Showrunner (eBook)

Joe McCormack (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
308 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-0305-6 (ISBN)

Infos

The binge-watching world's insatiable appetite for 'content' has created a new kind of Hollywood celebrity--the showrunner--who presides over every episode as creator, storyteller, producer and boss. When his series Bicycle Wars becomes a hit, Oliver Dillon finally enjoys the recognition he deserves. But a weekend in the California wilderness, to escape the pressures that come with success, ignites a series of events that threatens to destroy him.

Joe McCormack is the author of the acclaimed literary thriller, Among the Followers. This is his second novel.

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The binge-watching world's insatiable appetite for "e;content"e; has created a new kind of Hollywood celebrity--the showrunner--who presides over every episode as creator, storyteller, producer and boss. When his series Bicycle Wars becomes a hit, Oliver Dillon finally enjoys the recognition he deserves. But a weekend in the California wilderness, to escape the pressures that come with success, ignites a series of events that threatens to destroy him.

Textauszug

After a three days in the wilderness, he was eager to get back to a shower. Traffic on the I-5 was the usual apocalyptic death race: five lanes of massive trucks, speeding cars held together with mismatched body parts and fraying duct tape. When he reached the 10, traffic was backed up, but at least he was almost home. He phoned in an order at Fig—tuna tostadas, edamame pot stickers, charred cauliflower and two orders of the house ceviche.

A text came in from his girlfriend Aria. “Huge weekend. Making many connections. How’s the finale?” She had already posted scenes from her Soul Summit, a coven of New Age healers and exercise gurus, she had scheduled at the house that weekend. According to her, these were L.A.’s spiritual and fitness elite. He imagined them channeling their assorted energies around the pool. Hopefully they would be gone before he returned.

Having abandoned his mother’s devout Catholicism decades before, Oliver understood the appeal of softer belief systems that provided comfort and community, without dreary rituals or a strict moral code. There were thousands of self-appointed spiritual masters hovering over Hollywood: astrologists, shamans, spiritual mediums, energy healers, tantric meditation teachers, psychedelic drug guides and wellness gurus. Aria had her own personal circle with whom she traded posts and kudos on Instagram and TikTok, at least partly because it was good for business.

She and Oliver had met in the Gjelina takeaway line, when he noticed her checking her watch and let her slip ahead.

“You must be late for something.”

“Very perceptive.” Her tone, although sarcastic, seemed to invite a response. He noticed she didn’t have a yoga mat.

“Soul Cycle or kickboxing?”

She shook her head.

“Tai chi?”

“None of the above.” They seemed to be playing a game, so he used the opening to land a date for drinks and things moved quickly from there. The women in his past relationships were more cerebral, verbal, knowable. Aria was a character from a less predictable world. She moved through life by instinct and radiated a confidence that pulled people into her orbit.

She had grown up on a pear orchard outside Santa Rosa and inherited her Norwegian parents’ lean physique, if not their staid, Nordic manner. She dutifully followed the path of the earthy farm daughter—helping with the harvest, raising Harlequin rabbits for 4H—but at fourteen she metamorphosed into a girl who could stop the conversation in the room. Her parents seemed perplexed that their long-faced features could be rearranged into such an alluring form and continued to shower most of their attention on her studious, older sister Birgit and her Stanford field hockey scholarship.

By high school, she hated the chores, the taste of pears, and the scruffy backwardness of Santa Rosa. To escape the drudgery, she took after-school jobs including one at the local Charles M. Schultz Foundation, aka The Snoopy Museum, from which she was fired for showing up on mushrooms. Her parents overreacted by forcing her into drug counseling and she never quite forgave them. Oliver had only met them once. Although they hardly resembled the humorless drudges she described, they insisted on calling her by her given name, Astrid.

At eighteen, she left for L.A., doors opened and suddenly she began receiving signals on the secret wavelength reserved for very attractive people. She landed an agent, a few commercials and a brief friend role in a romcom series. But she responded poorly to the inevitable rejections, didn’t have the patience to go months between acting jobs and finally had to admit she found it hard to pretend she was anyone but herself. She networked her way into one of the big talent agencies as a power agent’s assistant, but quit after some scarring circumstance she refused to talk about.

Teaching Pilates barely paid the rent at first, but through some inspired sequencing and tenaciousness networking, she landed a couple of hot young actresses as clients. When they started posting about the intensity of her workouts, her classes developed a cult following on TikTok. With loans from a bank and her celebrity clients, she opened her own studio in a strip mall in Venice. Within a year, she had the hottest Pilates studio in greater L.A.—Soul Through Body—and a second location off Montana Street in Santa Monica. But she was careful not to take her local status for granted. When women stopped her on the street, she looked them in the eye and listened to their stories of personal transformation, obstacles overcome.

