As it turned out, there was good news a few days later. Development Hell had been accepted into the short film competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Jim’s film was rejected, but it was going to be shown at Slamdance, one of the funky alternative venues that had been set up in the last few years under Redford’s nose and without his approval. It wasn’t Jim’s first choice, but it was a start. They all knew that Sundance wasn’t what it used to be in the glory days of Sex Lies and Videotape; neither was the independent film movement itself. Most of the small companies that made independent films had been bought up by the studios anyway and finding distribution for the kinds of little films that were shown on the festival circuit was almost impossible now. Todd had said it best: “An independent film is just like Vanity Press books in some loser’s basement. They rent their hometown theatre, show it once, have a big party, get drunk and give up.”

Still, there were always surprises. Trends changed. Jim was rolling the dice and who ever rolled the dice without hoping for sevens? Rachel understood his optimism. Her plan was just as wacky as his. Atom film and Ifilm.com were still streaming short video on their websites. If one of them bought Development Hell the money might make up the funding shortfall on Escapade.

If nothing else, it was a chance to get out of town for a week. They put some money together and rented a small condo outside of Park City. All they had to deal with in the meantime was Christmas, and the growing certainty that George W. Bush was going to be the next president. 

Stacey went home; so did almost everyone else.  Rachel had a quiet dinner on Christmas Eve with Jim Hotaling, who had no family left that he cared to spend the holidays with.  Celia had gone east for a few weeks and he felt stranded. They were like two passengers in an airplane waiting for clearance to land at some congested airport; circling their futures, burning gas and drinking coffee.

Christmas was a strange season in Los Angeles, anyway, sad and artificial.  Shops decorated their windows with fake snow.  Giant, gaudy snowflakes in pink and silver were strung across Wilshire Boulevard in the ninety-degree heat.  The city was never more bleak than when it attempted festivity.  The department stores were packed, business was booming and without any seasonal reference, Christmas seemed purely commercial, an inspired trick for moving merchandise and nothing more. Rachel had no filament of holiday feeling left over from her childhood.  She didn't even buy a tree; it all seemed to be happening in another country, like Chinese New Year. She called her parents Christmas morning. None of the kids were going to be home for the holidays, just as she had predicted, but her parents were actually enjoying the time alone, reminiscing about building bicycles from incoherent Japanese instructions at two A.M. and burning the sticky buns. As usual her mother managed to ask when she was going to “face reality” and come home. She had agonized for weeks over an appropriate gift and Rachel almost said “One phone call where you don’t ask me that question would be perfect.” Instead she had to settle for yet another bottle of Chanel #19, the closest thing to a true meeting of the minds between herself and her mother. Her Dad had debated sending her Vanity Fair’s coffee table book about Hollywood, and then decided on a safer bet – a side of Scotch smoked salmon. Rachel fell back on the familiar also: a boxed set of Sarah Vaughan recordings and half a dozen pairs of expensive socks for her Dad.

She couldn’t reach Katy; Mary was a tiny island surrounded by dogs children and crumpled wrapping paper. It sounded like she was in a train station or a war zone. She had made the never-to-be-repeated mistake of giving her kids cap guns and fire trucks with sirens. She asked how the movie was coming along, then someone broke something with a crash and she had to go. Rachel hung up the phone in her empty, silent house and felt a quick gust of relief blow through her. She sometimes wondered how Mary survived that constant level of noise, squalor and chaos. But the sense of relief went sour before she had time to enjoy it. Unmarried, childless, she was exiled from the mainstream of life. It was lonely. She should at least have bought a wreath. 

On December 28th, Daughters opened in Westwood.  In a low mood she almost went to see it.  All the reviews were enthusiastic.  But she knew that if it was better than Next of Kin she would be angry and if it was worse she would be even angrier.  She sent Jim to see it instead.  His review was short, simple and loyal: "Piece of shit."

Rachel saw everything else though, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Requiem for a Dream, until she could look in the movie section of the L.A. Times and know she had seen every film advertised there, without a single gap.  It gave her a sense of control, monitoring Hollywood, absorbing the movies as fast as they came out, judging them and putting them behind her, and waiting for the next assault.

Stacey was back for New Year’s eve. They drank champagne and watched the ball drop together. It was a big improvement over the previous year. “This is the real beginning of the twenty-first century,” Stacey pointed out, just before they called it a night.

Rachel gave her a hug. “Let’s make it a good one.”

