Chapter 17: Before I Go to Sleep
"Is she one of the girls from our place?" José looked genuinely surprised.
"Tsk. Didn't expect our club to produce a star."
"So… what do we do, boss?" one of his underlings leaned in and asked quietly.
"What do you mean, what do we do?" José shot him a look.
"Turn her into a cash cow?"
José's eyes lit up. The idea clearly appealed to him.
"You're a sharp one," he said with a grin.
---
William had no idea what Nancy's future would look like after this.
And he didn't care to know.
He had far more important things to deal with.
The American Soldier's Wife and the Black Neighbor had fully exploded into a Los Angeles–area VHS hit, with clear signs of spreading into other states.
Riding that momentum, William bundled the five films he had stockpiled and sold them all to Vivid Entertainment in one go.
This time, he wasn't interested in long-term profit sharing.
All five were sold outright—$250,000 per film.
In any given niche, the real money is always made by the breakout hit. As long as he held onto the profit-sharing agreement for The American Soldier's Wife and the Black Neighbor, selling the rest outright was perfectly acceptable.
Meanwhile, the Nikkei Index continued to rise day after day.
William now had a substantial amount of liquid cash in hand.
It was time for him to take his first real step into the film industry.
Over the past few days, aside from shooting films, William had also been writing scripts whenever he found time.
Now, sitting alone in his office, he held a script in his hands.
Before I Go to Sleep.
It was a psychological thriller released in 2014, directed by Rowan Joffé and starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, and Mark Strong—adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name by S. J. Watson.
William intended to bring this film to Hollywood in 1989.
The story follows Christine (originally portrayed by Nicole Kidman), who suffers severe brain damage from an "accident" years earlier, leaving her with anterograde amnesia.
Every time she wakes up, she forgets everything that happened the day before—and all memories formed after the accident. Only her long-term memories from before the incident remain intact.
Each morning, she believes she is still a single woman in her twenties—
only to discover a middle-aged man lying beside her in bed.
In the original film, this man is played by Colin Firth.
William planned to play the role himself.
It would save on casting costs.
The man calls himself Ben, claiming to be her husband. Patient and gentle, he uses photographs and rehearsed explanations to help Christine "reconstruct" her reality.
Meanwhile, a man calling himself Dr. Nash, a neuropsychologist, secretly contacts Christine. He advises her to record her daily life on a video camera in order to help recover her memory.
Christine begins secretly filming herself.
And through these recordings, unsettling clues gradually surface:
Recurring bruises on her body.
Inconsistencies in "Ben's" stories.
And a chilling handwritten warning she finds on tape:
"Don't trust Ben."
As fragments of memory resurface, Christine recalls having had an affair with a man named Mike.
The so-called "accident" that caused her amnesia was not a car crash at all.
It was a brutal assault.
Consumed by jealousy and rage, Ben had beaten her severely, causing catastrophic brain damage. He then staged the scene as an accident, sent her to the hospital—and later took her home, where he "cared" for her for years.
The truth is even darker:
Ben was never her husband.
He was Mike—the man she had the affair with.
Mike murdered the real Ben (Christine's husband), burned the body, and assumed his identity. He imprisoned Christine, exploiting her amnesia, replaying the role of the devoted husband day after day to satisfy his own pathological obsession and need for control.
Dr. Nash, in contrast, was a legitimate psychologist who had treated Christine in the hospital and was genuinely trying to help her uncover the truth.
In the end, aided by her recordings and fragmented memories, Christine confronts Mike. After a violent struggle, she escapes and contacts the police.
Mike is arrested.
The film concludes with Christine, accompanied by her real friends and her son, attempting to rebuild her life. Though her memory disorder cannot be cured, she finally escapes years of psychological and physical imprisonment.
The film's true impact lies in its exploration of identity fraud and memory manipulation. The final revelation forces the audience to reexamine every earlier moment of "tenderness" from the husband—each one retroactively rendered horrifying.
---
To be honest, a film like this—
within the modern Hollywood industrial system—
would likely be ignored, buried, and written off as box-office fodder.
William didn't care.
He had never expected his first legitimate film to dominate the commercial box office.
Reality was not an absurd power fantasy novel.
No transmigrator could leverage a few hazy memories to pry loose a multi-tens-of-millions-dollar blockbuster without any foundation.
In Hollywood, capital is the only admission ticket.
And the narrow gate called "the first bucket of gold" was enough to crush ninety-nine percent of all ambition.
Even so-called independent films were money furnaces—
equipment, film stock, labor—none of it was cheap.
That was why William had spent so long struggling in the mud of Sacred Valley.
He needed those films to complete his primitive accumulation—
to earn his first ticket to the table.
His plan was cold, precise, and unwavering:
He did not seek massive profits.
He sought reputation.
He intended to pour his era-transcending camera movement, refined emotional pacing, and highly experimental visual language into works that appeared cheap on the surface.
He wanted to establish, in front of Hollywood's most cynical critics and arrogant producers, the image of a director obsessed with artistic pursuit.
Money was secondary.
His true objective was to force the so-called elites to acknowledge one thing:
Even when making films no one respected,
William could still deliver staggering artistic tension.
As long as the reputation of a "genius director" spread—
even if the films didn't sell—
As long as they bought him enough name value—
Then nothing else would be a problem.