the building, but not before imbibing on cancer-grade Californian cannabis. The sun and warmth immediately put them at ease and helped Collin remember the world wasn’t ending. For the moment.
Gene felt accomplished. Any time he could get a studio executive to tell him what they wanted instead of playing round after round of an unnecessary guessing game that wasted everyone’s time was a victory. Good clients were like reluctant soldiers—they hated being given orders, but executed faster than someone who did things by the book. Gene slapped Collin on the back and ordered him to enjoy the moment.
They walked around the lot giggling until they found a coffee shop. Gene bought Collin a coffee he would expense to his agency. That, Gene thought, was the best part of the job: free coffee. All he had to do was claim he was meeting a client, and any coffee he drank was free. If he was alone, he always got two and gave the extra to someone on the street. Homeless people needed to get their days going too, and asking them about their lives could be considered business—you never knew who had the next Oscar-winning story to tell. Alcohol was free too, but that, Gene learned, was not worth it. The clients who wanted to drink with you weren’t the clients who would stick with you. Collin was a coffee client. A keeper.
The moment was fleeting. Collin’s predisposition to anxiety was eventually exacerbated by the THC. After being told he had to come up with brand-new ideas, he was spinning out under the bright California sun as film executives, the stars who kept them in business, and the crews who did all the manual labor mingled on the massive campus getting their necessary caffeine fixes. He turned to Gene.
“I’m thirty-seven, single, and live in a one-bedroom apartment. What the fuck do I know about writing a family sitcom?”
“What the fuck did Stanley Kubrick know about being in the military? He still made Full Metal Jacket. Figure it out.”
“He also made Fear and Desire . . . so . . .”
“Reconnect with what it means to be a part of a family. Join a cult or something.”
“Do you know how expensive Scientology is?” Collin said.
Gene was sick of his high being stepped on. Coffee and cannabis made him proactive. Collin needed to chill out and it was his job to make him.
“Adopt a troubled teen for all I care. I pulled a lot of strings to get you this deal and I’m not going to let you self-sabotage your way out of it.” He got an alert on his iWatch and remembered he had another meeting. He stood up.
“I’ve got a three o’clock with Christopher Nolan’s long-lost sister.”
“Think the Nolan’s would adopt me?”
“Get to work.” Gene slid on sunglasses to hide his bloodshot baby blues and walked away from his client without another word.
Collin was certain now that he was done for. This was it. He was going to die alone in an apartment in Little Armenia. Coffee and cannabis made him melodramatic.
“Is that Dolph Lundgren?” he said to himself, out loud, his brain still figuring out how to operate in public under medical grade influence.
It was.
***
Collin was mid-stroke when the memory came into his mind. Fireworks exploded outside his window and he paused the vanilla porn.
Pants at his ankles, he sat in a dilapidated chair across from the poorly built Ikea desk where his laptop was camped. He’d hoped a good release would get him out of his own head, but somewhere out there a federal law enforcement program was logging any website he might choose to spend time on. Or, at least, Collin was convinced they were.
His Google search history could, at best, be described as alarming after his stint as a staff writer on a serial killer comedy series. His research into successful killers, their methods, and the government’s countermeasures created his suspicion that his every online move was being tracked, this paranoia brought to life all for ten episodes of dead dick jokes. Thanks, Netflix.
Individual privacy was long dead, and Collin acted accordingly. This made for some bland choices in carnal content. Not that he had extreme tastes by any stretch of the imagination—he simply didn’t want the government to know what got him off, which, if he was being honest, was low production quality and the belief that the performers were a genuine, loving, couple who had a long-established safe word.
The fantasy that true love equated to copious copulation was a wonderful escape from the reality that romantic love faded to platonic love. If you were lucky. Most of the time, you ended up with your dick in your hand. The performance was getting hot and heavy when Collin let himself go to pause it. He thought those sex workers in particular were better actors than any he’d worked with. Which wasn’t saying much.
***
The memory was far more stimulating than poorly produced passion. It was the time he and Orla hooked up in the lifeguard shack. He’d like to pretend this was a random occurrence, but memories like this cropped upon a fairly regular basis. What you remember most is what affected you most. Memories are traumas and joys—you don’t remember the blasé. At least, not when your dick is in your hand.
This memory was both trauma and joy, thus extremely prone to random recall. Collin hadn’t seen or spoken to Orla in years. While he was trying to get himself off, the image of their younger bodies going at it in the small shack popped into his brain. Maybe it never left. It was a distinct memory, clear as the day it happened.
Collin had held Orla up against the wall as she dug her nails into his back—he missed having core strength—and there was a lot of grabbing and biting. Collin couldn’t remember what initiated the throes, but he knew Orla was a little angry. Angry sex was the best sex. Another reason he didn’t trust the government with his porn predilections.
“Don’t you fucking stop,” she had ordered him. Past-Collin knew better than to refuse a command from Orla. She said what she meant and meant what she said.
He kept going; it felt too good to stop, regardless. Collin remembered that he and Orla always had a good rhythm with one another. So, it wasn’t a surprise when they came together. It was, however, a surprise when they realized the condom broke.
He remembered showing her the shredded scumbag. Orla darted to the first aid kit that sat at the nearby table. Collin thought she might have just had some Plan B stashed in there for emergencies—people made all kinds of mistakes in the ocean and a true lifeguard was prepared for any situation.
Instead, Orla had shoved hand sanitizer inside herself. Collin had tried to stop her the moment her hand moved to where he had been just moments before.
“You shouldn’t—” But before he could get the thought out, she was past the point of no return. Orla’s scream was terror-inducing. It had sounded like she was auditioning for a horror film. Collin had half-expected other lifeguards to come running. Luckily, no one had heard her over the fireworks. It had been the fourth of July. Maybe that was why he remembered—fourth of July was next weekend.
He’d gasped and then, after a moment of her screaming obscenities, collapsed into a fit of laughter. Which hadn’t made Orla feel any better about the blend of liquid flames and semen inside her. She’d turned her verbal wrath on Collin. He took it, knowing full well she just needed to get through the burn. For a girl who grew up around sailors, it was mild fair. A couple of ‘fucks’, a few ‘cunts’, and just one ‘asshole’.
She’d admitted it was, in fact, funny a half hour later when the pain finally subsided. Collin had calmed her down, and they’d both got dressed. They’d walked to the pharmacy together to find a better solution. Alcohol was good for a lot of things, but not preventing pregnancy. It more often had the opposite effect.
***
Why this memory got him off was something Collin did not want to think too deeply about. It was probably because, at the time, he and Orla had loved each other. He was, if nothing else, a romantic. A romantic with a disturbing Google search history, but a romantic, nonetheless.
With his balls empty and his head clear, Collin sanitized his own hands and pulled up his pants. He shifted programs and stared at the blinking cursor on his ‘Final Draft’ document. Time to work.
He had nothing.
“Fuck,” he said and tapped his fingers in a syncopated rhythm.
His phone vibrated on the faux wood grain of the IKEA desk. It startled him. Who could be calling? No one called him, except Gene, and they’d already spent too much time together today.
He checked the phone. His brother-in-law was starting an Instagram live. This notification made Collin smile. He knew what Kip going live meant. Happy for a reason to postpone work a little longer, Collin opened his phone. His sister, Valerie, was on screen wearing her Temple University embroidered scrubs and a scowl.
“There are real media outlets covering the event, why are you going live?” She crossed her arms. Collin could tell she was exhausted from a long shift. She was far from camera-ready.
“If you knew anything about teenagers, you’d know they don’t watch traditional media.”
