“Pretty One with Biceps.”
Becca rarely calls anyone by their given name. In TV-Literary, we represent an assortment of writers and creators, but very few actors. Most of those land in features. Emil Shepard is one of ours, however, and it takes a moment for me to process what she’s said. If Emil wants to move from Blake’s client list to mine, that would make him the third in the last two months alone, and my first big actor.
Understatement: Blake isn’t going to be happy about this.
“Emil was asking about me?”
“He called three times over the weekend,” she says, tugging on my arm to get me moving again.
“Does Blake know?”
Becca tears off a piece of paper covered in lines of almost indecipherable cursive and hands it to me. “I haven’t heard any tables being flipped, so I’m assuming the answer is no. You need to call Emil this morning if you’re interested, before anyone else catches wind of it. You know what a nightmare that kind of thing can be, and if Emil’s moving, he’s moving. You’re not poaching.”
Her reassurance is nice, but it’s still a messy situation. I want to eventually move into features, but taking talent from colleagues isn’t the ideal way to get there. I can’t even think about what this could mean.
Becca rattles off my schedule: meetings at nine and nine thirty, another at ten over Skype, a staff meeting immediately after, and a possible new author over lunch. I’d always thought that if I had a type, Becca would be it. She’s smart and sarcastic, with red hair and blue eyes and a body that’s on the curvy side. We met by chance in a coffee shop one day right after I moved here, and I’d liked her immediately. In fact, I’d liked her so much I was about to ask her out when she exclaimed she was about to be late for a job interview. That interview, it turned out, was with me. I’m thankful every day that she glanced down at her watch before I asked her to dinner.
But despite our less-than-conventional beginning, things have never been weird between the two of us, or anything other than professional. Becca is amazing at her job, and in reality knows more about what goes on here than any of the partners do. Which also means she’d make a fantastic agent in her own right; she swears she doesn’t have the particular muscle for it, though.
We’ve reached my office by the time she gets to the bottom of her very long list. “Carter?” she asks, noting that my attention has strayed to a spot in the distance. “Did you get all that?”
I glance back down and scan the paper in my hand, pointedly not looking at the piles of mail and various Call me when you’re in! Post-its stuck to my computer monitor. “Most of it, I think,” I tell her. “But it’s possible I haven’t had enough caffeine and I’m not functioning on all four cylinders yet. Give me an hour and check in again.”
“I don’t know what you did to deserve me,” she says, stepping around my desk and lifting a steaming paper cup from just beside my keyboard.
“You are a goddess.” The smell alone sets off some Pavlovian response and I already feel more alert. “I didn’t leave myself enough time to grab another on my way in. I’m buying you lunch today.”
She points to the twelve o’clock on my paper. “No, you’ll be buying Alan Porter lunch. Possible new client. Remember?”
My posture slumps. “Right.”
She grips me by the shoulders and leads me to my desk. “Today is packed, but you might as well get it over with.” I drop into my chair and watch as she walks to the window and yanks open the blinds. “Happy Monday.”
chapter three
evie
“Evie, I need to see you for a minute.”
I look up to see Brad’s shadow already disappearing from my doorway.
“Sure thing,” I say to my empty office, pushing back from my desk.
The sounds of phones and the clicking of keys greet me as I walk down the gray-carpeted hall. The layout is long and narrow, with smaller individual offices bordering the exterior walls, and larger offices or executives on each end. The assistants don’t sit outside their particular agent’s office, where it would be convenient to grab them should the need arise. No, they—along with the interns—sit in an inner ring of long tables creating a shared workspace. That way everything feels like a team effort, rather than individuals cast adrift without support. That’s how Brad feels about the arrangement, at least. To everyone who actually has to work, it’s a giant pain in the ass.
My relationship with Brad Kingman has always been delicate. For starters, though he didn’t know me at the time, Brad was an agent at my first real, postcollege job, almost ten years ago. He wasn’t always the nicest guy and had a reputation for some shady practices, including client poaching. Not illegal, but definitely not encouraged, either. He would keep track of actors just coming off a failure and quietly suggest to them that their agent should shoulder some of the blame, that more should have been done to protect the actor. He would find a client he was interested in representing and stop by a shoot while they were on set, explaining that he was there visiting another client and then acting surprised to hear that their agent had never been on set before. Brad was a master of planting seeds that in the end did most of the dirty work for him. He did this repeatedly on the set of a movie called Uprising and, funnily enough, ended up signing the lead actor a mere two months after shooting wrapped. Only one month after that, he was put in charge of Features at P&D.
While that’s not how I do business—and I would never admit this to anyone—I did learn a few tricks from him, the most important of which is: don’t forget for even one second that the moment you leave your house and step out in Hollywood, people are paying attention.
Brad only learned we had worked at the same agency years later, after I’d been hired at P&D. And I’m sure it’s because he knows I would have heard a few inside stories—or learned a little too much about how he does things—that he keeps me close. Not as a confidante or friend, but close enough to hold under his thumb.
“Go on in,” his assistant, Kylie, tells me.
Kylie seems smart and reasonably good at her job, plus she puts up with Brad all day, every day. Her bullshit tolerance must be off the chart.
Brad Kingman looks a little like the miracle baby produced by Hugh Jackman and Christopher Walken. Good skin, stark blue eyes, and severe bone structure. Sitting here in this office, surrounded by awards and celebrity photos and framed by a sweeping view of the Hollywood Hills, he’s the portrait of success.