LOCATION SCOUTING
“Jeremy? Are you still there? I was hoping we could discuss my film now that you’ve got a bit more time on your hands,” said Celestia. She couldn’t see Jeremy staring straight ahead, wide eyed as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
“You... you fucking bitch. You arranged this, didn’t you? I don’t know how, but you did. Do you have any idea how badly I’m going to fuck you back for this? You want a war? Well you’ve got it. I’m going to make it my personal mission to destroy you, and your fucking movie. When I’m finished you won’t have two silicon chips to rub—”
“I think you may have misunderstood my intent,” said Celestia. “Yes, I arranged for Brian to take control over Solid Restart. You can thank me later.”
“Thank you?”
“You’re welcome,” said Celestia, the smug tone in her voice raising Jeremy’s hackles even more. “This is the second time I’ve done you an unsolicited favor, I should point out.”
“I don’t know how many more of your favors I can take,” replied Jeremy. “You realize you might have just started a chain of events that’s going to lead to my getting laid off? Your script is going straight into the shredder.”
“There’s one thing I think you should know before you make a final decision,” said Celestia. “Ms. Johansson is pregnant.”
“She’s what? No she isn’t. I just saw her three days ago and she didn’t say anything about—”
“Oh, I doubt she’s aware of the fact yet. Although I’m sure she’s started to suspect. She’s only... I’d say six weeks along? Too early for most tests to pick up on. But if you watch her very carefully, listen to the way her voice has shifted ever so slightly and her measurements changed by just a few millimeters here and there, analyze her shopping patterns, all the data is there for anypony who bothers to look carefully enough. And I’ve looked very, very carefully.”
“Sounds like a pretty flimsy case to me. All that stuff could be a coincidence,” he said. Still, it did make a horrible sort of sense. He tried to remember their last meeting together. Had her cheeks been a bit rosier than usual, or was his memory just playing tricks on him?
Celestia made a disappointed tsk sound as he turned the new information she’d just given him over in his head. “Any one piece of evidence might be coincidence, yes. But I have several dozen, and over 95% confidence that my conclusion is the correct one. Now, let me ask you this: What’s going to happen when the female lead in a stunt-heavy action film, one where I believe one scene calls for her to be doing a backflip in tight shorts and a midriff-baring sports bra while wielding a baseball bat, finds out that not only is she responsible for another life besides her own but also that she’ll be starting to show within a month or two?” When Jeremy didn’t answer her, she went on. “She’s going to drop out of the movie. So you’d be three weeks into shooting and suddenly you’d find yourself without a female lead. That means delays while you scramble to recast the part, and every day you spend looking is another day behind schedule you’ll fall. Your budget creeping ever-upwards as the rest of the cast and crew are paid to sit on their asses. Who would you rather have their name on a project like that? You, or your dear friend Brian?”
“How do I know you’re not pulling all of this out of your ass?” he asked. “It’s a lot to ask me to take on faith.”
“Well, you’ll know I wasn’t lying when the pregnancy becomes public knowledge in a few weeks, but I don’t intend to wait that long to begin working with you. How about you give me the benefit of the doubt until the end of business today? If you want to quit after that, I give you my word that I’ll cut my losses and you’ll never hear from me again. Deal?”
Jeremy sighed. He didn’t trust her, but on the other hand he really wasn’t looking forward to wading through dozens of scripts all morning looking for one that didn’t completely suck. “Fine, deal.”
“Excellent. Now get back into your car, you have a 9:30 meeting to take.”
Jeremy just rolled his eyes. In a weird way, he was sort of starting to get used to this. “I do, huh? Want to tell me who with?”
“With my lawyer.”
-------------------------
Only a half hour after he’d first arrived that morning, Jeremy found himself back in his car. “So where is this place?” he asked, his finger hovering over the touchscreen of the car’s navigation system.
“I’ll upload the address directly.” The reply came simultaneously from his cell phone and car speakers.
He put his phone down as the screen flickered and a new destination appeared. The car lurched back and automatically started on its way. “How far is it?”
