with his friend and bandmate Daniel, who’d brought her a bouquet of yellow lilies. Even Jeremy’s father, Max, had come out and shuffled around in his corduroys and flip-flops and untucked dress shirt, lingering lasciviously near a clutch of twenty-something actresses who played bit parts in the film.
Claudia stood in the center of it all, feeling vaguely like a stuffed pheasant in a display vitrine. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She was the axis around which the entire room seemed to turn. She arranged herself directly in front of her movie poster—SPARE PARTS in capital letters, the faces of her lead actors in profile against the Los Angeles skyline, the Variety quote (“Sharply funny …. Addictive!”) just below—and dizzily accepted the congratulations, the pressed hands and overenthusiastic hugs. “Huge fan, huge fan,” a total stranger whispered in her ear.
Standing at the center of all this adulation, it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect Spare Parts to be a hit. Didn’t she have glowing reviews from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and, now, Entertainment Weekly? Even the Academy Awards was dominated by plucky little independent films these days, especially upbeat ones like hers. Yes, Spare Parts was opening in only twenty-three theaters this weekend, but next weekend it was scheduled to open in two hundred more, and yet more after that. She was days away from signing a movie development deal with a major motion picture studio; her next film was going to be big budget, cast with stars, a serious endeavor about issues of real importance (human smuggling on the Mexican border!). Maybe she’d revive her drug addiction script next.
“Claudia, I’m so sorry I can’t stay long, but the sitter’s threatening to call the cops on the twins,” she heard in her ear, and turned to see RC. RC’s real name was Renata Calliope, but she’d been going by her initials for the last twenty-five years, ever since she arrived in Los Angeles as a fledgling screenwriter in her early twenties and realized that Hollywood didn’t take women seriously. By now, RC’s screenwriting credits—including a handful of award-winning films and a long-running television hospital drama—were high-profile enough that the androgynous moniker was no longer effective or necessary, but she often told Claudia about the delight she once took in showing up for a production meeting in a miniskirt and heels and seeing the profound confusion on the producer’s faces when they realized they’d accidentally hired a chick to script-doctor their TV pilot.
These days, RC rarely wore heels. A mother of ten-year-old twin boys, she had traded in the stilettos for sneakers years earlier, and the skirts had been swapped out for a uniform of cargo pants with men’s Hanes T-shirts. Compact, her graying hair cropped short, RC looked more like a teenage boy than a woman nearing fifty, but she spoke with the smoked rasp of a Depression-era film star. She was only fourteen years older than Claudia but seemed of a different era entirely, spawned by 1980s Hollywood, when women in the business had to grow a protective reptilian skin and carry their own set of steel balls in their purse to survive. Claudia had been seated next to RC at a Women in Film symposium at a student film festival years before; two hours and four glasses of wine later, RC had adopted Claudia as her occasional mentee and more frequent friend. When Claudia was struggling to get Spare Parts off the ground, it was RC who lent her an $8,000 HD DV camera, introduced her to the Israeli hedge fund manager who would eventually provide her financing, and talked her off more than one ledge.
Claudia hugged her, smelled Ivory soap and basil oil. “Jason isn’t home with the kids?”
RC shook her head. “He’s off shooting a reality show in Singapore. So, quickly, my thoughts about your film, before I have to run: The new ending you cut really worked; that was definitely the right decision. And I know you were worried about the second-act turn but I think—”
“Claudia!” Carter, Claudia’s agent, slid up beside her and gripped her elbow with a moist palm, interrupting them. His pink tie was loosened and his balding pate gently reflected the overhead lights, and when he leaned in to Claudia the faint scent of cigarette smoke wafted from behind his cauliflowered ears. “There she is, the auteur. You saw that review, I assume?”
“Hi, Carter,” RC said coolly.
“RC. Wouldn’t be a premiere without you, now, would it.” Carter bared thirty-two whitened teeth, skipping