This piece is free to read without a subscription.
MacKenzie Tulasne stared at the dirty white screen of her MacBook Air and forced her eyes across the words, one by one.
EXT. CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES - PARIS - 1805 - NIGHT
She paused. She took another sip of chalky, weak, disappointing matcha from the bagel shop. She had gotten into Beverly Hills too late that morning to make her usual stop at Forest For The Trees Café, where the matcha was silky and strong. It was better to buy bad bagel store matcha than be late and risk Rudie’s wrath. It was better to have bad matcha than no matcha at all.
EXT. CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES - PARIS - 1805 - NIGHT
She made her way across the screen again, left to right, and after five pained seconds found she was not any farther through the screenplay. She had only read the opening slugline a second time.
MacKenzie allowed herself another break. She glanced over at Emma, Emma Ruller, her fellow entertainment assistant. Emma had no problem doing coverage, the task assigned to both young women whenever they weren't scheduling or putting out various talent fires. Coverage, in theory, was easy. You read a script and you wrote a page on whether it was good or bad or mediocre. Even at this very moment, Emma in her leather jacket was halfway through a horror feature for her own boss, Mitch Ewe, who was thinner and handsomer and just as lazy as Rudie. Emma could read a script in two hours, like she was watching it, like it was nothing.
There were two types of staff at Coberg Entertainment, each fully speciated and distinct. There were the Gen X partners who got drunk at lunch, and the Millennial assistants who took the brunt of their frustrations. When it was time to do serious work, they merged, mentally but not carnally, and the resulting Cronenbergian partner-assistant chimeras almost became a functioning business organism.
EXT. CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES - PARIS - 1805 - NIGHT
A dark field. The DUKE OF ENGHIEN (31), being marched at gunpoint by DRAGOONS, discovers he has been led TO HIS OWN GRAVE...
MacKenzie shut the PDF and started to cry. She couldn't do it. Her eyes just couldn't stay on the screen for more than a sentence without throwing her into a panic. Her crisis had reached a point of severity where it could not be ignored.
It wasn't that MacKenzie was literally illiterate. She had a B.A. in Journalism from Chapman. She had been an honors student. She had vague memories from once upon a time of wolfing down the entire Harry Potter franchise in a summer. Now, though, something had happened. It had been years in the making, and she didn't understand it, but at the age of thirty-one MacKenzie Tulasne could not read.
She had been faking it for a while. Her saving grace was that she could skim, and that was usually good enough to allow her to check if a screenplay was decent or total crap. This was War and Peace, though, and you could not skim War and Peace. She also could not dismiss it as a 'dog log' out of hand, to use Rudie's parlance, since one of their clients was potentially interested and it had won second place at the second biggest unproduced screenplay competition in Hollywood.
The coverage was late. The coverage was due. She was already on thin ice from three other fuckups that month, one of which was actually partially her fault. Any minute, Rudie would get back from long lunch and ask if she had finished War and Peace, and if it had potential. He had assigned it a whole two days prior, and her office duties had been light. If she could not at least pretend it was almost done, there'd be hell to pay.
MacKenzie opened up TikTok. On TikTok, nothing could hurt you. There was no commitment. There was no Napoleonic War. She could read TikTok captions for hours and hours and hours and never get tired.
"Do you have the list for Nobu for me?"
That was Emma, speaking to MacKenzie across cubicles without looking up. MacKenzie had agreed on Monday to make a guest list with contact information for a partner dinner at Nobu. Now Emma could hear MacKenzie watching TikToks. This was the end of her patience.
"I will today."
"Thanks."
MacKenzie swallowed and tried her luck. She tried to sound casual, to hide her desparation. "Would you have time to do a coverage for me and I can do one of yours? I just really am getting super stuck on this one."
Emma looked up from her laptop. "Which?"
"War and Peace."
Emma considered. MacKenzie had suspected for weeks that Emma knew her secret, that she could not read, that her coverage was half-faked. Emma had gone to Brown and was a communist and for these reasons considered herself superior to most. At least, that was what MacKenzie assumed, ever since she had walked in on Emma reading Ottessa Moshfegh in the break room for fun. Emma always seemed to have a superior air.
"I can't," said Emma. "Just try going for fifteen minutes and see if you get into it. Pomodoro."
MacKenzie had already destroyed that stupid plastic tomato timer back in January. That stuff never worked for her. It just made her feel more aware of her own inadequacies. She opened her purse and took an entire second Vyvanse. A warm Diet Coke remnant washed it down. This was an emergency. She could almost feel the nearing aura of Rudie walking back from the Greek place on Rodeo. He would be beet-face plastered and he would want to read her coverage.
EXT. CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES - PARIS - 1805 - NIGHT
A dark field. The DUKE OF ENGHIEN (31), being marched at gunpoint by DRAGOONS, discovers he has been led TO HIS OWN GRAVE...
