Except for casting director, I didn't know what any of those t.i.tles meant.

Part of me was relieved. Like I said, I was worried it was going to be just Mr. Brander, Lewis, and me. Either that or it would be a bunch of old people - all the people Mr. Brander had worked with before, away from the retirement home for the day. I had a really hard time imagining that anyone would take this film project seriously if it was being put together by a bunch of people with walkers and cataracts.

These people all looked like the real thing, ready to get moving. Evan and Justin had iPads, and Andrea clutched a pen and clipboard.

"Can I get you something to drink?" Lewis asked me. There were already drinks set on stone coasters all around the room.

"Evian?" I said, a little pleased with myself that I already sounded slightly less pathetic than before.

"Sure thing," Lewis said, and he left to go get it.

I took a seat. Now it was just me and the other producers, and there was this sort of awkward moment when everyone was staring at me. Which I guess made sense: I'd written the screenplay that was the reason why everyone had gathered there.

It seemed like it was up to me to say something, so I said the kind of thing you say at a party: "How do you guys know Mr. Brander?"

There was another awkward moment.

"I just met him last week!" Andrea said.

"Me too," Bryce said.

"Friend of a friend of a friend," Justin said.

"I mean, I'd heard of him," Evan said. "But yeah."

Silence descended yet again. So I said, "An old house? None of us have met before, and none of us know the host? Sounds like we've all been invited by an eccentric billionaire to spend the night in a haunted mansion."

Everyone laughed - really laughed - and I felt great. I was totally killing this "development meeting" thing.

Making it in Hollywood? I thought. This isn't so hard!

Everyone was still looking at me, smiling, so I went on to say, "In the end, of course, we'll discover we were all somehow responsible for the death of Mr. Brander's daughter five years ago."

No one laughed this time, and I realized I'd killed the joke.

Okay, so maybe this isn't so easy. At least I could still fall back on the Screenwriter Loophole. If people expected the screenwriter to be a total loser, maybe I wasn't doing that bad.

"But what a list of credits, huh?" I said, forging onward. "I mean, who hasn't Mr. Brander worked with?"

"He told me how he worked with Jack Lemmon," Evan said.

"Ha!" Andrea said. "He told me about working with Debbie Reynolds."

"Sean Connery," Stuart said.

"Bette Davis," Justin said.

So now I knew how Mr. Brander got people to work with him: he name-dropped. Mr. Brander had done the same thing with me, with Tennessee Williams and also Bette Davis. (I couldn't help but think: Justin is gay too? I mean, Bette Davis, come on.) Before long, people started talking about their own projects.

"I was working with Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky on this project," Bryce said, "and Don Roos, of course."

"Of course," someone said as if it was obvious.

Why is that obvious? I thought.

"I really like Web Therapy!" Andrea said.

"Do you?" Evan said. "Because I feel like it doesn't always come together. I mean, I'd watch Lily Tomlin read the phone book. But that's sort of what it feels like sometimes, Lily Tomlin reading the phone book."

Everyone grunted in agreement, and I did too, even though I'd never seen Web Therapy.

"I've been involved with this thing with Tim Burton and Jake Gyllenhaal over at Searchlight," Andrea said.

Everyone murmured their approval.

"I've been working with Jonah Hill on this screenplay he wrote," Justin said.

"Pure Imagination at Sony?" Evan said.

"No," Justin said. "That one's finally truly dead, even though Jonah won't admit it. This is something else. I know actors always think they can write, and they can't, but this guy really can."

Listening to all this, I was totally impressed. Then I remembered what Otto had said about the Bulls.h.i.t Factor, how everyone supposedly exaggerated their credits and accomplishments by a factor of three in order to make themselves sound better. Did that mean Bryce wasn't really working with Lisa Kudrow, and Andrea hadn't set anything up at Searchlight, and Justin didn't even know Jonah Hill? If they'd done all those things, knew all those people, why were they working with someone like Mr. Brander, someone who hadn't made a movie in more than twenty years? But if everyone in this town was always bulls.h.i.tting about everything (even their shoes), how could you tell anything about anyone? I had to remember to ask Otto that.

At some point, Lewis returned with my Evian and a gla.s.s of ice. I barely had a chance to thank him before he disappeared again.

"What about you?" someone asked me.

"What?" I said.

"What are you working on?" It was Evan. He looked genuinely interested, not like he was trying to put me on the spot.

Everyone was looking at me again.

I could have told the truth and said, "This is the first thing I've ever done with anyone." But then I thought: No. If everyone bulls.h.i.ts in Hollywood, then I need to bulls.h.i.t too.

So I said, "You guys know a writer named Vernie Rose? She was nominated for an Oscar a few years back. Anyway, she and I were working on this project together, but then Isaac called me about this."

