Hadley

By Robert Walters

LA screenwriter BOB BROOKMONT has reached an impasse. His pathetic writing gigs are borderline porn, and his beloved unmade screenplay, Sweet Town, strikes out with a series of potential financial backers. Even JASON GOLD, his best friend and producing partner, can't get Sweet Town off the ground. During this stressful time, BOB'S DAD, who suffers from dementia, demands that he come home to Hadley, his small Midwestern hometown, but before BOB can make a decision he meets several people on his path to get his film up and running: a savvy money-man, a socially inept director, and the perfect leading lady. With his dad's health in decline, staying in LA is no longer an option.  BOB painfully walks away from Sweet Town just as all the stars begin to align.

 

In a selfless act as the film's producer, JASON GOLD moves the now-funded Sweet Town production from Los Angeles to Hadley so BOB can be with his dad while they shoot the film.  This deepens an already growing rift between BOB and the film's director, who has manipulated JASON into hiring his own crew members.

In Hadley, JASON and BOB are outflanked by unhappy crew members, who begin to wreck havoc upon the production. Disaster strikes on the first day of the shoot when the vitriolic assistant director pushes the crew on an absurdly ambitious schedule. Moving too hard and too fast, a grip guy loses his finger in an unfortunate accident, allowing JASON to regain control as producer of the film. 

 

Desperate to prevent a crew mutiny, BOB secretly elicits help from a local production assistant, the town's mayor, and a few of his dad's friends. They surreptitiously give Sweet Town a fighting chance to make it to the last shooting day unscathed,  But things aren't that easy.  Sabotaged funerals, paint-spilling dogs and other hilariously awful acts of vengeance force production into a downward spiral, with BOB fighting behind the scenes each day to keep the shoot from crashing.

The crew's mean-spirited antics start to spill out into the town, which infuriates Hadley locals, all of whom want to see BOB, their hometown wunderkind, succeed at his filmmaking dream. With the help of his friends, BOB uses his Hollywood wits and Hadley knowledge to outmaneuver the crew once again.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Walters
• Release date: Apr 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224852710

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Story of Where I Was Going

Los Angeles. St. Patrick’s Day. 77 degrees. 2% humidity. 100% heaven.

I’m sprawled out on a lounge chair at my apartment swimming pool, half a continent away from Hadley, multitasking California-style, working on my early spring tan while typing my script. If I peek over the bushes, I can see the sloping ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains, a visual treat considering I didn’t see my first mountain until six years ago when I arrived in LA at age thirty. On the pool deck in front of me is a pair of ducks, nestling their yellow beaks into each other feathers. Every spring this friendly couple makes my apartment pool their home for a few days. They enjoy a bit of the glamourous Hollywood lifestyle before flying off to parts unknown. Each fall, they return for a brief stay before returning to their beloved homeland.

I adjust my laptop to keep its shadow from interrupting the golden sunlight on my skin. I crack my knuckles, lay my fingertips on the keyboard, and type a line of dialogue. I read the sentence, delete the last three words, read the sentence again, retype the deleted words, delete the entire sentence, then delete the whole paragraph, ultimately giving up.

I’m being paid to rewrite someone else’s film script called The Pilates Dilemma, but I’ve hit a nasty patch of writer’s block that forces me to stare up at the lone palm tree waving in the breeze high above me. Its huge palm fronds explode in slow motion from the end of a tall wooden matchstick trunk. The leafy reflections in the icy blue pool offers me no visual inspiration. My two ducky friends rustle their wings and hop into the water, breaking up the palm’s mirror image with ever-expanding rings.

I desperately need the proper words to float to the surface in order to continue writing, but today they remain submerged. I’m on a self-imposed deadline to rewrite the second act of the script before the end of the month. This writing gig is paying my rent, and although Los Angeles has perpetually perfect weather, I prefer the safety and comfort of having a roof over my head in my modest, if overpriced, apartment.

This script, The Pilates Dilemma, is a giant piece of shit about yoga’s bastard step-child, but to merely claim that it’s bad would be giving it credence that it doesn’t possess. For something to be bad it needs to be compared with something good. There are no good film scripts about Pilates. It’s an awful concept from the very start. When I was initially offered the rewriting gig, I was mortified by the original script’s tenuous grasp of basic grammar. It had some glorious golden whoppers in it like Raquel hoped that maintaining her downward dog would help his sperm find its way to her eggs quicker. and Jimmy put his rugged hand on Laura’s heart and slowly lowered it to her titty. I immediately threw out everything except for one major character, the owner of the Pilates studio, salvageable only for her abrasive wit. My version of the script is still a trashy cable flick, but at least it has a redeemable plot with a moderately interesting female protagonist. Granted, it’s a few small steps above a porno, but I’ll gladly whore out my writing services for a paycheck and be staunchly ashamed of that fact if anyone asks me about it.

