The script had been mailed for eight days.
James tried not to count them. But he did anyway.
He kept himself busy. There was always something to do, people to contact, gear to source, notes to sort. But every time the phone didn't ring, it felt just a little heavier than the time before.
Linda said nothing about it directly, though once, after lunch, she walked past his desk and tapped her pencil beside the phone. "If you keep staring at it like that, it'll file a restraining order."
He'd decided, sometime during the second or third day of silence, that the only sane thing to do was move forward anyway. Whether or not Cundey called, the film still had to be made. So he started building the rest of the skeleton.
He called a few freelance sound people eventually got a number for a young assistant who'd worked under Les Fresholtz, a name he recognized from Oscar-nominated films. The assistant Mike Lenner, mid-twenties, straight shooter said he could handle basic location sound. He had a portable Nagra setup and his own van.
"Cash only," Mike added over the phone. "Extra pay to touch water scenes."
James jotted his name and underlined it once.
Next, he started looking into make-up and effects. He needed just blood, maybe a fake arrow, and something convincing for the final kill. The challenge was finding someone who wouldn't charge studio rates.
Corman's name came up again. He'd made a quiet empire out of hiring young, hungry weirdos. If James could find someone who'd interned under one of those crews, he could maybe land decent effects work for cheap. One number led to another, and by Thursday, James was talking to a guy named Jerry Franks, who'd done gore work for a biker movie two years ago.
"I can do blood. You want heads rolling or just leaking?"
James paused. "Both."
"Then I'm your guy."
Linda kept a running expense estimate on a legal pad near her typewriter. She circled numbers, flagged them, and put a faint star beside anything labeled tentative. The paper was filling up faster than either of them expected.
"You're not shooting yet," she said Thursday afternoon.
"I know."
"Just making sure your inheritance doesn't evaporate before the first camera rolls."
James nodded, half-listening, as he crossed off another name on his contact list. The real problem wasn't money.
It was the name at the bottom of the page he hadn't crossed off yet.
Cundey.
No call. No message. No letter. Nothing.
He didn't mention it out loud, but Linda noticed. She always did.
"You waiting on a specific call?" she asked, pretending not to look up.
"No," James lied.
But by Friday, the lie wasn't enough anymore.
He knew what he had to do.
He reached for the phone.
The office was quiet. Too quiet, maybe, though it wasn't unusual for a Friday after four. Linda had already left, muttering something about needing to read for a test and not trusting the bus schedule. James had said goodbye with a wave, pretending he wasn't thinking about the call.
But he was.
He'd been thinking about it all day. Really, all week. The envelope he'd sent to cundey was probably sitting in a stack with others. Maybe unopened. Maybe tossed. Or maybe and this was worse maybe Cundey had read it, then decided it wasn't worth the courtesy of a reply.
James stared at the rotary phone for a long moment. He didn't want to do this. Not because he was afraid to hear the truth. He just didn't want to confirm what he already suspected.
Still, he dialed.
One ring. Two. Three.
"Yeah," came the voice.
James sat up straighter. "Hi. This is James Rowan. I sent you a script last week..."
"Friday the 13th," Cundey said, already sounding tired.
"Yes."
A pause.
James tried to stay steady. "I was just hoping to follow up. See if you had a chance to."
"I read it," Cundey interrupted.
That silenced James. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Another pause.
Then Cundey continued, flatly. "Script is shit, kid. Call me again when you've got a real one."
James blinked. "…Sorry?"
"You want notes?"
"I...sure."
"You've got a title. That's it. Characters are cardboard. Dialogue reads like a list. Pacing's all over. No camera sense. It's just stuff happening. You want people to care when someone dies, give them a reason to care when they're alive."
James didn't respond. There wasn't much to say.
Cundey's tone didn't soften. "I don't know what you're trying to make, You want to do better? Start with better people. Better scenes. Fewer lines that sound like you wrote them in the shower."
Another beat.
"Look. don't take it personally. First-time scripts usually suck."
The line went quiet for a half-second.
Then a click.
James sat with the phone in his hand, receiver still pressed against his ear even after the dial tone returned.
He placed it down slowly.
No yelling. No anger. Just silence and a bad taste in the back of his throat.
Across the room, Linda's desk sat empty. Her mug the one with the chipped handle was upside down on a napkin.
He rubbed his face once, then leaned forward and closed the notebook with the crew list.
That hurt.
James didn't say anything about the call the next morning.
He came in five minutes late, carrying two coffees. He handed one to Linda without a word and sat down at his desk, flipping open the crew notebook like nothing had happened.
Linda took the cup, sipped once, then stared at him over the rim.
"You look like you slept on a sidewalk."
"I didn't."
"Did he call?"
James didn't look up. "I called him."
She waited.
"No go," he said simply.
"Okay."
That was it. No sympathy, no pep talk. Just the reality, acknowledged and filed.
She opened her ledger and began transcribing the previous contract term of the crew. Neither of them said anything for the next half hour.
James worked down the contact list again. He drew a single line through Cundey's name.
Then he looked at the other names on the page. A few maybe's. One or two callbacks that hadn't gone anywhere. There was still time to find someone. It just wouldn't be the guy he'd hoped for.
Around midday, he made a fresh call to a camera operator who'd worked second-unit on a desert film a guy named Paul Keenan. James remembered him not from fame, but from a random credit he'd caught on variety issue, It was a reach, but not an impossible one. Paul answered. They talked. It was fine. Professional. Tentative.
"We'll see," was how it ended.
James hung up, wrote down the date, and underlined it once.
Linda set her pen down and leaned back.
"You rewriting the script?"
"No," James said.
She nodded. "Smart."
"Why?"
"Because it won't help."
He raised an eyebrow.
"You don't fix a broken script by chasing the guy who didn't like it," she said. "You fix it because you don't like it."
He didn't respond right away. But he didn't dismiss it either.
That night, after she left, James stayed behind. The office was quiet. Just the soft groan of the radiator and the occasional creak of the building settling.
He pulled the script from the drawer.
Not to send. Not to pitch. Just to read.
This time, he didn't skim. He read it word by word, like someone seeing it for the first time. The flaws were clearer now. Lines that didn't land. Scenes that dragged. Moments where no one said anything meaningful.
It wasn't unfixable.
But he was not at the stage to modify hit project at will.
He turned to the back of the legal pad, tore off a sheet, and wrote at the top in block letters:
Make it better from director's perspective.
He set the paper down beside the script and stared at it.
No deadline. No pressure. Just practice.
Just the next thing he had to do.