Blandine in Hollywood

I’m over the moon, even though I know it’s made of cheese.

Today, this happened.

A man walks into his office. He sits at his desk – no, not a desk, that would be too quotidian. He settles himself into a Biedermeir chair behind a slab of onyx held up by columns of piled film scripts. Hollywood golden sunlight floods through the windows. A woman follows, with perfect hair and an expression that is intelligent and ambitious in equal proportions.

They are partners in a company so impossibly famous that when you go into tiny villages of squatters in the four corners of the world, they have heard of their movies.

I have something to show you, says the woman.

He holds the novel in his hands, glances down at the title.

What does it mean? he says.

There’s an American woman, and a man who’s an English spy, she says. Bad guys, good guys, accusations of witchcraft, child abductions, supernatural demons. She’s hot shit, says the woman. And it all takes place 300 years ago, in Manhattan. It was virgin forest then, she says.

I know that, he says.

A beat.

So, the mogul says, for the heroine, that blonde from Thrones, what’s her name, Kahleeza something… and the hunk… we’ll get Depp. Or maybe that guy Fassbender…

For a moment, he muses, while she goes over and adjusts the blinds so they’re no longer fucking blinded.

He opens the book. Reads the first line:

On the same day, two murders.