Chapter 98 – The Million-Dollar Rumor
Bruce had been barricaded inside his apartment for four straight days.
He'd started thinking of it as White Story Workshop LLC — a name that existed entirely in his head and described a space that looked, to any outside observer, like a graduate student's apartment after finals week.
Drafts everywhere. Coffee cups in various states of abandonment. A take-out bag from two nights ago that he kept meaning to throw away. His old Royal typewriter sitting at the center of it all, clattering away with the steady rhythm of someone who had somewhere to be.
When Bruce was deep in a script, the rest of the world became theoretical. He'd made some vague promise to Monica months ago about keeping the common areas presentable, but she was currently absorbed in her Morvite recipe development and hadn't knocked in days. The creative chaos was, for now, permitted to flourish.
Four days. Countless cups of coffee. Two complete screenplays.
The first had come from the part of his memory that still sometimes astonished him with its precision — a psychological thriller built around a man with no short-term memory, hunting his wife's killer, the story told entirely in reverse. He'd verified carefully: Christopher Nolan hadn't made a feature yet. The structure — black and white sequences running backward, color sequences running forward, a man piecing together a truth he couldn't hold in his head — was still sitting there, unmined, waiting.
He called it Memento. A labyrinth of memory and self-deception that he knew, with the calm certainty of someone who'd seen how the story ended, would become something people talked about for decades.
The second script was more personal — a make-good to himself, in a way. He'd spent years, in another version of his life, working on a screenplay that never sold. A hotel cook in over his head, stumbling into an international smuggling ring, saving the day through a combination of bad luck and stubbornness. He'd loved the idea — the ordinary guy as accidental hero — even when nobody else did.
He transplanted the whole thing to Brooklyn. Made the main character a garage mechanic who gets tangled up with the mob, counterfeit cash, and a stolen painting from the Met. Tightened the jokes. Escalated the action. Leaned into the absurdity. It became something looser and faster and genuinely fun — a love letter to the kind of scrappy, unpretentious B-movie action comedy the '90s did better than anyone admitted.
He typed the final page, pulled it from the carriage, and sat back.
"Done."
The word came out like a deflating tire. He stared at the ceiling for a full minute, completely emptied out.
He slid both scripts into padded envelopes and addressed them to himself — registered mail, return receipt requested. An old writer's habit, crude but reliable: postmark as proof of creation date. Another layer of armor in a business where ideas were currency and attribution was contested sport.
Then he splashed water on his face, grabbed the duplicate copies, and drove to the Writers Guild of America offices on 48th Street.
Registration was straightforward — forms, fee, a copy of each script logged and stamped into the system. The receipt he tucked carefully into his jacket pocket. That official seal was worth something real. In a town that ran on relationships and handshake deals, paperwork was the only thing that didn't change its story.
By late afternoon he was running on fumes and thinking about sandwiches when he passed a newsstand on his way back to the car.
He almost didn't stop. He glanced at the rack out of habit — and the headline on the entertainment page grabbed him by the collar.
MIRAMAX FACES REAL COMPETITION? BIDDING WAR ERUPTS OVER BRUCE WHITE'S NEXT SCRIPT
Bruce stopped walking.
He leaned closer, convinced his four days of sleep deprivation had finally caught up with him and he was misreading things.
He was not misreading things.
The article — in a publication he respected, which made it worse, or better, depending on how you looked at it — claimed that Spotlight Pictures, New Line Cinema, and Focus Features were all actively pursuing the Lock, Stock writer-director, with offers reportedly approaching seven figures. It described his voice as "a dark, kinetic comedic sensibility unlike anything working in American independent film right now." It used the phrase "the industry's new Midas" without apparent irony.
"What." Bruce said it out loud, to no one, in the middle of the sidewalk. Several people walked around him.
A million dollars. He was apparently the subject of a million-dollar bidding war, and he had found out about it from a newsstand.
He thought about Estelle's voice on the phone, three days ago. Leave Harvey to me.
He sprinted back to his car.
He'd recently upgraded from a pager to a Motorola StarTAC — a phone small enough to feel slightly ridiculous, expensive enough to feel slightly guilty about, and useful enough right now to justify both. He dialed Estelle. She picked up on the first ring, which meant she had been expecting him.
"Bruce." Her voice was its usual composed, slightly smoky register. "Have you seen the Times entertainment section?"
"Estelle." He took a breath. "Did you plant that story? A million dollars? I haven't written the script yet — Harvey's going to see straight through this—"
"The same item runs in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety tomorrow morning," she said, serene as a woman reading from a script she wrote herself. "I'll fold the publicity cost into my next commission. Negligible."
Bruce stared through the windshield. "Right. Of course you will." He regrouped. "Okay — walk me through the logic. Harvey's not going to panic over a number he knows isn't real—"
"Bruce, sweetheart." She shifted into the tone she used when she was being patient with him. "That number isn't aimed at Harvey. It's aimed at everyone else in the room. Will they believe it completely? Maybe not. But will they wonder what you've written? Absolutely. Because Lock, Stock already proved you're not a fluke. Your next script doesn't need to be worth a million dollars — it needs to feel like it might be. I provided the feeling. The studios will provide the anxiety."
He turned this over. "And if Harvey digs in at his original number?"
"Then we sell to someone smarter. New Line wants edgier material. Focus loves anything that doesn't fit a clean category. You take their money, and you use it to buy into Harvey's Love Actually as an investor — his rival's capital funding his own Christmas blockbuster." A brief pause. "It's a seller's market, darling. We hold the inventory."
Bruce sat with that for a moment.
He put the phone down. Started the car. Sat there without pulling out.
Estelle's move was aggressive — knife-edge stuff, the kind of play that only worked if your underlying position was strong enough to survive the bluff being called. But she understood the industry's nervous system in a way that still impressed him, even knowing what he knew.
His hands were steadier than he expected as he pulled into traffic.
He had two registered scripts, a headline in tomorrow's trades, and an agent who played the long game like she'd been born doing it.
Worse starting positions existed.
[Support Goal: 500 PS → +1 Chapter]
[Support Goal: 10 Reviews → +1 Chapter]
Your review helps the story grow.
P1treon Soulforger (20+chapters ahead)