The sun was bright, and the road outside was busy with cars and people.
James Wong walked up to the office building with his briefcase, scanning the row of nameplates by the entrance until he found Starlight Entertainment. He went inside.
He found the right office, knocked, and entered. A freckled young woman greeted him at the front desk. He told her who he was and why he was there, and she asked him to wait while she went to let someone know.
James sat down and took in the office. Seven or eight people, sparse. He wasn't surprised. He had come into the film and television industry with his friend Glen Morgan back in the eighties, and in the years since he had worked with many companies that looked exactly like this one.
His agent had told him about the project a few days ago, and he had done his own research. An eleven million dollar investment was a big number to advertise. But that was Hollywood. Inflated production budgets were standard practice, with all sorts of arrangements underneath involving publicity costs, marketing, and assorted conflicts of interest. None of that was his concern.
This also wasn't his only option at the moment. People from Dimension Films had reached out about directing Scary Movie, a parody of Scream. He hadn't committed yet, because a condition he'd put forward had been rejected outright.
James thought about the script he and Glen had developed together and frowned slightly.
Was he actually going to have to walk away from it?
He had been in the industry for over a decade, a working screenwriter for more than ten years. He knew a good idea when he had one. The problem was that the industry was full of good ideas, and a very long line of people waiting for their good idea to become a film.
Selling the script separately wasn't an option he was willing to consider.
From the mid-eighties through 1993, for nearly a decade, he had worked as a screenwriter. After countless rejections, a teen comedy script he wrote called The Boy Next Door was finally optioned by a production company. After that, he and Glen had worked on commercial films and television series including The Wraith and 21 Jump Street.
But by 1993, after years of steady work, his income as a seasoned screenwriter was barely enough to cover his own expenses. Screenwriting simply wasn't valued the way it should have been, and he had been forced to find another way.
He knew exactly what a script alone was worth on the open market. Not much.
The only solution he could see was to bring himself along with it.
He wasn't an unknown. He had served as director and executive producer on The X-Files and as a co-producer on Space: Above and Beyond and Millennium. That counted for something.
"Director Wong." The freckled woman came back over. "Mr. Anderson will see you now."
James followed her into the inner office. His agent Edward was already there.
"James, this is Ryan Anderson, CEO of Starlight Entertainment. Ryan, this is Director Wong."
Ryan took one look at the black hair and features and knew immediately. He shook hands and asked, "Are you Chinese?"
"I was born in Hong Kong," James said.
Ryan got straight to it. "You worked on The X-Files?"
It was one of the most successful television series on Fox. After learning the director's name, Ryan had gone and watched it specifically, paying close attention to the episodes James was most heavily involved with. The quality was clear.
"From the first season through the fourth," James said plainly. "In the first and second seasons, Glen Morgan and I mainly worked on script development and revisions. Toward the end of the second season I started as Chris Carter's assistant director. In the third and fourth seasons I directed several episodes independently."
Edward added, "A significant amount of the content in The X-Files touched on thriller and horror territory. Director Wong is very comfortable in that space."
Ryan nodded. Among everyone he had interviewed so far, James Wong had the strongest resume and was the only one with real credits on a well-known project.
He also kept feeling that the name was familiar in a way he couldn't quite place. He couldn't search his own memory like a database. But anyone in Hollywood whose name stuck with him had almost certainly done something worth remembering.
They talked through the resume a little longer, and then Ryan took out the script and slid it across the desk. "Read through it first. We'll talk after."
James picked it up. About eighty pages, The Purge on the cover, Ryan Anderson listed as author. He had known these basics before coming and hadn't given them much thought. He opened it and began reading.
After a while, he had his general read.
The background setting was solid. At its core, though, it was fairly standard American horror, built around violence, killing, and gore — a splatter film, essentially. As a purely horror piece, it was middling. Real horror, in James's view, was what you couldn't see or touch.
He made the comparison in his head. The script he and Glen had written was considerably stronger from a pure horror standpoint.
But thinking it through, this script did something the other kind didn't. Beyond the violence and the horror, it reached into American social conditions in a way that would resonate with people. That was worth something.
Toward the end, James paused.
Why was the Arab character a hero?
There was some setup for it earlier in the script, but it still didn't fit the usual shape of things in Hollywood. Arabs in American films were almost universally villains or minor background figures. There wasn't much of an Arab-American audience to speak of either. If you were going to write this kind of supporting role as a savior, a Chinese-American character would at least reach a wider audience.
James finished reading and closed the script.
Ryan poured him a glass of water. "Any thoughts?"
James said directly, "The Arab character feels off."
Ryan smiled slightly. "The investment comes from Abu Dhabi."
James had been in the industry long enough to understand exactly what that meant in two seconds. Money was always in charge.
"The premise is very strong," he said, moving on from the Arab question. "This story should connect with a lot of people living in America."
Ryan leaned back. "Tell me more."
James had personal experience to draw on. "For the past few years I've been on various productions, some of the time in France, some in Canada. Watching the local news in those countries was disorienting, because it was so different from what I was used to. In France I was seeing coverage of European affairs. In Canada the news was almost entirely local, small stories, very contained. Then I came back to the United States, and every single day the news had violent incidents."
He laughed quietly. "I came here as an outsider. In those early years, my main feeling was that in America I seemed to be living inside violence all the time."
Ryan nodded. "America's public safety is genuinely terrible."
Edward, listening, suddenly cut in. "With so much real violence everywhere, why aren't people tired of it in movies?"
James replied without missing a beat. "An anti-violence film has to be full of violence."
Ryan actually sat back for a moment at that. Directors really did think differently.
"If you were directing this," Ryan asked directly, "how would you approach it?"
"I would make a film that was against violence, with as much violence in it as possible," James said, his thinking sharpening as he spoke. "You wrote a good story. The setting is in the future, but it's not post-apocalyptic. People are doing well. And yet violence is still an inescapable shadow over everything."
"That's the point worth making: violence doesn't come from poverty alone. It exists inside prosperity just as much. That's something worth making an audience sit with. Everyone watching feels themselves somewhere inside the violence."
Ryan was genuinely impressed.
He had watched the X-Files episodes, confirmed the resume, and now he had the man's actual ideas for the film. James Wong was a real option.
"Wong," Ryan said, "come on board."
James glanced at Edward, who put on his most straightforward smile. "Before you arrived I went over the compensation with Ryan. Three hundred thousand dollars, paid in two installments."
The fact that Edward had brought up the number meant Ryan was genuinely interested. For a small independent production there was no need to go through formal channels if both sides were ready to move.
"Hmm." James thought for a moment, then said, "Edward, I'd like to speak with Ryan alone."
Edward stood up immediately, already guessing what was coming. "You're going to..."
James cut him off. "I know what I'm doing."
Edward shook his head, turned, and left the office.