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  CONTENTS

  PART 1:

  PREPRODUCTION (2002–2003)

  Coming Attractions (1969)

  PART 2:

  THE LONG WEEKEND (2011):

  Thursday Night and Friday Morning

  Reel Change (1991)

  PART 3:

  THE LONG WEEKEND (2011):

  Later Friday

  Concessions (2000)

  PART 4:

  THE LONG WEEKEND (2011):

  Saturday and Sunday

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Wesley Latsch’s List of Seventy-five Things that Cause Unnecessary Fatigue

  About Owen King

  This book is dedicated to the inspiring,

  irreplaceable women in my life.

  ZJBK

  KTB

  NRK

  TJFSK

  &

  in memory of Sarah Jane White Spruce, 12/7/23–5/14/07

  DOCTOR

  (to Guido, the director)

  Well, what are you working on now?

  Another film without hope?

  —Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi, 81/2 (dialogue spoken by Roberto Nicolosi)

  The steel-on-steel whisk of the curtain rings scraping along the rod seemed to come from the sky, and for the last seven or eight seconds of his dream, Sam Dolan found himself turning in a circle, searching for the source of the sound, but there was no one else in the vast parking lot. “Samuel!” bellowed an unmistakable voice. “Samuel! I must speak to you!”

  Sam opened his eyes and recoiled at the rectangle of white light. He threw his hands out to block the brilliant autumn morning cascading through the revealed window. Something was wrong. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  A shadow grew, grew and grew, its mountainous shoulders overwhelming the bright frame. Booth stepped closer. His eyes were wide, his peppery beard tangled and wild, as if he had been rending it.

  “What?” Sam’s pulse was in his fingers and his toes, behind his eyes, under his tongue. He was afraid.

  “Samuel, my son.” His father cleared his throat and held up a sheaf of pages. “I have some notes for your script.”

  PART 1

  PREPRODUCTION

  (2002–2003)

  1.

  The script was for a film called Who We Are, a drama set at Russell College, the small liberal arts school in northern New York where Sam had matriculated. The partly autobiographical story had been his senior thesis. Central to the design of the work was the way it compacted time, by means of a trope that Sam privately considered so ingenious he sometimes broke into cackles just thinking about it.

  At the break of day, the narrative’s half dozen or so main figures are callow eighteen-year-old freshman, but as the film advances—through parties and drugged-out drum circles, couplings and arguments and pranks—they age at a super-accelerated rate, encapsulating all four years of college in a single Spring Festival, the annual daylong bacchanalia that was the inebriated topper on every red-blooded Russell undergraduate’s year. At sunup of the following morning, finally partied out, the characters are grown-up seniors on the verge of graduation, with different haircuts and thinner faces and better clothes, yet in every significant way no more prepared for the real world than when they started.

  While most readers of Who We Are found it funny in places, it was an essentially lyric piece that Sam felt spoke to the mad, arrested quality of those four years and, in general, of what a desperate thing it was to be young and free and American.

  One character, Rachel, is a buttoned-down suburban honor student when we meet her in the morning; when we leave her, four years later, she is a fully committed member of an ecoterrorist cell; through the first quarter of the movie, Hugh drinks beer after beer, backslaps everyone in sight, climbs on every available chair and tabletop to make ribald acclamations to his friends; by the last fifteen minutes or so, Hugh has stopped going out altogether, developed a policy of conducting communication exclusively via the Internet or speakerphone, become too indolent to bother dressing himself, and just lies on his couch, gloating aloud about the energy that his old companions are wasting while he is relaxing; another, Florence, renames herself Diana, and then Aurora, and then Divinity, before finally going back to Florence—the bright, gifted arts major who woke up that morning gradually transforming into a grim scold, her final project an installation of a Dumpster filled with words carved from piss-soaked foam blocks: EMPATHY, TRUTH, INTEGRITY, and so on; a gold-chain-wearing high school football star when we meet him, Brunson discovers his homosexuality during the first twenty minutes of the film, begins to treat his shame and anxiety with crystal meth around the forty-minute mark, and shortly afterward disappears completely right in the middle of a scene, at which point everyone ceases to refer to him except in the past tense; Kira spends the entire movie holding hands, only the person with whom she’s holding hands keeps changing, and they’re always arguing about that other person’s lack of faithfulness; she becomes angrier and angrier until she literally bites her last lover and rips a chunk of flesh from his cheek.