Then it was January 18^th and they were flying to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. For Rachel, the excitement of the trip had more to do with the details of travel than the glamour of the movie business. She liked organizing things – tickets and schedules, shopping and packing. She had a petty, precise genius for packing and could get twice as much into a suitcase as anyone she knew, except her mother. She had begun to develop her mother’s reputation: if you let her pack for you, be sure to buy another suitcase wherever you’re going, because you’re going to need it.

Even digging out her suitcases and cleaning them refreshed her spirit somehow. It was as if the trip had already begun, and Los Angeles was behind her. Her new winter coat had cost almost five hundred dollars, and it was hard to imagine needing it in the in the hot still noonday glare of the city. She had hesitated over it for a few minutes in Fred Segal on Melrose, where she had already racked up almost a thousand dollars. She liked spending her money and she hadn’t bought anything but gas and groceries for months. She had been tempted to invest much more than her initial ten thousand dollars in Escapade, but quickly learned (from Jim, Sam Rasmussen and others) that such an indulgence ranked somewhere between incest and acting in infomercials as a Hollywood taboo. Better to buy clothes; looking good at Sundance might actually help her raise some money there.

Finally everything was packed and listed and reserved and there was nothing left to do but leave. She enjoyed the sense of pushing her career ahead with decisive action, but in fact she didn’t have much to do with this event. Jim had submitted Development Hell to the festival and sometimes she thought he’d done it mainly so he would have company as he trudged the snowy streets and overheated hotels flogging his own film. She was really just along for the ride. Still, it looked like it was going to be an enjoyable one. She retained from her childhood a love of plane travel untouched with adult fears. Her father had often flown with her and the tang of jet fuel held some defining glamour of the adult world, as she had imagined that world might be; her father’s world, full of echoing rehearsals in empty theatres, and late dinners with famous actors and cross country travel, first class. The reality of Rachel’s adult world had been disappointing so far, but the smell of the airport gave her hope.

She sat back and looked out the cabin as the plane started down the runway. Intellectually, she knew it was the most dangerous part of flying, but she loved the take-off. It was the perfect metaphor for so many things: making love, writing: the totally committed rush of acceleration that cut the ties of gravity and set you free. NASA scientists had a phrase for the speed required to break loose from the Earth’s pull: escape velocity. Rachel felt something like it in airplanes when the wheels left the ground and the tarmac dropped like ballast. She had felt it in bed with Todd sometimes, and at the computer: when the leaden, list-making part of her brain was left behind like the boxy airport buildings and geometrical runways falling away below her now, and the best part of her was air-borne.

Rachel wound up sleeping for most of the flight, but Jim woke her up for a first look at Salt Lake City. Ringed by snow-capped mountains, dwindling to alkali plains and the Great Salt Lake, Utah’s capital city looked stark and barren to Rachel: a  whole other planet, and not a very hospitable one.

Jim laughed when she said that. He was sitting next to her, leaning across her seat to take in the view. “Pretty close,” he said. “The natives are definitely an alien life form. But you won’t see too many Mormons once we get to Park City. For the next ten days, Park City is just L.A. on a mountain.”

It was a two hour drive over twisting mountain highways to Park City in a rented Jeep Cherokee. The car’s heater was good, there were snow chains on the tires and Rachel enjoyed the drive, one long steep climb into the mountains. She had never seen a “Moose Crossing” sign before. She saw no moose, but she liked the idea that she might. Stacey felt the altitude before anyone else, but by the time they pulled into the parking lot of their Heber City condo, they were all gasping. It was fourteen degrees above zero and the cold seemed to cut through Rachel’s clothes directly to the bone. The condo was small, with two bedrooms and a tiny kitchen, but it had a fireplace and a TV with a satellite hook-up. They unpacked and Jim explained his plan. He had taken a suite at the Shadow Ridge Hospitality Center, the festival headquarters, a big Holiday Inn-style hotel just outside of the old town.  All the publicists offices were there, and the press people. He had organized a Promiscuity party at Harry O’s, the restaurant on Main Street where his movie would be showing in the basement. This had all been done months in advance. He had dozens of passes for the party and he planned to trade them for other passes to other parties – the Synergie spa party for the “American Spectrum” film series, the Premiere Magazine party and a dozen others. The parties were where the deals happened and if you couldn’t get into the parties you might as well stay home.

But he wasn’t taking any chances -- he had fliers and posters printed up and he was planning to plaster them everywhere.