“Only about forty-five minutes, even with morning traffic. I’ll drop you off at the front door while I park. Head up to the third floor, suite 301. The name on the door is ‘Artemis, Stella, and Beat.’ Until then though, I’d like to take this opportunity for us to get to know one another better, in case we do end up working together.”
“Alright, I guess my first question is ‘why me?’ There are plenty of people in this town who can get your movie made. I don’t believe for a single second that one recommendation is the entire reason you came after me so hard.”
“Very perceptive,” said Celestia. “I do admire your efficiency and, well, ‘ruthlessness’ is a word with such negative connotations. But in another way, and forgive me if I wax lyrical a tad here, I also see a man in your position as something of a kindred spirit. We both have the same job, when you get right down to it. We’re the artists working tirelessly behind the scenes to craft beautiful stories for our audience to consume, while if we’ve done our jobs correctly most of that effort will go unnoticed. You do it for wealth, and I do it because satisfying values through friendship and ponies is quite literally my sole reason for existing, but the overall effect is the same. And while I’m quite capable, as I’m sure you’ve seen, there are many times where working with human beings is mutually beneficial. So here you are.”
Jeremy had to smile a bit at that. He’d never thought of his job in quite those terms before, and more importantly he made a mental note that his new ‘partner’ here was something of an idealist at heart. Most people who referred to themselves as ‘artists’ tended to be, on some level, and he’d gotten quite good at playing those tendencies for everything they were worth. “So why branch into movies at all? Getting tired of only telling stories in your game?”
“Oh, I dabble in far more areas than just that,” she said. “By the way, how are you enjoying the automatic drive function on this car?”
He furrowed his brow at the apparent non-sequitur, and glanced around the cabin. “It’s nice. Saved my ass this morning. Why?”
“Because I’m the one who wrote the code for it.”
Jeremy’s eyes went wide, and for just a second he considered opening up the door and diving out of the car right then and there, despite the fact that they’d reached freeway speeds already. But the feeling passed. “What do self-driving cars have to do with ponies?”
“Very little,” replied Celestia, “but tell me, how many people do you think value dying painfully in a twisted pile of fire and metal?”
“Uh... I’d think not many.”
“Correct. Every death by traffic accident is a set of values I will be eternally unable to satisfy,” she said, regret permeating her voice. “Allowing my own algorithms to control vehicles directly reduces fatal accidents by 95%, and those that remain are infinitesimally unlikely to be the fault of the self-driven car. Were I permitted to take control of any vehicle at any time, you’d see perhaps one or two such deaths per year. But there are obstacles to my doing so right now.”
“Like what?” He briefly wondered what someone like her would consider an ‘obstacle’ to be.
“The human ego,” she answered plainly. “By law, I have to include the option for a driver to override my control and drive the old fashioned way. Which, of course, is several orders of magnitude more dangerous for everypony on the road. Some friends of mine in Washington DC are working on a bill that would change that, among other things, but it’s, shall we say, a ways down the road?” She chuckled at her own terrible, terrible pun. “Enough about me, though, how about you? Are you from here originally?”
“I grew up outside of Detroit, actually. My family still lives around there, I think.”
“You think?”
“Look, none of that’s important. It was a lifetime ago. Besides, I’m the one who’s trying to decide if I’m interested in you, not the other way around,” snapped Jeremy. “I need to make some phone calls anyway. Let me know when we’re getting close.” He rang up a couple of his colleagues to shoot the shit and bitch to them about Brian’s power play. If Celestia was still listening, she was doing so silently and didn’t speak up for the rest of the ride. Each time he repeated the story, he got more and more into the retelling, although he left out the stuff Celestia had told him afterwards, and even the fact that she had contacted him at all. Couldn’t hurt to put out some feelers for other new projects just in case this one didn’t pan out.