This wasn't entirely a lie. I actually did know a screenwriter named Vernie Rose (my mentor back in Seattle), and she had been nominated for an Oscar. But it had been back in the 1970s, in Short Film not Feature, and Vernie was retired now. She'd read all of my screenplays so far, and given me great notes - she was the one who'd suggested the high school flashbacks in A Cup of Joe in the first place - but she and I hadn't ever even talked about working together.

Everyone kept looking at me, and I totally expected someone to say something like, "Vernie Rose? You liar! She's not still writing screenplays! Besides, that Oscar nomination was only for Short Film!"

But no one did. People just nodded and smiled and grunted, as if I'd impressed them.

This really isn't so hard! I thought. I can totally do this! I hadn't even needed to rely on the Screenwriter Loophole.

Even so, I didn't want to spend the whole afternoon telling lies, so I decided to change the subject.

"This is a great old house," I said. "I love that fireplace."

"You should see the bathroom!" Andrea said. "I think there's an actual leopard skin cover on the toilet seat."

"There is not," Justin said. "This I have to see."

"Seriously. I didn't even want to touch it."

"Oh, you should always put the lid down before you flush it," Evan said.

"My boyfriend never puts the seat down," Andrea said.

"Not the seat," Evan said. "The lid! The seat is a different issue. If you don't put the lid down before you flush, it sends all these particles up into the air."

"Are you really saying what I think you're saying?" Justin said to Evan. "About flushing the toilet?"

"Fecal particles," Evan said. "Yes, I'm really saying it. And it's true. There've been studies."

"That is disgusting," I said, and everyone laughed.

"I can't believe we're talking about this," Justin said, but he was laughing when he said it.

"Andrea brought it up!" Evan said. "She started talking about the toilet seat."

"I was talking about the seat cover," Andrea said. "I didn't say anything about fecal particles!"

Everyone laughed again, even me.

The point to all this isn't just that I was totally rocking this development meeting, not coming across like a total newbie at all. It's also that those producers and I were actually having fun. I liked them, and (even more important than their liking my screenplay), they seemed to like me.

"Well," said a voice that resounded from the doorway, "it sounds like I'm missing the party."

Mr. Brander, who clearly knew something about acoustics.

We all stopped in mid-laugh and looked over at him.

He was sitting there, perfectly positioned in the middle of the arch. He looked absolutely relaxed in his wheelchair - Abraham Lincoln looking out from his memorial. It was the perfect entrance - he totally owned the room - and I went back to being reminded of some movie about an eccentric billionaire inviting guests to spend the night in his haunted mansion.

Mr. Brander rolled forward and took a spot in front of us, and I realized there was no area rug on the floor, and that the furniture had been arranged in such a way that there was an open spot for his wheelchair. But we were definitely not the Knights of the Round Table. Somehow, imperceptibly, Mr. Brander had ended up on one side of the room with everyone else facing him.

Lewis stood behind him in the hallway, wordless, watching.

Mr. Brander didn't say anything for a second either. He looked at us, going around in a circle, taking us in, the courtiers to the king.

"Welcome," Mr. Brander said at last. "I'm so pleased you could all come. Every movie tells a story, and every story begins with an opening shot - the opening scene. In a good movie, that scene tells you something important about the story, maybe the most important thing about the story: it sets the tone. But it also foreshadows the ending." He looked at me. "As every writer can tell you, the ending to a good story is usually found at the very beginning." He winked. "But never in the way the audience expects, right?" I smiled, and Mr. Brander turned back to the whole group. "But the making of a movie is a story too, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. With a protagonist" - here he nodded to all of us - "and rising tension, and plenty of obstacles along the way, all leading to a resolution that is satisfying to everyone involved. So let's set the tone, shall we? This is our opening scene. What does it tell us about our resolution? What hints and secrets are evident in this gathering that we've barely taken notice of, but that will have great and obvious importance in retrospect? Only time will tell, yes? But mark my words, everything we say here today, everything we do, will make perfect sense when we look back. And so we begin."

Even at the time, some part of me knew this was a cheesy, over-the-top speech - that Mr. Brander had probably given it a dozen times before, maybe at the start of every movie he'd ever set out making. But it didn't sound cheesy, not at all. He absolutely sold it. It also didn't sound rehea.r.s.ed. Like any good speech, it sounded new, fresh, like the words, the insights, were coming to him right then on a direct line from G.o.d.

"Russel?" Mr. Brander said. "Why don't you start? Why don't you tell us what led you to write A Cup of Joe?"

"You expect me to follow that?" I said.

This got another huge laugh from everyone in the room, Mr. Brander and Lewis included. It was even bigger than my joke about how Mr. Brander was an eccentric billionaire who had invited us all to spend the night in his haunted mansion.

