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    “And you,” he said, “are the coverage girl who just fixed the bound pile of shit I paid a hundred K for.” And like that, she had a job, on a studio lot of all places, with Michael Deane of all people, as his chief development assistant, personally assigned to help Michael “get my ass back in the game.”
    At first, she loved her new job. After the slog of grad school, it was thrilling—the meetings, the buzz. Every day, scripts came in, and treatments and books. And the pitches! She loved the pitches— So there’s this guy and he wakes to find that his wife’s a vampire —writers and producers sweeping into the office (bottled water for everyone!) to share their visions— Over credits we see an alien ship and we cut to this guy, sitting at a computer —and even after she realized these pitches were going nowhere, Claire still enjoyed them. Pitching was a form unto itself, a kind of existential, present-tense performance art. It didn’t matter how old the story was: they’d pitch a film about Napoleon in the present tense, a caveman movie, even the Bible: So there’s this guy, Jesus, and one day he rises from the dead . . . like a zombie—
    Here she was, barely twenty-eight, working on a studio lot, not doing what she’d dreamed, exactly, but doing what people did in this business: taking meetings, reading scripts, and hearing pitches—pretending to like everything while finding myriad reasons to make nothing. And then the worst possible thing happened: success—
    She can still hear the pitch: It’s called Hookbook. It’s like a video Facebook for hookups. Anyone who posts a video on the site is also auditioning for our TV show. We snatch up the best-looking, horniest people, film their dates, and follow the whole thing: hookups, breakups, weddings. Best of all, it casts itself. We don’t pay anyone a cent!
    Michael set up the show at a secondary cable channel, and just like that he had his first hit in a decade, a steaming pile of TV/Web synchronicity that Claire can’t bear to watch. Michael Deane was back! And Claire saw why people worked so hard to not get things made—because once you did one thing, that became your thing, the only thing you were capable of doing. Now Claire spends her days listening to pitches for Eat It (obese people racing to eat huge meals) and Rich MILF, Poor MILF (horny middle-aged women set up on dates with horny young men).
    It’s gotten so bad she’s started to actually look forward to Wild Pitch Fridays, the one day she still might listen in on a random pitch for a film . Unfortunately, most of these Friday pitches come from Michael’s past: people he’s met in AA, people he owes favors to, or who owe him favors, people he sees at the club, old golf partners, old coke dealers, women he slept with in the sixties and seventies, men he slept with in the eighties, friends of ex-wives and of his three legitimate children or of his three older, less-than-legitimate ones, his doctor’s kid, his gardener’s kid, his pool boy’s kid, his kid’s pool boy.
    Take, for instance, Claire’s nine thirty: a liver-spotted TV writer who played squash with Michael during the Reagan years and now wants to make a reality show about his grandkids (proudly displaying their pictures on the conference table). “Cute,” Claire says, and “Aw,” and “How sweet,” and “Yes, they do seem to be over-diagnosing autism now.”
    But Claire can’t complain about meetings like this unless she’s ready to hear the Michael Deane Loyalty Lecture: how, in this cold town, Michael Deane is a man who never forgets his friends, holding them in tight clench and staring into their eyes: You know I’ve always loved your work, (NAME HERE). Come down next Friday and see my girl Claire. Then Michael takes a business card, signs it, and presses it into the person’s hand, and just like that, they’re in. People with a signed Michael Deane business card might want tickets to a