“I need to sell this movie,” he said simply. Rachel was impressed by the military precision of his planning. But he had been to Sundance before and he knew the way the place worked. For Rachel and Stacey it was all new, and it hit them very differently. Stacey hated it – the fake western look, the endless stores selling hand made sterling silvery jewelry, the real estate offices that were the default setting for greed when the Hollywood army decamped. Most of all she hated the crowds, waiting on line at coffee shops and theatres, making traffic jams with their giant cars.

“It’s not a ski town,” She said. “It’s a ski town theme park.” Rachel could see what she meant. It was almost too picturesque. The old brick and timbered buildings rising up the main street, the mountain looming over the village – it was all so perfectly arranged, like Disneyland. When Jeffrey Katzenberg was at Disney some disgruntled writer had suggested that he was the eighth dwarf – Greedy. All Park City needed was someone in a Katzenberg Greedy-the-Dwarf outfit hugging the kids for souvenir photo-ops. But of course there were no kids in town, or none that Rachel could see. It was all people in expensive winter parkas and black leather pants driving Range Rovers and BMWs and Mercedes and Lexus SUVs and talking into cell phones. She had never seen so many cell phones in her life. Everyone had one, except her.

They got their festival passes at Shadow Ridge – Rachel was planning to see a lot of movies, and left Jim to work the place and prepare for his Slamdance screening.

Rachel’s film was to be shown a couple of days into the festival, part of an early morning marathon of short films at the Eccles theatre. In the meantime there was nothing to do but eat and watch movies and study the people around her. The food was good, and she enjoyed walking into a movie she knew absolutely nothing about at ten in the morning and emerging into bright frigid sunlight at noon having had an experience untainted by ‘buzz’, and bad reviews.

But the people were the really interesting part. The festival was like a gastronomic reduction of Los Angeles, a condensed pure syrup of the Hollywood she both loved and despised. In Los Angeles there were other people besides film people –- Korean grocers and Japanese students; mid-western aeronautical engineers working in the big aero-space plants in the South Bay; Mexican floor refinishers and Colombian performance artists and everything in between. Here it was just movie people. Everyone was making a deal or trying to; everyone was hustling something. No one wanted to talk about George W. Bush or Vladimir Putin or Ariel Sharon; no one even wanted to go skiing.

And then there were the cell phones. The assumption seemed to be that no business couldn't survive for ten minutes without the boss’ direct supervision. Everything was urgent, the volatile, unimaginably fast paced world revolved around them: that was the underlying assumption in the self-important tycoon wannabees she saw all around her. She wanted to remind them that Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan had virtually invented the idea of American capitalism without the use of blackberries and pagers and instantaneous wireless communication. The arrogance of it annoyed her. So did the more basic sense of people doing private things in public. What next? Would they be shitting on the sidewalks? It wouldn’t be much more disconnected and anti-social.

She had heard that someone at a forum after a film had stood up to ask the director a question and then cut the man off for a cell-phone call. But Rachel had seen an incident that was even more absurd. She was walking along one of the side streets in the old town, when she saw a middle-aged man yelling into his little hand-set, striding obliviously down the middle of the street. A good-looking guy in his thirties, driving a green range rover, saw the man and simply stopped his car. After a moment or two, he actually turned off the ignition. The range rover shuddered to silence and Rachel paused to watch as the older man kept striding towards it, yelling “That’s a deal-breaker!” and “I wanta see those figures!” and other bombastic noises into his phone. Would the old guy actually walk into the stalled SUV? It didn’t seem possible. But a few seconds later he did exactly that. He rapped his shins on the fender, looked up and started yelling.

“Where the hell do ya think you’re going? You ran me over, you fucking piece of shit! You trying to kill me? What the fuck. I’m calling a cop. I’m dialing 911 right now. Do they have 911 in this shit hole?”

“My car wasn’t moving, sir,” the driver said quietly.

“What? What the hell’re you talking about?”

The driver dangled his car keys out the window. “My car wasn’t even running. You walked into it. Technically, you ran me over.” The guy was trying not to laugh. Rachel liked him instantly.

“You’re out of you’re fucking mind,” the old man shouted. “I got witnesses! This girl was walking by -- ” He spun on Rachel. “Weren’t you, honey? You saw it all. Tell this guy what happened.”

Rachel smiled sweetly. “You walked into his car.”

“You’re saying I’m so blind, senile and absent-minded I’d just walk down the middle of a street and into the front of a parked car?”