  In a typical scene about midway through, Roger, the ostensible leader of the group, abruptly breaks up with his girlfriend. Initially a humorous skeptic, by the film’s latter stages, Roger has become so chronically dubious that he refuses to believe his own mother when she calls, sobbing, to inform him that his father has suffered a fatal aneurysm. “Nice try,” he says, and hangs up on her.

  Several of the screenplay’s characters were modeled on real people: Roger, for instance, was Sam’s stand-in, and most of the things that happened to Roger—like the phone call scene—were semi-fictionalized versions of events from Sam’s own life. Another key player, Hugh, was plainly based on Sam’s best friend, Wesley Latsch, who had in reality, over time, winnowed his direct human contact to the bare minimum, and become so resolute in his fecklessness that there was a kind of integrity to it. Claire, Roger’s girlfriend, was a dead ringer for Sam’s actual college girlfriend, an indefatigably good-natured young woman named Polly Dressler:

  EXT. NORTH FIELD PARKING LOT—MIDAFTERNOON

  The group comes to Roger’s Saab. Behind them, in the meadow and on the hillside, the festival continues—people jumping up and down in the bouncy castle, a juggler with devil sticks, the rotating Ferris wheel, etc.

  CLAIRE

  Slurpee time!

  HUGH

  T-minus Slurpee!

  Roger unlocks the car with a CLICK, as Claire pulls on the passenger-side door with a CLACK. Claire has pulled the handle too soon.

  Roger opens his door and climbs in. Claire pulls again on the handle of the passenger-side door, to no avail. Hugh stands with her.

  Roger stares at Claire through the dirty glass. Roger’s Radio-head T-shirt is now a Wilco T-shirt. Claire’s glasses are gone, and her hair is different.

  BACK-AND-FORTH THROUGH THE PASSENGER WINDOW:

  CLAIRE

  Let me in! I want Slurpee!

  HUGH

  Slurpee motherfucker!

  ROGER

  No. It’s over. I can’t do this anymore, Claire.

  CLAIRE

  What?

  ROGER

  I can’t be with you. You’re a handle-puller.

  CLAIRE

  What?

  ROGER

  I’m sorry, but we’re through.

  CLA
IRE

  Why are you being such a jerk? I just want to get a Slurpee and have an enjoyable day.

  ROGER

  I could never love a handle-puller. I mean, it’s proof that we don’t fit.

  CLAIRE

  Are you serious? This is not funny, Roger.

  ROGER

  It’s not that you’re impatient, it’s that you want more from life than I do. You want to get going. You want your Slurpee right away. You’re a handle-puller, Claire. You pulled.

  CLAIRE

  Yes, but I didn’t mean to!

  ROGER

  It’s too late.

  She starts to cry and gives Roger the finger.

  HUGH

  (to Claire:)

  No Slurpee for you.

  Hugh raps on the window, and Roger lets him in. They pull away a moment later, abandoning Claire in the parking lot. A Volvo pulls into the empty space. Bertie, the Welsh exchange student, climbs out, unloads his guitar. Claire, in fresh makeup now, face completely dry, runs over and leaps into his arms.

  In truth, Polly dumped Sam. And she was the one who pointed out that their ambitions weren’t especially compatible. Polly wanted to have a career and a family and a house and lots of affairs with men whose discretion she could trust. Sam’s only real ambition was to make a movie. Beyond that, he conceded that he didn’t have much in mind for the future.

