Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Did you know Woods was sort of based on my husband’s mom?”

I nodded. I’d seen something about that in a write-up of a screening in Chicago, but I hadn’t paid much attention. I’ve never thought the backstory of a movie was very important — I don’t watch making-of documentaries either. It was strange to think of Sophie as someone’s wife — only now did I notice the ring on her finger, below a bitten-down nail.

“Well, at first he was really into it,” she went on. “He said it would be a relief to have his mom’s story out in the world, not just in his head anymore. Then he saw the movie.”

“Once it was real, it didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore?” I asked.

I’d seen this before with biopics — the family’s so flattered that someone wants to tell their famous grandpa’s story, and then they realize the screenwriter put in the coke and the cheating and they freak out. Like they didn’t get what made the story interesting in the first place.

Sophie shook her head. “No, I fucked up. I knew that Jacob wanted it to be a happy story, like about his mom finding peace. And I let him think I’d make that. I thought I could make it. But then I got into it, and I realized there was a much better way to make it that would be really beautiful and interesting. And I knew I could either make it happy or I could make it good.”

I remembered the second-to-last scene in the movie now. Beth leaves the house, weak and fragile, and looks across the lake to the beach where her family is playing, and just for a second her face flashes total contempt. You had to be really ballsy to show an audience that, to let us see someone who, on her last day on earth, hates the people who took care of her. And if those people were your husband and his family, you had to be a little cruel.

“I’m glad you made it good,” I said.

Sophie shrugged. “I knew I shouldn’t do it. But once I see the best way to do something, it’s hard to do it any other way.”

I admired her then; I was almost jealous. I’d hurt plenty of people in my life, but never because of my artistic integrity. I’d been all too willing to compromise that just to get a steady paycheck, a decent office. When I was really young, I thought Hollywood was going to be full of geniuses — ambitious, crazy people like you see in movies about movies. But mostly it was full of people like me, people who thought they had big ideas but really just wanted to make money and be famous and ultimately couldn’t even quite manage that.

“He can’t blame you for that,” I said. “He gave you permission.”

She shook her head. She used her empty taco container as a shovel to scoop a hill of sand.

“He didn’t know what he was getting into,” she said. “Neither did I. I keep thinking it’s going to be different, but it never is.”

She used her fork to draw a road up the hill, then stuck the fork in the top, a flag.

“Different how?” I asked.

She looked up at me then, and I recognized her face. It looked like mine in the mirror after I got the last of my stuff from Taylor’s house, or after I finished eating brunch by myself in between two happy families, or after I came home from a night out at what used to be my favorite bar, now filled with people who would never be my friends.

“I thought making movies would make me more like other people,” said Sophie. “But sometimes I think it just makes me even more like me.”

Again I thought about Kat when she was twelve. I thought of the stories she’d shown me — the science teacher who discovers aliens in his backyard, the unpopular boy who turns into a tiger. I knew a good story when I saw one — I knew it wasn’t just because she was my daughter that I thought her writing was funny and surprising. I gave her pointers here and there, and I imagined doing this for years — mentoring her, helping her become the great writer I knew she could be — and then when her first book was published and dedicated to me, I could know I’d done something good with my life. But Kat had stopped showing me stories and, as far as I knew, stopped writing them. Now she was an anthropology grad student, the kind who studies old bones, and whenever I asked her about her work she just said, “It’s really technical,” as if I wouldn’t understand.

“Why would you want to be more like other people? You know how many other people can make movies as good as yours? I can think of maybe five who are working right now.”

She looked right at me as I talked. It didn’t embarrass her to be complimented.

“You have a responsibility,” I went on, “to make the best movies you can. It might cause problems along the way, but the value of what you make will outweigh all that. That’s what you’ll be remembered for.”

She smiled, and when she stood up, she looked taller than before, her back straighter. I felt bigger, too, like I used to when I would lift Kat to pluck walnuts from the tree in our backyard. The sea and sky were blue-gray now, and everybody else had gone home; we could’ve been giants on that beach.

WE MET WITH STEVEN, the head of development at Blackhorse Pictures, two days later. Sophie hadn’t booked a hotel, of course. I thought about booking one for her, but when she kicked off her shoes and curled up on my couch, I didn’t have the heart to make her leave. I was realizing that she needed more than a place to lie low; she needed taking care of. At night I could hear her from my bedroom, whimpering in her dreams.

She turned out to have brought decent clothes with her — dark jeans, a black blazer — which was a relief, because I had no idea where to take a young woman shopping. The morning of our meeting, she changed and slicked her hair back and put on red lipstick. She looked like a different person, cool and confident, like the first photos I’d ever seen of her, from the premiere of Marianne . In Steven’s waiting room, though, she seemed nervous, crossing and uncrossing her legs. I wasn’t worried. I knew that Steven was getting jealous of execs at other studios who were churning out Oscar contenders. I knew he’d been hurt when the L.A. Times called Blackhorse “a clearinghouse for faux-indie fare.” I figured that to him Sophie would mean credibility.

“I’m so excited to meet you,” Steven said to Sophie when the receptionist finally let us in. “I have a million questions.”

Then he wrapped me in a hug, which I’d come to expect but hadn’t entirely gotten used to. Steven and I had partied together when we were younger, and he’d been a much bigger piece of shit than even I was. Once he brought an aspiring starlet, maybe twenty years old, to a big party in Runyon Canyon — he’d met her when she waited on him and his wife at a restaurant. He said that like it was something to be proud of; his wife was home that night, pregnant with their son. But then Steven turned forty and met his second wife, and suddenly he got wholesome. He quit cheating, quit doing coke, had two more kids, and now his office was full of their Little League trophies and pictures of the whole family vacationing in Bali. The charm that had gotten him laid when we were young had softened into this constant cheerleadery enthusiasm — his e-mails always included the word “psyched.” It made me feel tired, but clearly it worked — Steven was where I thought I’d be at fifty-five, and I was not.

“You have the coolest style,” he said to Sophie when we were seated facing the giant window in his office. Against the backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, he looked like he was on a nature show, an effect I’d always found unnerving. From old Steven the compliment would’ve been a come-on; new Steven just sounded like an eager fanboy.

“Thanks,” Sophie said, with no feeling. I liked that she didn’t bullshit him back; clearly she hadn’t learned the language of meetings, of sucking up. I was glad I could do that for her.