Book Six, Chapter 68: The Game Plan

We picked five players to go on the rescue in Eternal Savers Club.

The more players you had, the more characters you had to share screen time with, and because Bobby’s rescue trope was about completing subplots from the failed storyline, I worried that we would be hurting for screen time anyway.

There was no way to know until we actually got there and used Bobby’s trope for the first time.

It was Bobby, Kimberly, Antoine, Dina, and me. It was a good mix of some strong On-Screen players with great Off-Screen support. With access to the script from the original storyline, I felt that we would have an easy time developing a plan of action.

But of course, we had to go over everything again before we left, just in case.

We went to the diner. It was a safe place, and we could all pack into a booth with our missing posters stacked in front of us and talk things through.

Kimberly, of course, brought her phone so that we could give her talent agent, Sal, a call.

“Eternal Savers Club, huh?” he asked. “Yeah, that movie’s been in development hell for almost a year at this point. I hear they have to do reshoots. Why are you asking?”

“They’re supposed to be pretty extensive reshoots, right?” Kimberly asked. “Is there a chance that I might be able to squeeze in?”

“I don’t know, Kimberly,” Sal said. “I’m sure they’d take you, but movies with this type of trouble behind the scenes rarely end up being that impressive at the box office. I’ll see what I can do.”

We heard him shuffling around papers in the background and sighing. It was no surprise that he was going to be negative about it. We didn’t have a big advantage in this storyline level-wise. Even with the twenty-five percent off gimmick, the storyline was probably higher than our average Plot Armor because it was a rescue.

But that was the game. You couldn’t play on easy mode because there was no easy mode. If you went too slow or you played too cautiously, you just lost. It might take a while to find out, but that was what happened.

“All right, here it is,” he said. “I actually reached out to the studio about this film months ago, and it does seem like they’re just trying to attach any star power they can to it. So if I gave them the call, there’s a good chance we might get their wheels turning and get this thing made.”

He was being very somber.

“What exactly was wrong with the original?” Kimberly asked.

Sal had some thoughts.

“They spent millions of dollars on the shoot, and at the end of the thing, they only had maybe thirty minutes of usable footage. Apparently, the director who shot the original stuff was trying a novel approach where they made major modifications to the screenplay that pretty much cut characters out altogether, which cascaded further down in the script to make entire scenes impossible to shoot.

“The good news is that the director is six feet under. The bad news is that the studio is going to want to use a good chunk of the footage that it spent so much money on. So now you’re going to have to come in and film basically a completely separate movie that takes place at the same time as the first movie and can pick up from where the other one left off, without any contradictions, and without using most of the original actors.

“It’s a nightmare, sweetie. And now the tone is a bit different. The original screenplay was supposed to be a comedy, but then they decided to make it dark and scary. And now, with the most recent rewrites, it’s a bit more sentimental. I don’t know, Kimberly. If you wanna do it, I’m sure you’ll do great, but even being the best part of a terrible movie might not be a good career move.”

Sal could be long-winded, but that was ridiculous.

“The storyline’s about a cult or something like that at a big box store, right?” Kimberly asked.

“That’s one of the things it’s about,” he answered. “But now they’re going in other directions—something about the nature of grief being a major theme.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Strange,” I said. “I just assumed that for a story about a big box store, it would be some heavy-handed criticism of capitalism or something like that. Anti-consumer culture, that sort of thing.”

“Wait, who was that? Who’s talking?” Sal asked.

He did that a lot. If he heard someone other than Kimberly, he would say something like that. He was just playing around. Technically, I wasn’t allowed to use the trope because it was Kimberly’s.

“Sal, I’m going to do it,” Kimberly said. “Are there any surprises I should know about?”

“I wish I could tell you, sweetheart,” Sal said very seriously. “I really do. But movies these days are full of surprises. It’s like they think a film is naked without a twist. I just hope they’ll leave this one out. Good luck. I hope you’ll give me another call soon. We never talk.”

He hung up.

“I’m glad we called him,” I said. “Really helped raise our spirits.”

“Well,” Kimberly said, “we knew this wasn’t going to be easy. But we have to do rescues, right?”