  But it was true that Polly was a handle-puller. This fact was important to Sam.

  The breakup had also taken about two years, which was the beauty of the conceit: the compression of such a development brought it into greater relief. What Sam meant to convey was that minor troubles and lingering dissatisfactions—say, one man’s deep-rooted irritation at his girlfriend’s blithe impatience toward car-door locking mechanisms—often added up to personal shifts with massive consequences.

  Taken as a whole, no one who read the screenplay for Who We Are denied that it was clever in its composition, original in its pattern, and ruthlessly unsentimental in its conclusions. It was also “a bit portentous,” according to Sam’s father, Booth Dolan, the B-movie mainstay famous for his stentorian blink-free performances in such films as New Roman Empire, Hellhole, Hard Mommies, Hellhole 2: Wake the Devil, Black Soul Riders, and Hellhole 3: Endless Hell, who, without invitation, had fished a copy of the script from Sam’s laptop bag.

  ■ ■ ■

  “Portentous?”

  After waking him, Booth had trailed Sam to the bathroom, lingered outside while Sam took a leak, and followed him down to the kitchen, maintaining a running critique of the script throughout. The general theme seemed to be that he found Who We Are too serious. Sam disagreed; he felt that it was exactly as serious as it needed to be. In addition, he wasn’t thrilled about having his work assessed by an intrusive old fat man before he’d even had coffee.

  “Let me put it this way,” said Booth. “I don’t find much in the way of generosity in the story. I’m worried that the irony is perhaps too thick.”

  Tom Ritts—a wealthy contractor, Booth’s best friend, and Sam’s godfather, at whose house both Dolan men were staying—had thoughtfully made them a pot of coffee before leaving for work. Sam went to the counter and poured some into a Ritts Design & Construction coffee mug. “Maybe I like my irony thick.”

  “Irony is so easy, though, Samuel. It’s so simple to pull out the rug and make everything bleak and awful. Isn’t it more interesting to try and dig down into the hard dirt and scrape out that precious nugget of possibility? Of redemption? Of humor? Of hope? Cynicism is the predictable route. Now: something hopeful! That would shock an audience, knock them back in their seats.” Booth stood in the middle of the kitchen as he delivered his homily. He was dressed in a gigantic pair of sky-blue pajamas. A big man in his youth and an enormous man in these later years, he had the legs of a monument and the torso of a snowman. Sam was tall, but his father towered over him. “Certainly, there are many amusing moments, but it leaves an acutely bitter taste. You should at least give your characters a chance at happiness, don’t you think?”

  Sam thought his father was completely wrong, about everything. He thought, I don’t like you very much. He thought, It’s too early in the morning.

  A part of Sam wanted to yell, to just yell unintelligibly, until his father shut up and went away. He had to concentrate hard on maintaining a tranquil front. With exaggerated care, he set his brimming coffee mug on the counter. “Hold on, Booth. Just—hold it.”

  For as long as he could remember, Booth had been Booth. Sam was aware that people found it off-putting that he called his father by his first name—that it came off as severe or pissy or both, which, admittedly, it pretty much was—but to call him Dad would have felt like giving in.

  “You know—” Sam searched for a way to concisely summarize the man’s gall. To commit adultery was one thing. To break promises to your children was another. To do the things that Booth had done in movies—to rant and to brood and to stalk around like a tin-pot dictator on thousands of movie screens—was another. But to be guilty of all these trespasses, and then to carry yourself as though you were a serious person—The Most Serious Person—was something else altogether.

  It wasn’t as though he had expected Booth to like the script, let alone understand it. Who We Are was about the hard reality of how quickly the days sped up, how suddenly you weren’t a kid anymore. Booth’s movies had nothing to do with reality. They had to do with killer rats and the car-wash mafioso and the outbreak of werewolf attacks in ancient Greece. It annoyed Sam that he was annoyed by his father’s opinion, which was a meaningless opinion, and which he could have predicted.