DUKE OF ENGHIEN: So I die at the hand of my countrymen.
A dragoon SHOOTS THE DUKE IN THE BACK with a pistol. The man falls into the GRAVE. Meanwhile in...
EXT. MOSCOW - 1805 - NIGHT
MacKenzie shut the lid of the MacBook. She was so mad! She was mad she had to read it and she was mad she could not. She had worked for eight, nine, ten years of her life, beaten out hundreds of people, to sit at a desk like this and do this job, to serve as the very first line of defense against outside art in Hollywood. She was the gatekeeper. She was entrusted with a position that could make or ruin the careers of dozens of powerful men and women, Rudie’s clients, clients who trusted an alcoholic man who in turn trusted his assistant. Somehow, having arrived, she hated it.
The aura of Rudie and his fat, perfectly-shaved face loomed closer still in her mind as the afternoon ticked on. Opening the lid again, she typed in a familiar URL did the unthinkable.
She had tried so hard to avoid it. She knew it carried shame. On the bleeding white homepage of an AI assistant, she uploaded the screenplay PDF and a custom prompt.
"Please write detailed coverage on this script, analyzing voice and plot and market fit, as if you are an expert entertainment executive..."
The door to the southwest wing of the office, the shitty wing, MacKenzie's wing, flew open from the hall. Rudie Fane was furious. He was berserk. He was madder than MacKenzie had ever seen him before, besides on last December's Zooms with his divorce attorney. If this was directed at her, her Hollywood career was already dead.
"Did you invite my ex-wife to the fucking Golden Globes?!"
His eyes were bloodshot in Emma's direction, not MacKenzie's. It had been Emma who had done the Golden Globes RSVPs, with no input from MacKenzie at any point. Somehow, by the grace of God, MacKenzie was spared.
Emma turned in her office chair to face Rudie and did not stand. Her face was composed. Her hands were on her lap. "Mitch told me to do the same list as last year, so that's what I did."
"But obviously not including Tammy, you fucking numbskull!" Rudie bellowed.
Emma's voice was embodied with a cool measure MacKenzie had almost never heard from an assistant under the gun. It was staggering to witness, like a house cat holding ground against a bear.
"I'm sorry this happened, Rudie. I'll change it now. I did what Mitch told me."
"No, you fucked up!"
Emma Ruller kept still. Her tone was even and low. "I did what Mitch told me."
"No, and I don't pay you to give me this kind of lip. You fucked up!" Rudie punctuated his statement by grasping for the nearest object, which was a stapler. Then, in his rage, like a toddler, he threw it.
Emma made no motion to duck, like she expected it to hit her, like she wanted it to hit her. Nonetheless, it went wide. The black metal object sailed into the unlit monitor of Emma's company-issued desktop PC, spraying clumps of staples as it clattered down onto the cheap Dell keyboard. The screen lit up with a garish, gory new RGB smear of broken pixels across the Windows logo.
"I quit," said Emma. "I'm not giving notice."
She picked up her purse and took a picture of the broken screen with her personal phone, then walked past Rudie to the women's restroom down the hall.
The first person Rudie looked to, in his realization of what had occurred, was MacKenzie. She stared at him with wide eyes, trying as hard as possible to come across as fully sympathizing with the panicked man. "Whatever you need, just let me know, boss," she said to him. He liked when she called him boss.
Rudie exited in the direction of the HR manager's office and not the women's restroom. MacKenzie felt her heart pounding from the drama, and also all the Vyvanse. She opened TikTok to self-soothe and returned to a place where time had no meaning. Labubu oat milk cold brew my situationship conflict management music festival boymom service animal AI MAGA beauty hack contour tip. Her pulse evened. She was a girl who was going to be okay.
Rudie came back in, slower than usual, looking haunted. MacKenzie looked up and played her favorite role, his friend and fellow gossip, wide-eyed confidante for the blustering oaf. She faux-whispered, "Oh my God. Is everything okay? She, like, went nuts."
It didn't matter who had actually gone nuts. What mattered was that Rudie was there and Emma was not, that Rudie paid her and Emma did not.
Rudie looked down at MacKenzie's hands, at her phone, which was still playing TikToks. "How was War and Peace?"
MacKenzie felt the question claw her. It was no longer even a matter of if she had read it. The conclusion was foregone. She had to respond right now, without flinching in her lie, and she had to be smooth.
"It was not so good, unfortunately."
"Oh really?" Rudie was trying so hard to get back to a mental state of business as usual. "Shame. I had heard buzz. Minor buzz. Not enough to get it made without one of our people attached."
"Yeah, I was so disappointed. It had some problematic parts."
This was good. She was doing things right. A recommendation meant a long discussion, one that MacKenzie couldn't possibly bluff through. A rejection meant a moment of disappointment and then moving on.