I abandon my writing long enough to click open a new tab and look at the online images of snow drifts back in Hadley after a mid-March snowfall. Snowy days are a part of my Midwestern upbringing that I gladly left behind when I headed westward, into the land of sunshine.

My cell phone vibrates underneath my chaise lounge and a little rush of adrenaline fires through me. A phone call is a legitimate excuse to pause my writing session. A second rush jolts through me when I see Jason’s name pop up. I immediately answer.

Tell me some good news, Jason. Did she give us some money?

Dude. Not even a hello?

My best friend and business partner, Jason Gold, has been feverishly hunting down financial backers for Sweet Town, my other script, the one that isn’t a soft-core piece of trash. Jason’s meeting with a possible investor would have just ended.

Sorry, Jason. How are you today? I’m doing well, too. Thank you for asking. Did she give us any damn money?

You’re in a snarky mood. And no, she didn’t.

Did she say why?

She said your script wasn’t ready yet, and I agree with her.

Jesus. Can’t you sugarcoat it once in a while?

Nah. Not my style.

I’ll travel to the ends of the earth with Jason, but he lacks my artistic soul. He never turns bad news into new hope. He just calls a spade a spade and moves on. Jason sees all film scripts, including mine, as pitches that turn into dollar figures that turn into crews that will create films that need marketing approaches that will sell to distributors, and if the film earns enough money, he can repeat the entire process, and earn a respectable living. This is the exact opposite way that I see scripts. My characters jump headlong into beautifully articulated relationships while inhabiting worlds of quaint, small-town romanticism. They cry and kiss, struggle and fail, fight and win. But I’m no fool. Sweet Town will sit forever on my laptop if we can’t get funding to go into production.

If Sweet Town isn’t ready yet, then what do you have in mind?

Write a different script.

Wow. Did you just say that out loud?

Let me finish. Write a different script, something that’s easier to pitch to investors, or keep Sweet Town, but we need to latch and attach. Get some hot girl from one of those cable series that wants to step up her career with a leading role in an indie. If we land someone big enough, I’ll attach her when I pitch your screenplay. That might get investors interested. Right now, nothing’s working.

Six years ago, I trudged through my early existence in Hollywood, actively hunting for a producer for Sweet Town, someone with connections in the industry who could give my screenplay wings. I met Jason Gold while standing over a barbecue grill at my friend Kath’s swanky new apartment. She had just landed a writing gig on a network show and was throwing a pool party to show off her new digs. The small crowd loitering around the grill was a collection of hapless writers, actors, directors, and producers, most of whom were just starting their careers. Our little group of misfits launched into an impromptu complaint session driven by our collective jealousy of Kath’s good fortune. We swapped war stories where all the bad things in LA happen to all the good people. Jason trumped everyone by telling us how he got royally screwed while producing a micro-budget horror film. The director skipped town with the money and all the raw footage. Nobody got paid and the film never saw the light of day. Financially, that gig almost destroyed him.

By the time the spare ribs were cooked, our artisan cadre had disbanded, except for Jason and me. Our conversation went from petty complaining to a deep treatise about the viability of fresh dramatic scripts and their current place in the independent film world. Jason had fought those battles on the front lines and was fully aware of his own successes and failures. I told him that I had just wrapped up a brief writing job for a comedy pilot and that my bank account was starting to dwindle. Neither of us had a new gig on the horizon and we both needed a passion project to sink our teeth into. When I got home, I emailed him the latest draft of Sweet Town, and within hours he sent me a boiler plate contract making him the sole producer of the film, but with no promises and no expectations. I never asked him if he read my script, but it didn’t matter. I was just grateful to find a kindred spirit.

Jason is a native Los Angeleno who doesn’t need to wear a suit or tie to put a movie together. In fact, to see his lumbering six-foot-four frame wearing Dolce and Gabbana would be off-putting, if not slightly hilarious. He makes independent films by rolling up his sleeves, getting his hands dirty and doing the hard work. We each have our own skill sets. Jason has an acute knowledge of equipment, locations, contracts, and hiring the right people to do the right jobs, whereas I can flip all the letters of the alphabet into artistically crafted characters who live vainglorious fictional lives in beautifully articulated realities. Unfortunately, neither one of us has that magical mojo to coax complete strangers into giving us wads of money. So far, we’ve shamed a few friends and acquaintances into putting up a bit of cash. One sizable donor, the owner of a Van Nuys car wash, who happened to be the father of Jason’s then-girlfriend, gave us a big check, but the girlfriend turned out to be a raving sociopath and that money got washed away when she took a box cutter to Jason’s favorite leather jacket. Luckily, he wasn’t wearing it at the time.

Currently, our bank account has a paltry $17,300 in it, a far cry away from the six-digit figure we need to start shooting, $260,000 to be precise. Even though Sweet Town will be a micro-budget indie film, it still needs cash flowing inward to get off the ground.