  There was so much he could have said, and wanted to say, and there was Booth in his gigantic pajamas with that look of concern, as if he were not only entitled to offer his critique but actually cared. The words and the arguments became jammed up somewhere in Sam’s chest. “Who asked you, anyway? And why the fuck are you going through my laptop bag?”

  Booth made an innocent face. “I was going to write you a nice note and put it in there.”

  “What was it going to say?” asked Sam immediately, eager to catch him.

  “That I was proud of you! You’re a college man now.”

  “Booth. Who looks in a bag to put in a note before they’ve even written the note?”

  “I needed paper to write my note.”

  They stared at each other. The clifflike brow that hooded his father’s eyes gave him a haunted aspect. It also made him invincible in staring contests.

  Sam broke away and snatched his coffee mug from the counter. A splash of hot liquid fell across his hand and fingers. He hated feeling like this, like he was a son and Booth was a father and they were arguing about whether curfew was eleven or twelve. It was embarrassing. “You know what? I want to go and drink my coffee now.”

  “Samuel, I am not trying to offend you!” The exclamation was drafted in Booth’s Voice, the resonant declamatory tone that he adopted to lend credence to things that were ridiculous, such as killer rats and the carwash mafia and the werewolves of ancient Greece. “I am trying to help!”

  His father blinked, very slowly, and in spite of all his experience, Sam found himself swayed to consider whether this once the man might mean what he was saying. The hot coffee dripped over his hand and plinked onto the floor. Around them, the machine guts of Tom’s house ticked and hummed.

  “Samuel.” Sam’s father cleared his throat, shook his head, and lifted the hem of his pajama shirt to absently swish a finger around in the gray-haired nest of his belly button. “I am your father, and I only want the best for you”—Booth glanced down at the small meteor of hair and lint that he had mined from his navel, momentarily considered it, then carefully placed the artifact on the kitchen counter—“and that means that, above all else, I must be honest.”

  Honesty had, in the twenty-two years of their relationship thus far, not proved the slightest burden to Booth. He had taken every “chance at happi
ness” that he ever wanted—fucked anyone he wanted, said whatever he wanted, left whenever he wanted.

  “What?” asked Booth, reading the look on his son’s face. “What is it?”

  What was it? It was everything about him.

  “That,” said Sam, and flung out a hand to indicate Booth’s gut.

  “All right, all right.” His father dropped his shirt and put up his palms. “All better?”

  ■ ■ ■

  His father claimed that the edge in their relationship dated from their earliest meeting, in a hospital room in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1979. A nurse had handed him a bundle containing his son and, Sam’s father would recall, “You peered up at me with your little scalded face, and you did not cry, did not make a single peep. You were enrobed in a kind of rough brown cloth, such as an extra would wear in a biblical production—you resembled a leper, a tiny leper. And you made no fuss at all, just squinted at me with those fierce blue eyes. You looked aggrieved, terribly aggrieved.”

  At this point in the telling, he would inevitably pause, taking the theatrical hesitation that could be so persuasive on the stage or the screen and so irritating in person. Booth’s delivery seemed to suck up the entire atmosphere, stealing away even the air that was already in your lungs. Sam had been gagging for years.

  “It was,” his father would at last declare, frowning greatly, “most disquieting.”

  The story was undoubtedly an exaggeration if not an outright fabrication. Booth had been in the business of cheap entertainment for so long that he had gone native. In his telling, everything was a sensation, a shock, a crisis, a betrayal, amazing bad luck, or an unforeseeable confluence. When Sam was younger, his father had let him down. Now that Sam was older, his earlier self’s stupidity mortified him: how could he have expected anything else from a man who relished any opportunity to tell strangers that his infant son looked like a leper? Booth’s fallaciousness was right there all the time, as inherent as the nose on his face.