The Theater of Maybe

We’ve done the work.

We know our story. We’ve lived with it long enough that it wakes us up at 3am with a better version of act two.

We are ready.

And then we walk into the room.

There are three versions of this room.

Each one is its own special kind of theater.

Just us and them.

Three modes:

The Collected Intellectual — Criterion Blu-rays arranged by director. Books about Kubrick that have never been opened. A vintage film camera that that also has never never been used. This person wants us to know they have taste. They will pass on our project and feel cultured doing it.

The Approachable Creative — A neon sign. A fidget toy that costs two hundred dollars. A plant that is definitely fake, although a really good facsimile. We are holding eleven-dollar Norwegian water that tastes like a boardroom and trying to remember our opening line.

The Power Minimalist — Nothing. Deliberately nothing. A glass desk. A view. The unspoken suggestion that our idea should be grateful to be in the same room as the view.

All three are saying the same thing.

We have taste. Do you?

They arrive the way people arrive when they have somewhere more important to be. Phone face-down on the desk. The universal signal for you have 15-minutes and my unwavering attention — deployed by people who will check it twice before we finish our first sentence.

Now there are five of them.

We don’t know who most of them are. There’s a Current Programming person. Someone from Business Affairs who shouldn’t be here but is. An assistant taking notes whose face tells us nothing.

The table is too long. We are at one end. The power is at the other.

This is not accidental.

The innovation the industry did not ask for and will never recover from.

We are pitching into a rectangle. A grid of rectangles. Each containing a person also watching themselves in a rectangle — which is its own psychological crisis nobody is addressing.

It is being recorded.

Mentioned casually. Almost as an afterthought.

Just so you know, we record all our meetings.

Somewhere on a server in Burbank there is a file of us pitching our life’s work to five rectangles — one of which was definitely driving for the first twelve minutes. We could tell. The background was moving.

Another rectangle was a closet. A real closet. With coats.

Someone’s dog walked through the frame. Nobody acknowledged it. Acknowledging it would mean acknowledging that we are all at home running a multimillion-dollar creative industry from rooms that smell like lunch.

We begin. We are good at this.

And then:

• Their eyes move to the phone. Just once.

• They write something down that may be a grocery list.

• They say interesting in a tone that means nothing.

• They say I love that in a tone that means less.

Then the comp titles.

Them: “So it’s like Succession meets The Bear?”

We think to ourselves: “Well, okay… but our show is about the Rwandan genocide”.

But, what we actually say: “That’s a really interesting lens”.

What we really mean: “We need this meeting”.

We will not hear it in the room.

Nobody passes in the room. The room is for warmth. The pass is for email. From their assistant. Sent at 7pm on a Friday. Which is Hollywood’s version of a breakup note under a windshield wiper.

Not quite right for us at this time.

The most dishonest sentence in the English language. It means one of the following:

• We didn’t understand it.

• We understood it and were afraid of it.

• We loved it and forgot about it.

• We never read it.

We will never know which one.

That is also by design.

Meanwhile — upstairs — they just greenlit a sequel to a sequel of a franchise based on a toy.

The toy is performing well internationally.

They are guessing. We are guessing. The entire industry is guessing — dressed in expensive clothes or sitting in coat closets — pretending any of it confers authority.

It does not.

It is eleven-dollar water and a fake plant and a recording nobody will ever watch.

The only difference between us and the person who just passed?

We are guessing in the direction of something we actually believe in.

That’s not a small difference.

That’s the whole game.

Walk in. Hold the water. Unmute ourselves.

Tell our story.

And when the Friday email arrives from the assistant —

understand it for what it is.

A guess.

From a frightened person.

In a fake-plant office or a too-long conference room or a Zoom closet full of coats.

Who definitely didn’t read it.