"Send me the coverage right now," said Rudie, walking into his office. "I want to read it."
Rudie never read the coverage. What was happening? Was she caught? Was he just trying to distract himself from the Emma situation? MacKenzie opened the lid of her laptop, feeling the gummed-up hinge creak, and saw the keyboard shine with the reflected glow of her AI assistant dashboard. The coverage she had asked for had been generated. A response in the chat sat waiting for her, underneath the analyzed PDF.
The AI had liked it.
This held no actual sway for MacKenzie. The AI recommended roughly seventy percent of the scripts it was given, and any good Hollywood assistant knew to keep her recommend rate at five percent max. What infuriated MacKenzie was the fact that she had just said the script was bad, and now the AI was saying it was good, which meant the coverage she had asked for was already a complete waste of time and carbon emissions.
She typed. "Redo this coverage to give this script a pass and focus very specifically on reasons why it is problematic..."
The HR manager, Stacy, came up behind her and made her jump with fear. "Everything good?" Stacy asked as MacKenzie reflexively lowered her laptop lid like a guilty child.
"Yeah," said MacKenzie, breathy. She pressed 'return' with the hand trapped under the mostly-closed lid, her knuckles leaving a grease mark on the dusty screen. "Yeah. Just a crazy day."
"Can you talk?" said Stacy. She always came off like a bitch to MacKenzie, ten years older and a holdout goth, face pocked with silver.
"Send me the coverage before you talk to Stacy!" Rudie called out from his corner office overlooking Beverly Boulevard.
"Just one second," said MacKenzie. She awkwardly turned her laptop screen away from looming Stacy, then opened it again. In the span of a short conversation, the new coverage had already been generated. She checked the PDF, glancing over it just long enough to make sure it was indeed what she had asked for. Then, without reading more than twenty words, she emailed it to Rudie and shut the computer.
"My office," said Stacy.
The partners apparently shared MacKenzie's dislike for HR Stacy, since her 'office' had for seven years been a closet-like clutter hole full of Bekins boxes of thousands and thousands and thousands of unread, unmade scripts. In the partners' defense, Stacy had had ample time to get her assigned space in order, and had never once made the effort. She had a desk and two chairs and a PC, and with those she conducted her responsibilities.
"Sit."
MacKenzie sat. She was expecting to make some kind of statement, but Stacy didn't want to hear a single word. She wanted to talk. She explained that Coberg Entertainment and ex-assistant Emma had amicably parted ways. She explained there was no need to 'make drama' or 'talk or post about this' or 'get into any legal situations.'
"Of course," MacKenzie said about fifty times. She had no qualms about ignoring what happened with Emma. She was just glad no one was mad at her or currently making her read.
"For the sake of all our careers," said Stacy.
"Of course."
Stacy dismissed her.
The whole walk back to the southwest wing, MacKenzie grappled with a shaking fear that Rudie had found her out. It was possible the file name of the coverage PDF had included the name of the AI software, or that some other telltale marker had been present in the document she'd sent. She wouldn't be bothered by a stapler thrown in her direction, or even being slapped, but the underlying disappointment and risk of firing from Rudie would be utterly humiliating. There was nothing worse than being fired in the business just a few years out from making coordinator.
Rudie was standing there, waiting for her, when she arrived. Mitch's office was empty, and Mitch had gone surfing. Emma's desk, which was no longer Emma's, was also empty. In a week or two it would be filled with some new graduate meat for the grinder.
"I would put my hand on your shoulder but we can't do that now," said Rudie. He had mostly sobered himself up in the past forty minutes.
"Oh, I don't care," said terrified MacKenzie. "What is it, Rudie? What? Is something wrong?" She got ready to lie like her life depended on it.
"I read your coverage," said the man in the billowy button-up.
"And?"
"It was good. You're a good writer, Mac."
"Oh, thank you." MacKenzie beamed, and she took the praise like a real reflection on her work. She was a good writer. She was adaptable. She was efficient. She would get through her impostor syndrome and remind herself she really did deserve this.
"So, about Emma..." This was the real thing on Rudie's mind.
"Oh, forgotten, forgotten," said MacKenzie. "Fuck that bitch. Sorry, but. Pretentious-ass."
Rudie let out a tired, relieved chuckle. "Well, I'm not allowed to say that."
"No. Rudie. I support you. I love you. You were so right. Are we good?"
Rudie nodded. He was still too scared to touch her, even with a reassuring pat. "You keep doing what you're doing," he said, "and in five or ten years I can see you running an entire development department."
Behind the Scenes
As part of our commitment to keep all our essays and stories free, we ask our authors to pull back the curtain and share a little bit about their writing process and intent as a bonus for paying members.
You can find an explanation and reflection from the author of this piece just below…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Futurist Letters to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.