I’m not writing a new script, Jason. We’re keeping Sweet Town.

Oh, relax. Of course we’re keeping Sweet Town.  I’m just giving you shit.  I’ve got a meeting with a possible investor set up for next week, and you and I are going to volleyball this guy.

Sure. Whatever.

Don’t get all pissy with me. We’ll get your dumb film made, just don’t ever doubt me.

I don’t.

And yet your snippy attitude says you do. I’m coming over to work on a new actress list.  The other one is crap. 

I hang up with Jason and close my eyes, pushing away the distant sound of the highway and the obnoxious Latin music coming from my neighbor’s apartment. Fundraising for Sweet Town has given my emotional well-being many brutal work-overs in the wrestling ring, tagged in, slammed around, bounced off the ropes and pounded to the mat. On the rare occasion that I’m still standing after the bell dings, a little sliver of pride fills my soul. Today, I’m struggling to get up off the mat.

I abandon any hope of mental serenity and reopen my laptop, forcing out a few more lines of dialogue, but after typing the words labia and C-curve in the same sentence, I drift into an anguish that lasts as long as it takes my tan line to become noticeably darker when I peel back my swim trunks. Emotional desperation keeps my artistic drive alive. I sulk and pout and curse LA’s stranglehold on my psyche, then I move on. Such is the price I pay for living the Hollywood dream.

My cell phone rings again and I happily shut down my laptop, officially calling it quits for the day. This time the phone call is from my dad, an unusual surprise. We always talk on Sunday mornings, never mid-week.

Hey, dad. What’s going on?

Robert, how’re things in California?

Sunny, as usual. I heard Hadley got some snow.

Except for my dad, everyone in my life calls me Bob, but officially it’s Robert Brookmont. Robert is the family name handed down in alternating versions of first and middle names to the men on my dad’s side of the family. My ancestors kept flipping Robert from first name to middle name, keeping it firmly rooted in my family tree, but making sure no son carried the burden of being a II or a III. On a rare occasion, if my dad gets angry enough with me to use the words Robert and Evan and Brookmont in a row, I slowly back out of the room, only grinning once I’m clear from his view, knowing that my pristine image of being a great son has cracked just a little. 

Robert, you should see these snow drifts. They’re worse than last spring. Remember last March when the snow was piled all the way up to the deck.

Last spring Hadley broke two heat records, but my dad’s brain can no longer retain that kind of detailed information. He’s sixty-four years old and mentally drifting, a devastatingly early onset of dementia that is slowly turning his short-term memory into mush. Even though he’s healthy, or at least as healthy as a man who drank and smoke his entire life can possibly be, his memories are floating away, and the most recent ones are the most ephemeral. He probably doesn’t remember that we spoke three days ago on Sunday, and that a Wednesday afternoon phone call is highly unusual.

I feel guilty talking about snow drifts as I bask in the California sunshine, so I switch topics and tell him that Jason struck out with raising money and that we’ll be talking to a possible investor next week. Then, he tells me a story about his buddy from work who ran over his toe with a lawnmower only to have his steel-toed boot save his foot, but the steel in the boot caused a spark that exploded the gas tank which set the lawnmower on fire. I’ve heard this story a dozen times, but the last time my dad told it the lawnmower belonged to my aunt, not his buddy from work. Plus, my dad has been retired for several years. That crucial detail exited his storytelling station several retellings ago.

Most of my dad’s stories are variations on the previous version, reconstructed and repeated as his brain jumbles facts. Yet, he can still paint an uncannily descriptive portrait while acting out each part, using goofy voices to mimic people and throwing his whole body into the tale. The lawnmower story has grown into a fun Hadleyan axiom whose foundations of truth have been long since lost to history, but that won’t stop me from retelling it to Jason when he comes over. Jason grew up without a father, and he’s always excited when I retell one of my dad’s tall tales.

When I was a kid, my dad would rouse his miniature sagas from their sleepy nests and let them fly free whenever he needed to make a point to his children. Each story was crafted specifically for whichever child was in front of him at that time. My two sisters got the lighter, more waggish, fare, often soft and beautiful gems about kindness and caring, but he would save the big, rambunctious stories for me, his only son, ones about his rowdy youth and improper teenage years, ones about love and loss, joy and pain. He even told me a few that I never heard him retell anyone else, private stories exclusively for me, ones with deep and profound resonance that I carry with me each day. It was in those storytelling moments when he stopped being my dad and became my personal advice-giver, problem fixer and best friend.

Our phone call feels different than our usual chats. My dad is more concise. He hasn’t repeated himself or rambled on like he often does. His dementia is a passive onlooker instead of an active participant. I shut my eyes and savor his voice, knowing that his lucid days will eventually disappear, and along with it, these stories. Their vibrant buoyancy will ultimately sink into the depths of his brain, never to resurface again.