They were both L.A. strivers, soulmates of a sort. Although she had her own success, she liked being part of Oliver’s creative life and that he cared about something besides money. With Oliver, she wouldn’t end up on the wrong end of the power dynamic. Unlike all of the men who wanted to fuck her just for her looks, she could trust him.

Pulling into the driveway, Oliver felt the usual surge of pride and disbelief that this was his house, his life. Marcelle had tipped him off about the place, before it went on the market, said it was perfect for him, 1940s Santa Monica, classy without being pretentious. Sandra Bullock owned a house up the block as an investment and Robert Downey, Jr. lived just around the corner. Oliver put in an offer the next day. The owner, widow of a former studio CFO, wanted a worthy buyer and insisted on meeting him. Aria came along in a white linen dress and Italian sandals and the widow accepted his offer over drinks by the pool. After a year in the house, the glow still hadn’t worn off. Everything had come together for them. Although they tried not to talk about their success for fear of jinxing it, they felt like they were comfortably inside the velvet ropes.

A car he didn’t recognize was parked in front of the house, which meant one of Aria’s coven was lingering. Tibetan music drifted through the patio doors and a trail of trampled rose petals led down toward the pool. Oliver went onto the deck and saw a woman in a long tunic giving Aria a massage outside the pool house. To avoid disturbing whatever healing energies might be at work, he went back inside, stuffed a tostada into his mouth, washed it down with a cold beer and headed upstairs. He stood under the pounding heat of the shower and watched the grit from the weekend gather into a reddish swirl as it circled the drain. It was still warm outside so he threw on a pair of shorts and dug through a pile of T-shirts for a plain black one. The show’s stylists were always trying to improve his image by sending him vintage tour T-shirts for punk and grunge bands, but he refused to wear them.

By the time he came back downstairs, Aria and her friend Yalla were sitting on the patio overlooking the pool. They had set out the food on platters with plates, forks, chopsticks, cloth napkins, and an open bottle of white wine on ice in the center of the table. Aria held out her arms and kissed him on the mouth when he leaned in. She was wearing one of his shirts over her bikini.

“Was your weekend as productive as ours?”

“Hopefully.”

“Tell us. We want spoilers.”

Oliver poured himself a glass of wine. Because of the show’s cult following, he couldn’t talk about the new season or upcoming episodes. Fans were always looking for leaks and the studio was obsessed with preventing them. Even the slightest rumor about unexpected plot twists exploded online.

“Sorry.”

“Your shoulders look tight. Yalla might exchange a massage for your secrets.”

Yalla took a sip of wine and lifted a pot sticker with her chop sticks. She was few years older and radiated a careful calm, with smile lines that ran from cheek to chin.

Oliver guessed she had been an actress before embracing the spiritual world.

“I love the show.”

“Everybody does,” Aria said. “Sleeping with the creator should be worth at least a spoiler or two. Don’t you agree?”

“Okay, here you go: the dog comes back.”

Aria rolled her eyes. “Of course he does. Everybody loves the dog. You have to bring him back. That’s not a spoiler.”

Oliver scooped up some ceviche. “That’s all I can give you.”

“We’ll see. Sometimes you talk in your sleep.”

“Speaking of sleep…” Yalla leaned forward in her chair and stood up. Aria walked her to the front door. Their voices drifted through the house as they discussed the restorative aspects of the weekend. Clearly, this Yalla was someone important to know because she was receiving Aria’s full attention. He heard their goodbyes, then the door close and her feet padding through the kitchen. She sat down on the arm of his chair.

“I love holding sessions here. There was good energy the whole weekend. Everybody was posting. My site traffic tripled and my classes are sold out for two months. Yalla said I should talk to some VCs about a streaming subscription model.”

“Could you stream classes from the studio?”

“I think so, with a little remodeling. And maybe think about a clothing line.”

“Why not?” From the beginning, they had an unspoken agreement to believe in each other, and given how well things were going for them both, that was easy to do. But Oliver couldn’t conceal his amusement over some of her spiritual crew.

“Did the manifester join you?”

“Go ahead, say it.”

“I’m wondering if she manifested anything for you while she was here. Like a Mercedes.”

Aria took...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-0305-6 / 9798317803056