Was Lana Wachowski skeptical? She was.
Was Lana Wachowski dismissive? She was not.
Was Lilly Wachowski visiting friends in Buffalo Heights that very weekend? She just so happened to be doing exactly that, buddy.
And was Lilly Wachowski maybe willing to come by and have a look at my photos and videos? I’ll tell you, chief, there wasn’t any maybes about it—not a one. Lilly Wachowski was in.
And fast.
She came by after dinner that night with a pair of impressively burly, however sub-Archonic, mostly silent “assistants.” On the living room couch, we watched Blank for two hours: various facial expressions and gags and games from its teenage years; I figured I should save the better, later stuff for last. There were pratfalls, throat-clears, the hora-on-its-hands, a Chaplin-hobble, walnut-juggling, and something I’d always thought of as “interpretive karate,” which entailed its performing mock-fighting moves to the beat of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I know I was impressed—I was verging on tears—and I’d seen it all before, live and in person.
“There are more of these tapes?” Lilly said.
“Nine more,” I said, still doing the voice. “About twenty hours total. A little less than half of those hours are even like assloads more impressive than what you just saw.”
“Well, I don’t have twenty hours,” said Lilly Wachowski. “In fact, we have to go meet some people for drinks downtown, then tomorrow I leave. I don’t suppose you’d loan me these tapes to review in L.A.”
“You don’t-suppose correctly there,” I said.
“Well, okay,” she said. “In that case, I’m prepared to offer you a hundred thousand dollars for your tapes.”
“A hundred thousand?” I said. “You’ve never seen a cure that adorable in your life. My Blank outshines any animated cure in your whole fucken trilogy.”
“I don’t disagree,” she said. “Those faces Blank makes—stunning. I’ve never seen anything like that. But our films, Belt, were made over a decade ago. Our animation technology is much, much better now. In fact, that’s one of the primary reasons we decided to make these new films. We can do a lot with this new technology. We don’t need these videos of Blank to draw from—they would make it easier for us, we’d get some rendering done a bit more quickly, but we’ll get there on our own with or without them.”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand. Thanks for coming by.”
“Really?” she said, making no move to rise from the couch. “We’re doing hardball, now? With all due respect, Belt, I remember living in a house like this. I remember what money meant to me when I lived in a house like this. One hundred thousand dollars for some home videos? You don’t want to turn that down.”
“First of all,” I said, “I love this fucken house.”
“I didn’t mean to insult—”
“Right, right. ‘With all due respect,’ you said. That’s not the kind of language you Hollywood types usually precede your backhanded classist insults with, I know. All due respect, I don’t give a hairy rat’s shiny bald ass you’re from Chicago and you lived in some house. But I’m not trying to get hostile here, Lilly, and I really like your movies, I think you’ve got talent, you and your sister both, and I’d much rather see Blank immortalized in the CGI you do than in any other interested parties’ CGIs that they do, those other interested parties being who I’m referring to by saying they, if you get what I mean. It’s just you’re just not even in the ballpark with your hundred grand.”
“What other interested parties?” she said.
“All of them,” I said. “All the ones you’d think to name. Woman at Industrial Light & Magic, guy at Pixar. Older-sounding lady at MGM.”
“What have they offered you?”
“First of all, I’ll be honest,” I said. “They haven’t offered anything yet—they haven’t even seen the videos yet. I have yet to send them. They’ve only expressed their interest in seeing the videos. Secondly, if they had made offers, who are we kidding? I’m gonna tell you the offers at this early juncture when you’re offering me unserious garbage talk? If you want,” I said, “I can give you their names, the people at the studios, and their numbers even, in case you don’t have them, and you can go on ahead and call them up, or have Frick or Frack here call them up, and ask them what their interest is, and how much it’s worth. We both win that way, right? Win-win, win-win. Because you, Lilly, you get to develop a sense of how interested the others are, and of what they might offer and ex-cetera ex-cetera, and at the same time I benefit, because you, being the great Lilly Wachowski, by asking all these people about my home videos, you’re actually helping raise the value of those videos—it’ll up my bids once they start making bids, right? I mean, if you want those videos enough to make inquiries, you who has all this great new technology that can like make it happen anyway—make Blank happen anyway like how you were saying—well then they must be worth a hell of a lot, right?”
“I don’t know if I like you,” said Lilly Wachowski. “What would put me in the ballpark?”
“Half a million dollars,” I said.
“I’ll give you three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Four hundred thousand.”
“Four hundred thousand, and I leave with the tapes, you don’t send duplicates to anyone else, you keep no duplicates for yourself, and you sign a contract that grants me exclusive—”
“A cashier’s check for four hundred thousand,” I said, “and you leave with the tapes and all the other stuff you just said and were about to say and I’ll sign whatever, but not til I get the four hundred thousand, and if I don’t have it by noon tomorrow, I’m going to the PO and sending the tapes to the other interested parties.”
“I think I do like you, then,” she said. “Is your novel any good?”
I said, “I think I like you, too, Lilly. I meant what I said about your movies, and I even do care you lived in Chicago, actually, and so for that very reason, when you give me my money, I’ll throw in a gratis copy of No Please Don’t, which, yeah, I’d say it’s pretty fucking good.”
We shook hands. The following morning, she returned with a lawyer, all went as discussed, the sale made final, and, after they left, I remember I was looking at the $400,000 check on the table, thinking about how good and happy I felt, which is to say very good and happy indeed, and yet no better or happier than I’d felt the day before or the day before that.