Chapter 2

“Cory! Good to see you again! What evil drags you away from the ivory beaches and rarified heights at which you usually soar and drag you down into darkness my way these days? Looking to do an indie production anytime soon?”

It was weird, she thought to herself for the hundredth time, how Mattson could get away with calling her Cory when she had hated it from anyone else since she was a kid. She decided it must be because he was a sincere, kindhearted and gentle soul, who had always had her back, even in that whole Ray Nesta thing a while back. She walked over to the side of his desk for the hug she knew was coming.

Mattson Childers gave her the best hugs, she thought as she cuddled her smaller frame into his warm embrace. She held on for close to a minute before letting go.

Mattson had known her since her first role in ‘My Baby Blue’, the job that got her noticed and led to everything else good that had happened to her since. Breakout rolls had nothing on what had happened to her because of that film. Of course, not everything that had happened since would be considered good by any stretch.

Mattson was a production assistant, or maybe serf or slave would be more appropriate, working his first job out of film school when the two had met and bonded on set. While Mattson had been identified as her first official boyfriend by some of the tabloids once in a while, nothing could be further from the truth.

Mattson was a wonderful friend, a completely loyal confidante, and someone you wanted in your corner should it all come apart, but he was certainly not boyfriend material. Mattson was completely asexual. Some fluke of genetics had left him with exactly zero interest in sex, dating, and companionship. Or maybe it was something else. Corinne never tried to figure it out. She liked him just the way he was.

Mattson and Corinne moved on different levels and in different crowds. He was firmly in the indie film tier, almost a kind of second-tier Hollywood, made up of many talented people who were, for whatever reason, unable to catch the eye of the right person in the top tier.

A lot of indie films were just as well acted, directed, produced, and edited as any of the stuff coming out of the major studios, but without the same marketing forces and the like behind them, they chugged along at a lower, sometimes much lower, level of audience exposure and the equivalent lower revenues that came with.

Once in a while an A-lister would do an Indie film, with generally mixed results. Sometimes it is a labor of love to do a different project or explore a different character or develop a new facet to their experience and skills, and sometimes it is a chance to take a break from the pressures of financial success that drove the major studios to be so cut-throat in their decisions about what got filmed and how it was finished.

Corinne took a seat in front of Mattson’s desk, and propped her feet on the edge of the solid oak top, pushing up her chair back on its rear legs as she settled in. It was a familiar, comfortable position.

Mattson reached over and pulled a stack of papers away from her with a slight smile, making more room for her feet in her stylish canvas Converse high tops she went everywhere in.

“Hey, what is that? A screenplay? What are you working on, Mattson?”

He thought about it for a moment as he looked down at what was in his hands. Then he shrugged and handed it over.

“It’s just something I have been working on in my spare time. I will never find anyone to headline it, both because I’m indie and because of the topic.”

Intrigued, Corinne took the screenplay and started thumbing through it, until her eyes got wide and she stopped, rereading the section in front of her. Then she looked up at her old friend.

“Is this for real? Did you want me to do this?”

“Oh hell no, Cory! This will ruin anyone’s career that takes it on. I won’t even consider you for it.” She looked at him for a moment, then realized that he was deadly serious.

“Any way I could talk you into it? I think I’d be perfect for it.” She was only kidding, but Mattson was not immune to the DeLoie acting skills; she wasn’t an Oscar-winning actress for nothing.

“Seriously, Cory? This would fry you. No fucking way. No. Don’t even think about it. It is a fantasy of mine to be able to do it one day. And, if I’m being honest, it is a heavy steel-toed boot to the nuts of the Hollywood Establishment and the ESRB. But the political culture in Hollywood would blacklist anyone who did this for all time. You think the McCarthy era was bad? This would make that look like losing at canasta for whomever decided to tilt at this windmill.”

She smiled at her friend, breaking out of the character she threw herself into as a prank. Mattson smiled back.

“You had me there for a moment. Damn, you’re good, Cory. I can’t believe that you broke out of the box just exactly that good in your first film. People still talk about it, you know. Just how good you were. Raw, but talent washed off you like water off a duck’s back. Hell, you made everyone else around you better, you know that?”

Corrine shook her head in denial. It was hard, even now, to hear others sing her praises. Most of the time they wanted something from her – a good word with the right casting agent, a whisper in the ear of some director (other than Ray Nesta, who was now a resident of the State of California, having pled guilty to a felony drug possession charge in exchange for dropping the underage sex charge, which everyone knew would be hard to prove, but would have landed him on the sex offender registry for life, ending his ‘illustrious’ career).

But Mattson wanted nothing from her, which, in a perverse way, almost made the things he was saying about her all more difficult to hear, in some twisted way, she supposed.

“Don’t sell yourself short, Short Short,” he said, using his other favorite nickname for her. “You are the Audrey Hepburn of our times. You don’t read the reviews or the rags, but nearly everyone not in Hollywood loves you. There’s a few conservative politicians under a few rocks here and there who hate anyone that doesn’t campaign for them,” he added, causing her to grimace, “But they don’t count. For this, or, honestly, for anything else this side of the cooking fire burning in front of their cave and the wooden club they shop for food with.”