"This is Jack Hansen."
Jack clawed his phone out of the sheets at 4:00 a.m.
The caller ID said Tom Cruise.
He groaned. "Dude, it's four in the morning. What are you planning to do, rob a bank?"
Tom was kicked back in a hotel suite, city lights glittering through the floor-to-ceiling windows. One yellow desk lamp, one laptop, one glass of something strong.
He stretched like a cat. "Aren't you the genius who slipped an extra project onto my plate?"
"Oh, you mean the Juno thing?" Jack perked up instantly. He loved this script and wouldn't mind having his name on the producer list if it blew up. "You read it?"
Tom traced the rim of his glass with one finger. "It's worth putting money into."
Jack whooped. "Told you! Your gut's better than half the Ivy League film-school grads I know."
Tom ruffled his hair back with that effortless movie-star flick. "Don't sell yourself short. Your fancy degrees still come in handy."
He never went to college; everything he knew came from the school of hard knocks. But after almost twenty years of picking winners, he had a system that almost never failed.
Since Top Gun turned him into a human ATM in '86, pretty much every movie he touched printed money; some just printed more than others.
Undeniable. The guy was the last true movie star.
Jack pushed. "So we're green-lighting it?"
Tom didn't answer right away. He was staring at Joey Grant's IMDb page: one bright debut photo and a string of rotten tomatoes so red they looked radioactive.
He sighed, then smiled a little. "I need to know more about her background. I don't usually back kids with that kind of baggage. I'm not convinced someone can flip a switch and stop being a train wreck overnight."
Jack jumped in. "We're not investing in her past, we're investing in the script sitting on the table right now. The script's killer, right?"
Tom's voice stayed even. "I just don't believe she can direct it as well as it deserves."
"So we pass? Or buy it off her and make it ourselves?"
Tom glanced at Joey's photo again; she was laughing in the sun, eyes sparkling like the light was falling straight out of the sky into them.
"No," he said finally. "Let her shoot it."
Jack blinked. "I swear you're messing with me. Do you want in on this movie or not?"
"I said let her shoot it. Clear enough?"
"But you just said you don't like her."
Tom didn't explain. He never explained the big calls. "That's it. Handle the details. Anything under two million is fine."
Jack laughed under his breath. "You're getting weirder every year, man."
Call ended.
Tom set the phone down, dumped half a sugar packet into his coffee, and watched the steam curl up while he thought.
He didn't like the girl; at least not the version the tabloids sold. So why the hell was he writing her a check?
Because earlier that day he'd looked into her eyes and seen 18-year-old Tommy Mapother: broke, short, too tan, laughed at for "acting too big," stuck taking bit parts nobody else wanted, getting told every day he'd never make it.
And still refusing to quit.
That's what he saw in Joey Grant right now.
The media had trashed her, studios had blacklisted her, her fiancé had walked, the bank was about to take her house, and the whole world was laughing.
And she still wasn't quitting.
That hit him right in the chest.
He knew exactly how heavy the low feels, and how much raw nerve it takes to keep chasing the dream when you're down there.
Either she was the best actress he'd ever met, or she actually meant it this time.
He was betting on the second one.
He wanted to see if she could surprise him.
––––––––
Three days after Joey got back to L.A., an email pinged: Jack Hansen wanted to "confirm details."
Attached were a bunch of very reasonable, very one-sided conditions: they'd advise on distribution, sit in on every deal with distributors, take a fat percentage of the back end, and plant a couple of "supervising" people on set; basically babysitters with clipboards.
It looked a lot like selling her soul and the movie's soul in one contract.
But she needed the money yesterday, and beggars don't negotiate NDAs. She signed.
Making a movie in America is a bureaucratic nightmare: form an LLC, raise cash, get insurance (so if the thing implodes, the bond company eats the loss), then the completion bond people show up every day to scream about budget and schedule.
Not everybody gets to be James Cameron, bleeding Fox and Paramount dry on Titanic because the plates didn't have the White Star logo and he needed another $200 million. (Summer Redstone almost had an aneurysm over that one.)
Since the original Harvard Lives had been 100% her own money, she'd skipped half those steps. Now that real investors were in, everything had to be by the book.
First stop: she flew to Texas to register the company, because Texas is cheaper than California and nobody in Hollywood cares where the paperwork lives.
She named it "Do As Infinity Studios." Filing fees were a fraction of Cali prices.
Original female lead on the old version had been Rebecca Ferguson, a 20-year-old Swedish soap actress Joey had pulled from the SAG roster. Twelve years from now she'd blow up as Ilsa in Mission: Impossible, but right now she was cheap and available, plus Sweden offered juicy tax rebates.
Tax rebates are the reason nine out of ten Oscar contenders these days shoot everywhere except Hollywood or the U.S. Canada, the UK, Scandinavia; they'll literally pay you 30–40% of your budget to bring the circus to town.
California still acts like it's 1955 and refuses to play the game. Hollywood soundstages are basically tourist traps now.
So most of Joey's cast was Swedish; hello, rebates.
They couldn't afford to actually shoot in Sweden, or even another state, so she kept principal photography in the San Fernando Valley; way cheaper than soundstages on the studio lots.
(The Valley: proud producer of roughly 90% of American porn, home to legendary adult stars who work cheap and can actually act when clothes stay on.)
For half a second Joey considered casting one of them just for the headline chaos, then decided the tabloids would have way too much fun with that.
Since they'd already shot the old version once, most of the cast and crew were still available. A few who weren't got replaced through the unions, contracts got re-issued, and it was way easier the second time around.
Jack's money landed. Insurance was locked. The bond company sent their babysitters.
With a skeleton crew, Jack's hand-picked "assistant" director (translation: spy), and the completion guarantor's rep riding shotgun, Joey loaded everybody up and headed to the San Fernando Valley to start shooting Juno for real.