“I wouldn’t say you were senile. I’d say you were suffering from narcissistic personality disorder.”

“This is bullshit! You’re trying to make me look an idiot.”

“Actually, sir,” the man in the car said, “I think you’ve got that one pretty much covered all by yourself.”

The man looked at the driver, then at Rachel, blew out a breath that was somewhere between a grunt and a growl; then he turned away in disgust and stalked around the car to the sidewalk. In a moment he was gone, headed for Main Street. Rachel’s feet were freezing and her eyes were parching in the dry, arctic air. But she felt like flirting.

“At least he got off the phone,” she called out. But the engine starting up swallowed her words. She was about to try again when the range rover drove away. She must be losing her touch; normally she could at least get an attractive man to chat for a few seconds. She watched the car go and checked her watch. Maybe he was late for a screening. She was. She started jogging up towards the Egyptian theatre.

She ran into the old man two nights later, at The Hugo Boss party in Deer Valley, after an uneventful early morning screening of Development Hell, wedged among twelve other short films. The screening had been a nerve-wracking experience, vaguely reminiscent of the afternoon in high school when she was pushed out of the locker room naked. The big doors slammed shut and the boy’s football team was going to be clattering down the hall any minute to change for practice: that was how she felt as the lights went down in the cramped theatre. The girls had relented at the last moment and let her back in; the audience seemed to like the movie. But neither experience was something she’d want to repeat. She was lucky, though – the one before hers was something slow and tedious about the filmmaker’s Lithuanian grandmother. When her film began people were in the mood to laugh, and they did. She had stood up briefly before they ran the film and said, “I’m sure this guy will be very familiar to you all. Try to wish him well in his new position. He’s going to be there for a while.”

She saw a few more films that day, dizzy with relief, and wandered through a fresh snowfall, window-shopping (She even bought a pair of sterling silver earrings) and celebrity spotting. (Julianne Moore and Jeff Goldblum; Mick Jagger and Harvey Weinstein –- she was hoping for Robert Redford himself, but he had skipped the festival this year).

She and Stacey had taken up party crashing as a competitive sport, hiding out in a restaurant bathroom for two hours so they could slip into the Donnie Darko fete, dodging through the service entrance to raid the George Clooney shindig, where Clooney himself, alas, was nowhere to be found. But Jim had gotten them tickets to the Hugo Boss affair, a lavish gathering, complete with thugs at the door turning people away, a gaudy HG projected onto the snow with red lights, and music so loud your bones vibrated. Everyone there seemed to be twenty years old and Rachel felt like matron who had stumbled into the place looking for the early bird special at Red Lobster. It was kind of like trying to buy a pair of jeans at Abercrombie and Fitch. Everything from the half naked teenagers in the giant photographs on the walls to the condescending store clerks gave her the feeling that hideous crones in their early thirties (such as herself) really ought to be shopping at Wal-Mart.

Maybe that was why she approached the old man with the cell phone. He was the only person who seemed more out of place at the party than she was.

He was standing at a big picture window looking out into the dark snow, drinking from a plastic bottle of spring water. He turned when he heard her coming and offered her the bottle.

“Care for some water? I’m turning into a goddamn potato chip in this place. The air is so dry.”

“And thin,” Rachel said. “I practically blacked out walking up the front steps.”

“I made an ass out of myself the other day. Sorry.”

“I thought it was funny.”

“I saw your movie this morning.”

“Did you like it?”

“You were right. I know that fellow very well. I’ve been dealing with him for thirty years. This is a business – unlike the business of, say, manufacturing gaskets – in which everyone wants to be talented. And almost no one is. The results can be perverse - bitter little people wielding the power of their opinions like clubs. And they do have power. Don’t kid yourself about that. I expect you annoyed quite a few of them today.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“They could make life difficult for you.”

“They already have.”

The old man stared at her, apparently amused at the way her answers kept slamming back at him without a second’s hesitation. Maybe that was why he decided to drop a wall in front of her and watch her hit it head first. He extended his hand.

“My name is Harold Levy.”

She stared at him. “Harold Levy,” she said stupidly.

He took her hand as he would take a small child’s, leading her through the grownup formalities of being introduced. “Glad to meet you,” he said. His grip was light but firm.

“I love your movies.”

He smiled. “Then we are a mutual admiration society.”

“It’s --  I … thank you. That’s very nice of you to say.”

