told her she was crazy to be writing this sort of dark, arty fare. “Are you trying to defeat yourself? Do a broad comedy, get yourself established with the studios, and then go for the fringe indie stuff,” her best friend, Esme, advised her. But she wanted to be successful and an artist; was that so unrealistic?
By the time her doctor diagnosed her with an ulcer, she had shown the drug-addiction script to a half-dozen film finance companies and received vaguely positive responses, a handful of rewrite suggestions, but no offers. They are trying to kill me with encouragement, she realized. Burned out, dead broke, and still single, she seriously began to consider packing it all in and going back to Wisconsin. Maybe the life that awaited her there—a conventional sort of job, marriage, kids, the whole middle-America Apple Pie package—wasn’t so bad after all. At least she wouldn’t be living a life of incessant rejection.
But then, just when she was beginning to tinker with the Wisconsin job listings on Craigslist, she showed up at a friend’s barbecue at a rundown Craftsman in Venice. There, she found herself meeting the slightly sad eyes of the shaggy musician standing across the mud-stricken lawn and realized, to her surprise and great delight, that he was walking straight toward her.
The morning after their first date (a screening of Bonnie & Clyde in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, talking until dawn on the roof of Jeremy’s apartment building over a bottle of warming Chianti), she began writing a new script, this time starting from a place of inspired pragmatism. This one would be a comedy (comedies sell) with a boy-meets-girl story at its center (everyone loves a love story) and a cast in their twenties (prime moviegoing demographic). It would be more commercial but still sufficiently indie; and maybe it wasn’t the original direction she’d intended to go with her career but it might actually get made. She would give it another try. More than anything, suddenly, she wanted to stay in LA.
Still, it took a year to cobble together the financing for the film, as she coaxed the money, one zero at a time, from friends and friends of friends and one miraculous Israeli hedge fund investor. Her budget was still so modest that she’d had to borrow her video camera from a friend; instead of a craft services table, her Aunt Betsy sent out home-baked cookies from Indiana; since Claudia couldn’t afford stars, her lead actress was a refugee from a television sitcom. Jeremy—by that point, her husband—served as production assistant, fetching her coffee and rubbing her feet when she got home from the set. They still went over budget, a shortfall she personally fronted on a series of credit cards. There were days when it felt like she’d just made an audacious losing bet.
But then Spare Parts was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, and there her movie won a directing award and was nominated for two others, and finally she sold it to a respected film distributor for a sum that felt enormous to her (although, put into perspective, was probably the equivalent of one day’s catering budget for the average Hollywood blockbuster). Sitting in her lawyer’s hotel room overlooking the snowy Rockies on the day she signed the deal, she felt high—not just from the altitude up there in the mountains, but also from a certitude that she had never felt before. She had taken a gamble on her own future and drawn a winning hand despite the odds.
That was how she’d ultimately ended up here, in the packed lobby of this theater, surrounded by friends and film industry acquaintances and people who had worked on her movie and a vast number of complete strangers. The movie had finished screening; and even though there wasn’t a standing ovation at the end, the audience cheered and sat through the entire credit sequence before making a beeline for the free bar. Now, the crowd drew together in small clusters, chatting and shaking hands and exchanging cards and then breaking apart to form new clusters, a hive of bees performing some kind of intricately orchestrated honey dance.
A group of grips loomed over the food tables, guzzling their sponsored-vodka cocktails as they double-dipped in the hummus. The suits stood in the corner, rapidly typing on their BlackBerries. Claudia’s film-school peers, led by her friend Esme, stood in a protective semicircle around her, eyeing the strangers who approached. Jeremy was in position by the crudités