….
In a fully furnished dimly lit room, sat a one of the greatest directors of this generation in Hollywood–
Damian Prescott.
At least that's what people and the media had called until two weeks ago.
However the same media, who had revered him for the last three decades, printed something else on the same pages.
====
–Pixy's $240M Gamble Crashes: A Disaster of Auteur Indulgence–
–Is Damian Prescott Out of Touch? Inside the Studio System's Biggest Flop–
–Pixy Studios Re-evaluates Slate Following Disastrous Opening Weekend–
====
For twenty-eight years, his life had been fully consumed by filmmaking.
He had directed fourteen feature films.
Fourteen.
Across nearly three decades, he had delivered gritty neo-noirs, award winning character dramas, and mid budget psychological thrillers that consistently pulled double their production budgets at the worldwide box office.
He was a craftsman.
A veteran auteur who knew where to place a 35mm lens to catch the exact second an actor's eyes gave up hope.
Yet, currently facing his biggest downfall, he has no one left to lean onto. Every studio, and producer is ignoring his call.
His only last hope is this decades old personal card he has from his AD days.
He dialed the ten digits printed on the car, with a name–
[Stephen Hawking]
'Right, there was only one Stephen at that time…'
He pressed call and brought the phone to his ear, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Ring–!
Ring–!
Ring–!
Damian swallowed hard, bracing himself for the click of a disconnected line or an automated operator, which he had been hearing over and over for the last two weeks.
However….
Click–!
"Speak."
The voice on the other end was rough with age, deep, unhurried, and carrying an intrinsic gravity that felt like it had been carved out of granite.
It was the same voice that had guided millions of people through the [Superman] trailer years ago.
Damian choked on his breath for a split second before forcing his vocal cords to work.
"M-Mr. Hawking?" His voice cracked slightly. "Sir... My name is Damian Prescott. I... I know you probably don't remember me. Twenty years ago, on the set of 'Winter Harbor], I was a third AD–"
"Damian…." the voice interrupted smoothly.
There was no hesitation, or confusion. "The boy who took care of acting sheets right?"
Damian froze, and the air in his lungs entirely stopped.
"You... you remember?"
"I have been watching your work, Damian." Stephen Hawking Sr. replied quietly, the faint rustle of a turning book page echoing through the line–
"All fourteen of them, and you have a rare eye for human tragedy. 'The Broken Line' was a masterpiece of restraint."
For some reason that simple compliment made all the accomplishments he had revised until now feel like nothing.
Honestly, for him, the last week had been a bloodbath.
A four day domestic gross so humiliating that theater chains were already pulling digital prints from prime evening slots to make room for second run screenings of Regal Seraphsail's [Batman] even after months of its release.
And with that catastrophic box office came the true face of Hollywood.
It wasn't anger or loud condemnation, but an absolute suffocating silence.
By Monday morning, his long-time agent at CAA, a man Damian had made tens of millions of dollars in commissions over fifteen years, stopped picking up his calls.
When Damian dialed the agency's direct extension, a junior assistant made a pathetic excuse before placing him on a perpetual hold that led nowhere.
His emails to producers bounced back with generic automated out of office replies.
Two development deals he had spent eighteen months improving at Apollo Pictures and Vista Crown International vanished overnight, quietly purged from internal production tracking boards without so much as a formal cancellation letter.
Even his private life had begun to erode under the toxic fallout.
His reservation at the San Vicente Bungalows was quietly flagged as 'unavailable' due to sudden kitchen maintenance.
Long-time colleagues who used to seek his counsel on festival juries crossed to the other side of the street when he grabbed a morning espresso in Brentwood.
In Hollywood, failure wasn't a mistake, but an airborne contagion.
And Damian was patient zero.
The worst part… the part that made his stomach knot–
–was that the audience was right.
The movie was terrible.
When Damian had sat with Pixy Studios three weeks before release, watching the locked final cut with the studio brass, he had felt physically sick.
The pacing was bloated, the dialogue was synthetic and disjointed, the tone swung between childish slapstick and unearned melodrama, and the third act was an unrecognizable slurry of muddy CGI and disconnected explosions.
It was a Frankenstein's monster stitched together by committee compromises, and never supposed to be that way.
Damian had loved superheroes long before the current boom.
A decade ago, long before Regal Seraphsail introduced the MarvelDC Cinematic Universe to the world and changed the landscape of global cinema forever, Damian had spent his own money optioning comic book properties.
He had written treatments, drafted character driven scripts, and pitched them passionately to the executives at Pixy Studios.
Back then, they had literally kicked him out of the boardroom.
They told him capes were toys for ten year olds and that serious filmmakers didn't waste their time on men in spandex.
Then Regal took over the industry.
[Spider-Man: Web of Destiny] crossed $1.2 billion; [Superman] also did a billion, and broke global pre sale records. LIE Studios turned comic book adaptations into high art, modern day mythology. Even the latest [Batman] was a humongous success despite being three hours long.
Terrified of being left behind in the greatest gold rush modern entertainment had ever seen, the board at Pixy Studios panicked.
CEO Richard Bethell and his aggressive suite of executives suddenly remembered Damian's decade old passion.
They called him on board, dangled a massive $240 million production budget, and promised him the holy grail: His lifelong dream project.
Damian had walked into the trap with wide open eyes and a full heart.
Only after cameras started rolling did the nightmare begin.
The creative freedom he had been promised was an illusion, and from week two of principal photography, Pixy's executives began suffocating the set.