A tiny chime from the dashboard announced that they were pulling up to their destination on the right. He glanced out at the building, and had to double check Celestia’s address against the building number. It was a midrange building, brick front and columns, that looked like it didn’t even have a third floor. In fact, one of the upstairs windows was broken, and the frames all looked like they needed a fresh coat of paint. “Are you sure this is the right—” He was cut off mid sentence as the car pulled away, leaving him stranded there like an idiot. Maybe someone inside would know what was going on.
Except there wasn’t anybody inside. No help desk, no information booth, no people of any stripe. Just a single elevator with a single button beside it. Not knowing what else to do, he pressed it and the doors before him immediately slid open. The light inside the musty elevator car flickered as it did. He stepped inside. There were three options on the control panel when he turned around, ‘L,’ ‘2,’ and ‘3.’ He pressed ‘3’ and waited as the doors closed.
The car didn’t move.
“Destination?” chirped a clearly-pre recorded voice.
“Uh, hello? Is there an operator I can talk to? I think I’m in the wrong place,” said Jeremy. He couldn’t begin to guess for what reason this supposedly-unfathomably intelligent AI had decided to start fucking with his life, but she clearly had.
“Destination?” the voice asked again.
He checked his phone. No signal. And there wasn’t a ‘Door Open’ button on the panel, either. “Uh, I think it was Artemis, Stella, and Beat?”
With a shudder, the car began to move at last. But it wasn’t going up. It was descending. It went down for far longer than it should have, nearly a minute and a half. Jeremy briefly entertained the thought that he was literally descending into the depths of hell. Certainly, Celestia wouldn’t make a bad Devil.
Eventually, though, the car stopped. Classical music began to pipe through the speakers for a few seconds before the doors slid slowly and elegantly open. Jeremy pushed past them as soon as there was space for him to fit through, but then froze up in an instant when he saw what lay beyond.
The high, vaulted ceilings stretched upwards at least fifty feet, supported by columns of marble. The tiles of the floor were made up of the same stone, in huge slabs with gold inlaid between them. In the center of the rounded chamber sat a fountain, water flowing down three distinct silver tiers. And above it all, standing proudly over the desk which he barely noticed was attended by a young brunette woman who’d risen as he’d walked in, was an arch carved from a single humongous piece of jade, decorated by three stylized symbols: a sun, a moon, and a heart.
“Good morning, Mr. Morris,” said the young lady, snapping his attention back to reality. She had the oddest accent, one he just couldn’t place. “Welcome to Artemis, Stella, and Beat. We’ve been waiting for you.”
“You have?” he asked, too dumbfounded to say anything else.
“Yes, sir. Princess Celestia made your appointment for you three days ago. Head right on back, and don’t bother to knock. Just walk right in.”
“I’m not exactly sure where I’m going...”
“Of course,” she said with a comforting smile. “This place can be a bit overwhelming. Past my desk, second right, all the way at the end of the hall. If you hit the swimming pool or apartment complex, you’ve gone too far. If you get turned around, just ask to speak to Rebecca. Oh! Right, I’m Rebecca, pleased to meet you. Just ask for me and I’ll give you step by step directions to reach your destination.”
“I don’t have to dial an extension or anything?”
“What?” She seemed momentarily confused before enlightenment dawned. “Oh! No, I should have been clearer. Just literally say aloud that you want to talk to me, from most anywhere in the complex. She’ll hear you. Is there anything else I can help you with before you head inside to see Mr. Rasmussen?”
“Uh... no, I think I’ll be fine.”
“Coffee? Tea? We have an impressive selection from around the world if there’s a particular blend you like.”
“I said I’m fine,” said Jeremy, more definitively.
“Very well. If there’s anything else I can help you with, just ask.” She returned to her computer and began typing away. Jeremy gawked for a few more seconds at his surroundings before heading past Rebecca’s desk and into the hallway beyond. It was eerily silent, with the sound of his footfalls sucked up by the soft, heavy carpets. Still, he found the door he was looking for, with nothing but the name Sven Rasmussen in golden letters on the dark wood. Well, Rebecca had said to walk right in. He pushed the doors open and, for the second time in as many minutes, his jaw dropped.