As he describes the lawnmower flames engulfing the lower branches of the hickory tree, I have a flash of writerly intuition for my Pilates script. What if Raquel, the Pilates studio owner, purposefully sets her studio on fire to get insurance money to pay off her debts? It’s a perfect way to start the third act. Suddenly, my writer’s block twists free from its cognitive prison and the golden bird of creativity takes flight.

As my dad talks, I power up my laptop and let my fingers furiously clack away. On the phone, I hear the click of my dad’s lighter and the puff of a newly-lit cigarette. He’s on strict doctor’s orders not to smoke, but we’re having a great conversation and I pretend not to hear him inhale a lung full of nicotine. When he finishes the lawnmower story, he launches into another oft-told Hadley adventure, one about his favorite bar, The Wreck.

Robert? Mac asked about you the other day. Did you come down to The Wreck with me the last time you were in Hadley?

I did, last year.

Are you coming home this summer?

Maybe. If I can free up my schedule.

I’ve given my dad the same round-a-bout answer so many times that it feels natural to tell him a little white lie in order to appease him. Truthfully, I can write anywhere in the world as long as I have my laptop, and spending a few weeks back home wouldn’t be much of a financial burden. I’ve amassed a modest, if meager, savings account thanks to the weekly paychecks from the Pilates script rewrites, but with my dad’s deteriorating mental health I feel the pull back to Hadley and the pang of guilt for lying to him.

Robert? I have another question to ask you. Are you coming home this summer? Oh, wait. I just asked you that, didn’t I?

He pauses, a small stammer that hinders the clarity of his sentence. Without warning, his dementia creeps out from the shadows and into the light.

Sometimes I forget things, you know, but you’re coming home this summer to Hadley, aren’t you?

Suddenly, there is a pressing tone in his voice, along with something else, something that causes the hairs on my neck to stand on end.

I hope you’re coming back soon, so we can have another beer down at The Wreck. That would mean a lot to me.

With his dementia now working the reins of the conversation I quickly change the subject, hoping to guide him back onto a clearer path. I ask him about the birthday cookout for Hadley’s mayor, an annual event that he hasn’t missed in decades. My dad immediately launches into a vivid description about how the mayor of Hadley poured gasoline on the grill instead of lighter fluid causing the flames to shoot up ten feet high nearly burning down his back porch. I’ve heard this story more times than I can count, and I revel in the serendipity of two accidental fire stories in less than five minutes, confirming my decision to burn down the Pilates studio in my script.

When my dad finishes the story, his voice drifts back into that same strange tone, only this time with a tinge of sadness. 

Robert? Are you coming home to Hadley this summer? Did I ask you that already, whether you’re coming home?

His unnerving vocal pattern startles me into silence. Should I change the subject again? Should I repeat my little white lie?

Then, without warning, barks my name in direct, almost stern, tone. Robert Evan Brookmont. You’re not answering me. Are you coming home this summer?

I am five.

I am standing in the kitchen with a half-eaten cupcake in my hand, my mouth rimmed with chocolate. My dad towers over me with his hands on his hips. Did you just climb up on the counter? I stare at him, unable to talk because my mouth is filled with chocolate. Answer me. Did you climb up on the counter to get that? My eyes well up and tears start to stream down my cheeks.  I blurt out Ythess. Chunks of cupcake spew from my mouth onto my dad’s khakis. Horrified at the disaster, I burst into uncontrollable sobs. My dad, looking down at his speckled pants, starts to laugh. He scoops me into his arms and holds me close, my tears soaking his shoulder as I bury my head into his neck. A peaceful calm washes over me. My tears flow down to meet the chocolate around my mouth creating a wet brown trail that oozes down the back of his shirt. I’m ashamed and afraid and calmed all at the same time.

I fumble for an answer, no longer able to change subjects or tell a lie. August. I’ll be home by August. I promise. 

I hang up the phone and let the warm breeze ease the tense muscles that have suddenly seized my shoulder blades. I set my laptop aside and dive headfirst into the deep end of the pool, forcing my two ducky friends to quack furiously, reprimanding me for ruining their afternoon swim. The chilly water fails to clear my head of the looming questions now swirling in my brain.

Why does my dad suddenly want me to come home? What’s triggering this urgent need for an answer? With my dad’s dementia getting worse, time is the one thing I no longer have in abundance. I pull myself out of the pool and wrap a towel around my shoulders. I click open the calendar on my laptop and count backwards from August.

Eighteen weeks. That’s when I need to be home. That is the promise I made my dad.

Chapter 2

The Story of How It Started

As cynical as Jason can be, his drive and enthusiasm for filmmaking is overwhelming. He’s a film nerd who believes in the everlasting allure of cinema, a fact that he will