Levy smiled. “I’ve been accused of many things in my life, young lady. Nice has never been one of them. In any case, there’s nothing nice about flattery. It’s a lie and liars always want something.”

“Well, everyone wants something.”

“Yes. But I don’t want any of the things I could obtain by pretending that a lovely young girl is a gifted filmmaker. If you ever decide to make a full-length film, let me know. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“A reputation … ?”

“For discovering young talent. For making stars out of pimple faced film school drop outs and video store clerks. People ask me how I do it, but there’s no special technique. I just exploit their good will and their star-struck admiration. I ride their coattails while they think they’re riding mine. And everyone is happy.”

“Are you always this honest?”

“Only when I can’t get away with lying.”

“Now you are flattering me.”

“No.”

“Come on, when you – “

“My dear girl, I actually see what I’m looking at. That may be my real gift. I look at you and I see a brilliant artist with a highly refined bullshit detector, as Hemingway liked to call it. I actually knew him slightly. But I never ventured to call him ‘Papa’ and I wouldn’t try to put that one over on you, either.”

Jim and Stacey had ambled over and were listening to this exchange. Rachel introduced them. Jim just said “Wow.”

Levy said softly to Rachel, “Remember.”

Then he turned and disappeared into the crowd.

“That was Harold Levy,” Jim said.

Rachel nodded, smiling.

“He was talking to you.”

“He was the crazy guy on the street with the cell phone.”

“That makes sense.”

“He liked Development Hell.”

“Of course he did,” said Stacey. “I just met someone else who liked it. He works for iFilm.com and he wants to talk to you. He’s standing over there at the bar. The guy with the green hair.”

The guy with the green hair was named Larry Palamoussis, and he offered Rachel twenty-five hundred dollars for the right to stream her movie on his website for six months.

“Is that a fair price? It seems low.”

Palamoussis finished his beer. “It’s tough making money on the net, babe. People are just starting to figure that out. It was designed to be free – total access, ungovernable communication. Like a big store with no clerks or cash registers or security. No, not even that, because you’re anonymous. Look at Napster. People who trade files are basically just shop-lifting, but it doesn’t feel that way.  You tell them they’re thieves they look at you like you’re on crack. Ten years from now, when the hard drives can handle it and the broad band connections are there, they’ll be doing the same thing with movies. Then it’s kiss your copyrights goodbye and everybody’s working for free.”

“That sounds grim.”

“It’s gonna happen.”

“I don’t think so. You can’t pirate the experience of going to a movie.  You know? Sitting in the dark with all those other people. Looking at the huge screen, eating pop-corn? That’s like the number one American social entertainment. It’s our favorite thing. It’s what we do on first dates. No one wants to watch a bootleg DVD on a first date.”

“Maybe not now. But with full wall plasma screens and big speakers and microwave popcorn … you’ll be stylin’. People are never gonna leave the house.”

“That sounds so sad.”

“Hey, the future’s coming. What do you want to do? I say grab the money while it’s still there. A lot of people are gonna see your movie. We get ten thousand hits a day sometimes. And that’s the good thing about the net. You can get your stuff out there.”

“Okay.”

“Great. Come by Shadow Ridge tomorrow and we’ll make it official. I gotta move right now – I wanta sign the guy with the talking hamsters movie. That shit was funny.”

Rachel watched him disappear into the crowd. Stacey slipped beside her.

“It’s a start,” she said.

Rachel put her arm around her smaller friend and squeezed her shoulder.

“It’s an excellent start,” she said. “And it’s also twenty five hundred dollars.”

“We actually did better with the yard sale.”

“I guess. But this is more fun.”

“And quicker.”

“Plus I get a Hugo Boss hat. And a sweat-shirt.”

“I got a down parka. It was the last one size small.”

“You sneak. But I can wear my HB hat in L.A. and everyone will know I was at Sundance.”

“Like the kids who came back from Christmas vacation all tanned so you knew their parents were richer than yours and they’d spent the holiday in St. Barts or wherever.”

“Exactly. Whereas the only place you can wear that coat is back in New York where nobody cares.”

The alarming logic of this point hit home. “Shit,” Stacey said, “I’m getting a t-shirt.”

Then she was gone, too and Rachel was left staring into the snow, happy to be here in the middle of a real winter night, happy to feel like a real filmmaker, the center of attention (however briefly) because of her film, the future swirling, dark and unknowable, just beyond the window pane.