Brad Carter and a rotation of creative coordinators were always present on soundstages daily with stacks of color coded revision notes.
They didn't want Damian's vision, only a shot for shot imitation of Regal Seraphsail's MDCU formula stripped of the soul and thematic weight that made his films work in the first place.
Every auteur touch Damian fought for was systematically dismantled.
His practical stunt choreography was discarded in favor of rushed digital VFX contracted to the lowest overseas bidder, and his character driven emotional beats were hacked apart to insert unprompted, quippy jokes designed by focus groups.
And then came the killing blow: the lead.
Damian had spent six months developing the protagonist around Christian Isaac, tailoring the script to the actor's gravity and brooding physical menace.
Pixy had promised him Isaac was locked in.
But while Pixy dragged its feet playing corporate hardball, LIE Studios made a single, decisive move.
Regal Seraphsail offered Christian Isaac the role of Bruce Wayne in [The Dark Knight], and Isaac walked away.
Furious and running out of time, Pixy shoved a wooden, untested network idol into the lead role simply because he had twelve million social media followers and a low quote.
Damian had fought back.
He had screamed in production trailers, threatened to walk off the lot, and appealed directly to the board.
But Pixy held the purse strings and the contract clauses.
They threatened him with catastrophic breach of contract lawsuits that could bankrupt his estate, took the edit out of his hands, barred him from the color-grading suite, and locked the final cut.
Then, when the premiere went up in flames, Richard Bethell and his PR machine moved quickly, leaking stories that painted Damian as an inflexible, outdated veteran who had lost control of a modern blockbuster budget and making him the sole scapegoat for the disaster to protect their stock price and executive bonuses.
And now, Pixy's back channel blacklist has closed every door in the city.
….
Damian closed his eyes, his breathing even as he heard Stephen–
At that time, he was just a twenty eight year old third assistant director.
On the other hand, Stephen Hawking had been the top-billed superstar of the production.
And both of their status had no business interacting. Even during the whole filming of four months, they hadn't exchanged more than five sentences across four months of filming.
Damian had just been another nameless body.
However, on the last day something happened.
The veteran actor had reached out, tapped the script notebook, and spoken with a calm, resonant weight:
"I see the spark in you, young man. You have a great future, just understand that things don't go your way every time, and that's when you need to stay extra strong."
And those words really hit him hard after almost three decades.
He added. "Contact me if you ever need it."
That's when Damian remembered.
There is a talk in the industry that Stephen hands over his details to the people he believes has potential, and in fact whoever received that had become successful figures moving forward.
And for that exact reason, Damian had never let go of that card no matter what.
He had considered it as his lucky charm, and a validation that belonged to a younger, braver version of himself, though he never believed he would actually use it.
And even if he wanted to, what were the chances that a twenty year old private number still connected to a retired legend who rarely stepped into the public light?
However, it still worked–
….
"I... sir, I don't even know where to begin." He whispered, his voice thick with raw emotion. "What happened with Pixy... the film..."
"I saw the film." Stephen stated plainly.
There was no pity in his voice, only the clear, unvarnished truth of a veteran who had survived every era of the industry–
He asked. "What do you think about the result?"
"....it's a clear reflection of the product."
Damian was honest.
"Good. You haven't lost your eye yet." Stephen commented.
"....." - "....."
Then, silence lingered on the line for three measured seconds.
When Stephen spoke again, his tone was firm, steady, and immovable as a mountain.
"Damian, I can only guess what you might be going through. But do not worry, I believe you have what it takes to bounce back. I will provide you with a personnel detail, contact them as I said. I will inform him and arrange a meeting."
Damian blinked, his mind struggling to process the words. "Arrange a meeting? With... with whom, sir?"
"Regal Seraphsail."
The name dropped like a thunderclap in the quiet study.
Damian sat entirely paralyzed.
Regal Seraphsail.
The head of LIE Studios.
The visionary behind the MDCU, and the man who had conquered publishing, streaming, and global cinema before the age of thirty.
And the very filmmaker whose gravity had inadvertently driven Pixy into the manic frenzy that ruined Damian's life.
And the supreme, dizzying irony of it all struck Damian right in the chest:
Damian had spent twenty eight years directing films in Hollywood.
Regal Seraphsail was twenty eight years old.
His entire career, his decades of sweat, failure, triumph, and experience, was the exact age of the young man who now held the keys to his professional salvation.
A breath escaped Damian's lips, carrying away the lingering dread that had suffocated him for days.
"Thank you, sir. I will do as you say." Damian said, his voice steadying with a profound sense of reverence.
"Yes, please do so. And take care of yourself and your family."
"Yes, sir."
There was a slight pause on the line.
Damian prepared himself for what would come next.
"Can I have a suggestion for you?" Stephen asked gently.
"Yes, sir." Damian replied immediately.
"Be open with your family. They are part of you, and have the right to know what is going on in your life. Take care of them."
Damian's hand gripped the phone tightly.
In an industry built entirely on vanity, contracts, box office splits, and ruthless disposability, no producer, agent, or executive had ever asked him about his life. No one had ever spoken of family.
They only cared about the weekend numbers, the budget variances, and the profit margins.
A single tear slipped down Damian's cheek, landing quietly on the yellowed business card resting on his desk.
"....yes, sir." Damian whispered.
The call clicked off.
Damian sat alone in the fading afternoon light, the heavy silence in the study no longer feeling like a tomb, but like the quiet before a new scene began.
He wiped his face, stood up from his chair, and walked toward the living room to talk to his wife.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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