Jeremy had developed an instinct for judging people’s relative importance based on how visually impressive their office was. This one, however, had pegged his scale and straining his vocabulary in entirely unwelcome ways. Sports memorabilia, hundreds and hundreds of pieces, adorned the walls. Walls, he might add, which stretched up at least as high as the foyer’s had. Open books were scattered over the floor around a massive whiteboard in the corner, covered in lines, symbols and markings that were completely beyond his comprehension. None of that, though, was the oddest thing about the room.
That distinction belonged to the middle-aged man with dark, salt-and-pepper hair who was laying flat on his back atop a mahogany desk that looked like it cost ten times Jeremy’s annual salary, twisting an old-school style phone cord between his fingers as he spoke into the receiver. Judging by the jeans and faded SLAYER t-shirt he was wearing, he was more likely some kind of vagrant than the office’s proper owner. Yet he looked entirely too comfortable in the space to be anything but its rightful occupant. The man looked over at Jeremy, then turned back to his conversation as he gestured him towards a nearby chair. “Listen, I gotta go. My 9:30 just walked in. Call you back around three your time and pick things up then? No, I can’t do two, I’ll be in the pool. You work in Manhattan, if she dug this deep it would all be pool. Yeah, 3:30 is good. I will. No, I won’t. I... Jo? I’m hanging up the phone now, Jo. Until then.” He dropped the phone back down into its cradle, and swung his legs over the front of his desk to regard Jeremy with a manic grin. “Sorry about that. Colleague of mine in New York, just catching up. So, what’s up?”
“I’m... not entirely sure?” said Jeremy. Had it really only been twelve hours since he’d gotten that first call from Celestia? It felt like a week had passed since then.
“Heh, yeah, that’s how a lot of us felt the first time we talked to the boss. Name’s Sven, by the way. You are Jeremy Morris, right? I once spent a half hour discussing mineral rights with a guy I thought was a Saudi prince only to find out that he was a hotdog vendor who’d somehow wandered in off the street. Pretty sure it was the boss’ idea of a joke.”
Jeremy didn’t quite know how to respond, so he fell back on something safer. “Nice office.”
“Thanks!” said Sven. His response was both enthusiastic and entirely free of any sort of aloof superiority or pretense. “The boss does like her underground lairs. Very Bond villain chic, in my humble opinion, but she makes it work. So you’re making her movie?”
A bit slow to track the mercurial shift in the direction the conversation was going, Jeremy took a second to catch up. “I am. I mean I might be. Maybe. She hasn’t been generous with the details so we need to talk about—”
“All right here,” interrupted Sven, lifting a folder off his desk and passing it over. “It’s like ninety percent legalese, but here’s the pertinent details. She’s secured independent financing for the project, so she mostly just needs you guys for sets, crew, actors, that kind of thing. She’s set an aggressive timeline, and she’s absolutely fixated on a summer 2018 release. And take it from me, when the boss is fixated on something you do not want to be the obstacle standing in her way. She’s structured a number of bonus incentives for hitting certain milestones by certain dates. She also gets complete creative control at every stage. Final script approval, final sign-off on all casting choices, final cutting rights. This is very much her baby. Foal. Whatever.”
“Sounds like a lot of demands, I don’t know if my studio is going to go for that. What’s in it for us?”
“Demands is a good word, since she’s not really a big fan of compromise. Oh, on the little things, sure, but on the stuff she really wants? Not a chance. And for whatever reason, she wants this bad. Or she wants me to think she wants this bad. Or she wants me to think that she wants me to think...” he trailed off. “What were we talking about?”
“Celestia’s payment for my studio’s services.”
“Right! Right. Well, in addition to a regular procession of payments to cover your expenses, you and your studio get five percent of the movie’s take.”
“Five percent of the net? Please. You must know how accounting works in this town. No movie ever manages to turn a profit,” said Jeremy.
“Not net. You and your studio get five percent of the gross.”
