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been the room mother for the second grade, so she understood their behavior.
    Why did it still amaze her what yo-yos the three of them turned into the minute the door to the conference room was closed?
     Why did it gall her how ruled by their maleness they became? All day long they all kissed the asses of the talent and made
     nice with the agents and spoke in conciliatory, unctuous tones to the lawyer. So when they finally got into the room to talk
     among themselves about the details and the projects, the rage they’d been holding inside finally blew, and it wasn’t a pretty
     sight.
    After so many years in this town, during which she’d somehow managed to work for some of the legendary pigs in the business,
     Ellen was sure she’d seen and heard it all. And yet now and then she still found herself embarrassed by the behavior of these
     three. Just that morning, Randy McVey, a gifted British director, was in a meeting with all of them, discussing a project,
     and he brought up his background in classical theater.
    “Of course,” he said, “my first love is to work in the summerseason at Chichester. If only they played all year long, I’d never leave the place.”
    And behind the very elegant man’s back, for the entertainment of the others, Bibberman actually made that open fisted moving-in-and-out,
     jerking-off gesture the boys used to make, back when she was in elementary school. Ellen wanted to grab him by his Armani
     lapels and shake some sense into him. Later when the director left, Bibberman imitated McVey’s dialect and his passion for
     the theater, thinking he was being terribly funny. Now they were talking about one of the writers.
    “How much does he want?” Bibberman asked.
    “Two hundred thousand.”
    “Pass,” Bibberman said. “I could shit on the page and it would be better than his first draft.”
    Ellen had her usual wave of wishing she could afford to quit this job. Give up the perks and the pricks and go open a bookstore
     in a beach town somewhere. Or at least work at a company that was run by grown-ups. This was getting to be too much, watching
     the boys sitting there all day, wagging their dicks at one another.
    Each of them believing with the hubris that their excessive salaries gave them that they were going to be in these heady positions
     of power forever. And worse yet, claiming that they actually knew how to predict what the audiences wanted to seem what would
     make money. All Ellen knew was that even Nostrafuckingdamus couldn’t tell how a movie would do until the popcorn was popped
     and the audience was either cheering, laughing, crying, or walking out in the middle.
    But she chose to shut up and do what Rose told her, which was not to “rock the yacht.” Not let the “boys” win their battle
     to get her out of the locker room, since they were the onlyreal downside of the job for her. Otherwise it had a lot to recommend it.
    She’d grown accustomed pretty damn quick to the expense-account life, including the high-priced car that the studio transportation
     department not only provided, but had serviced, detailed, washed, gassed, and waiting in her personal parking spot for her
     every day. And since day one of the announcement in the trades that she had this job, she always got the great tables everywhere
     in town. At Morton’s and at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Granita in Malibu, with Barbara Lazaroff fawning over her.
    But what stoked her more than the trappings, what kept her awake at night with excitement, was the charge she got putting
     together the deals to make the movies. There was something incredibly heady about the alchemy of matching just the right script
     with a director no one else would have dreamed of using for that genre, and watching the project take off. It was a spike,
     the part of the job that made her as giddy as the studio secretaries when Daniel Day-Lewis walked into the commissary. That
     was what made it all worthwhile for her. Spending