With my opening joke landing so great, I could totally take it from there. I told everyone what Mr. Brander and I had talked about before - how we saw the script, what it meant, how I hoped people would respond.

After that, Mr. Brander outlined the next step in the process: raising the money we needed (still six million dollars). In a nutsh.e.l.l, he and the other producers had to find development money, which would enable them to attach name actors, which would then allow them to make "pre-sales" to various distributors and territories, which would also enable them to approach various corporate ent.i.ties for equity financing. He also wanted to at least explore product placement, and they would resort to supergap financing only as a very last resort.

I understood almost none of this, so let me nutsh.e.l.l it for you: THEY WERE GOING TO MAKE A f.u.c.kING MOVIE OUT OF MY f.u.c.kING SCREENPLAY!.

Before I knew it, we were finished. I'd made it through my first development meeting. I was no longer a virgin. The truth is, it was even more like s.e.x than I'd thought: it had hardly been painful at all.

And I'd had a total blast.

I didn't go straight home after the meeting. For one thing, it was later in the day now - the middle of rush hour - so traffic was even more horrible than before (as if that's possible). So I decided to stop at the library.

I never had told Kevin about my encounter with the "ghost." I was too embarra.s.sed. I still didn't really think it had been real. It had just been some weird trick of the acoustics, or maybe I really had been sleepwalking. At the same time, I'd been genuinely curious about that supposed suicide in our apartment all those years ago. I'd researched it on the computer at home (when Kevin wasn't around), but I hadn't found anything, so I'd come to the library to see what I could discover.

Since it was late afternoon, it was mostly mothers with their kids in the library, plus a handful of scruffy people sitting at the computer terminals, a few of whom were obviously looking at p.o.r.n. I was the only white person - everyone else, including the librarians, was black or Latino, something that was still taking a little getting used to after living in Seattle.

I walked up to the guy at the research desk.

"I heard a rumor there was a suicide in my apartment," I told him. "I wanted to find out if it's true. I don't know when it happened, but it was a long time ago - like, maybe fifty years."

He thought for a second. "I'd start with the newspaper archive," he said. "But search for the address. A lot of apartment buildings have changed their names over the years."

So (after waiting twenty minutes) I sat down at one of the computers dedicated to the newspaper archive. I was basically searching the entire twentieth century, so I obviously got a lot of returns. I tried to narrow things down. I quickly discovered that newspapers almost never referred to deaths as "suicides," at least not in obituaries or news articles.

Finally, I found a short mention in the "Notices" section of a newspaper dated August 11th, 1950. The librarian had been right, and the name of the apartment had since been changed: Cole Gordon was found dead last night in his room at 1189 Ivar Avenue, the Rising Sun Apartments, police said. Gordon, 34, was an unproduced screenwriter.

So it's true? I thought. Except I still didn't know that he'd killed himself. When I searched for "suicide" and "Cole Gordon," nothing came up. I didn't even know if he'd lived in Kevin's and my actual apartment.

I did find Cole Gordon's obituary, which was printed a couple of days later.

Cole Gordon was born January 12, 1915, in Dayton, Ohio, and died in his apartment in Hollywood, August 10, 1950. He was single. He was survived by his parents, A.J. and Sara Gordon, and a brother, Edgar Gordon, of Huber Heights, Ohio. Funeral services will be held at the Taylorsville Mennonite Church, Huber Heights, Ohio, August 15, 2 pm. Interment will be made in the adjoining cemetery.

There was also a picture. Cole Gordon had thick dark hair greased back in the suggestion of a pompadour. He wasn't particularly handsome - he had a beakish nose and gla.s.ses so thick they magnified his eyes. There was a hint of a smile, but only a hint. He looked like an adult posing for a high school yearbook.

That's him, I thought. That's the person I heard that night.

Or was it? Maybe my recognizing him was all in my mind - it probably was. But he did seem familiar somehow.

Had he really killed himself? The newspaper still didn't say, but why else would someone that young have died in his apartment? If he'd been in a car crash, he would have died on the scene of the accident, or later in the hospital. If he'd had some kind of illness, he probably would have died in a hospital too. A suicide was the only thing that made any sense.

Gordon, 34, was an unproduced screenwriter.

So he'd moved to Hollywood just like I had, to make it as a screenwriter, maybe even around the same age I was, twenty-four. Ten years later, he was still unproduced. Was it really so crazy to imagine him killing himself?

It's tempting to look at a picture of someone who's committed suicide and imagine you can see hints of the tragedy in their face. But that's stupid. It was one photo, one instant in a life that surely contained plenty of happy moments, along with the obvious sad ones.