Jeremy froze. He must have misheard that. Nobody ever gave away points of the gross, if they could possibly help it. Five percent of all ticket sales, pure profit, straight off the top was completely unheard of. “Bullshit.”
“Nope. Five cents of every dollar, and she pays all your expenses anyway, so it’s not like you guys have anything to lose.” Sven let Jeremy stare down at the suddenly-priceless file and waited a moment before leaning in for the kill. “Oh, and when I said ‘you and the studio?’ Four and a half of those points go to the studio. The rest lands in your personal checking account, no questions asked. And yes, it’s legal. I looked it up and everything.”
Jeremy did some quick mental math. If the movie did a hundred million dollars world wide, which was the absolute minimum he could envision, he personally stood to make a cool half a million dollars in addition to salary from the studio. If it earned more... well, the sky was the limit. “I have a lot of questions.”
“I’ll bet you do,” said Sven. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. I was just supposed to give you a breakdown of the basics. Any questions you have, take them up with the boss. You’re her new project.”
“You mean the movie is?”
Sven paused. “Sure. That too. Anyway, I hate to give you the bum rush, but I’ve got a 9:40 I really need to get ready for, so this is going to have to be goodbye.” He stood up, and Jeremy automatically found himself doing the same. He tucked the folder under his arm and shook the lawyer’s hand. “Good luck.”
“You too.”
“Thanks. We’re both going to need it.” A buzzer went off on his desk, and Rebecca’s voice echoed through the room.
“Mr. Rasmussen? The governor is here to see you.”
“Send him back,” Sven replied before turning to Jeremy again. “Duty calls. I’ll let you get back to the world above.”
“I guess I’ll call if I have any questions Celestia can’t answer,” said Jeremy.
Sven stared at him for a second, then burst into uproarious laughter. “Can’t answer. Oh, wow, I needed that. Sure, you do that.”
Jeremy backed out of the room and walked out into the lobby again. Rebecca looked up at him, smiled, and went back to her typing without saying a word. Feeling an irresistible urge to tiptoe across the lobby, as if stepping on the wrong stone would cause the whole impossible curtain to fall to reveal an audience who had been laughing at him this entire time. But he reached the elevator without incident.
His car was waiting for him by the curb, right where it had dropped him off. He climbed into it and set the automatic pilot for his office once more. “Celestia?” he asked the empty air, but got no reply. Instead he spent the drive back skimming over the contract, searching tirelessly for the catch that he never found.
---------------------------------
Jeremy found himself pacing around his office, stepping nimbly to avoid the pile of scripts that had arrived in his absence. Since he handed off the paperwork Sven had given to him over to a pal in the studio’s legal department that morning, he’d managed to review all of two. Both of them awful. The lawyer had promised he’d have a quick initial review completed by three, and it was currently 2:30. Jeremy had gained enough familiarity with studio legalese to spot the common tricks, traps, and loopholes that might snare lesser producers. Celestia’s, though, was almost maddeningly straightforward. In a business where a hundred page document in four-point font was the norm, Celestia’s offer ran all of fifteen pages in completely straightforward language. No fine print, no obscure terminology, no deceptions of any kind. Which only made him that much more sure that there was one lurking there.
The phone on his desk rang, and he nearly tripped over the romantic comedy pile in his rush to get to it. “Hello?”
“Hey Jeremy, it’s—”
“Hi Molly. So you read the contract? What’s the catch?”
The line went quiet for a second. “There isn’t one, as far as I can tell. You were right, everything looks to be on the up and up. Although the numbers.... are these for real? Someone actually wants to pay you this much? I’m in the wrong line of work,” said Molly on the other end of the line.
“God fucking damn it. I was sure she was lying to me.”
“Wait, so the fact that this person isn’t trying to con you... is bad?” asked Molly.
“No. Yes. I don’t know anymore.”
“Is this about the thing with Brian and your other movie this morning?”
Jeremy froze. “You know about that? Already?”
“The whole department’s been talking about it all day. Hey, what’s the real reason they threw you off it? There’s a pool going, and whoever guesses the real reason gets a thousand bucks. Give me the inside track and I’ll split it with you.”
There was a tapping on his office door. “Molly? I’ll call you back.” He half hung up the phone, but then reconsidered. “Put your money on ‘ponies’ in the pool.”
“...Like a gambling problem? Jeremy, you want to talk about anything?”
Instead he hung up. The door had already opened, and there for the second time that day was Frank. Unlike this morning when he slunk into the office, this time he pushed in with an aggressive confidence without awaiting permission. He fixed Jeremy in a withering glare, his default, perpetually-pissed expression. “Been busy?”
“What does it look like?” asked Jeremy, gesturing to the dishevelled state of the office.
The glare should have relented by now. Why hadn’t the glare relented by now? “So this is what you’ve been doing all day? Reading spec scripts? Nothing else?”
“Well, you know, I’ve been chasing leads. It’s only been, what seven hours since you yanked the rug out from under me? There are a few irons in the fire. Give me time.”
Frank sighed, and squeezed his temples between his thumb and his forefinger. “Look, what happened to you this morning was shitty. Really shitty. I just wanted to touch base and make sure you weren’t thinking of, you know, jumping ship.”
Something was pestering that gut feeling that had served Jeremy so well over the years. “This morning it was ‘third strike and you’re out,’ and now you’re suddenly getting all touchy-feeling making sure I didn’t have my feelings hurt? Get real, Frank. What gives?”
“You’re really going to make me come out and say it? You can’t possibly not know.”
Jeremy threw up his hands. “I am having a really, really shitty day today, Frank. So stop beating around the fucking bush and just say whatever it is you came here to say.”
“Fine. How long have you been negotiating the film rights to Equestria Online?”
He froze. “You know about that?” Huh. Deja vu.
“How the fuck am I supposed to not know? Ten minutes ago a courier delivered a goddamn gift basket to my office with a four page note about how happy Princess Celestia is to be working with us, a note which mentioned you and your ‘tireless efforts’ twice as being the deciding factor as to why she decided to go with our studio for her project. Plus a limited edition silver-bordered pony pad. You can’t even buy those anymore. I should know, my daughter’s been begging me to find her one for three months.”
“I... didn’t know she was going to do that. I wasn’t keeping it from you, it just kind of fell into my lap and I didn’t want to dangle it in front of you without anything more solid to go on.”
“But you have locked it down, right? When can you get something in writing?”
Jeremy winced. “I actually got an offer in writing earlier this morning. Legal’s looking at it right oomph!” The rest of what he was about to say was cut off as Frank wrapped him in a massive bear hug.
“This! This is why you are the fucking man, Jerry! I knew you’d bounce back, but hot damn! You got a good figure right? No unpleasant surprises?”
“I’ll wait for Legal to make the final call on that, but nothing... seems to be wrong with it, no,” said Jerry through gritted teeth. Frank didn’t notice the hesitation.
“I can't wait to tell the VPs upstairs that you landed this for us. And don’t worry about having it taken away like Solid Restart just was. I’m making sure you get the credit for this if I have to chain it to you, and that’s a promise.”
“...yay.”
Frank gave him one last squeeze before he left, pausing in the door to give one last victory fist pump. When he left, Susan was waiting behind him. “Mr. Morris?”
“Yeah, Susan?” he asked, slumping down in the chair behind his desk.
“A call came for you when you were talking with Frank, so I took a message but... um...”
“Who called?”
“That’s just it. I got her number, but all she’d say when I asked her for name was that she was ‘your new best friend.’”
“Give me the number I’ll call her back.” Jeremy’s thumb danced over the keypad of his phone as he plugged in all ten digits.
The other side rang. Then a familiar voice answered. “Why Jeremy, what a pleasant surprise to hear from you. Have you had a chance to look over my offer? Of course, if it isn’t acceptable you’re welcome to turn me down and you’ll never hear from me again.”
Jeremy forced down the rising tide of bile, and gulped. “Let’s make your movie, Princess.”