The air inside Soundstage Two was thick and deliberately uncomfortable.
Daniel had asked the facilities crew to shut down the massive industrial air conditioning units an hour before the actors walked onto the floor. The heavy, high-wattage lighting rigs suspended from the ceiling were already baking the room, pushing the temperature into the low eighties.
It wasn't a mistake. They were shooting the interior of Ken Rosenberg's law office, and the scene was supposed to take place in the sweltering, sticky heat of a Miami afternoon. Daniel didn't want to rely entirely on the makeup department to spray fake sweat on the actors' foreheads. He wanted them to actually feel the heat.
The set itself was a masterpiece of cheap, desperate 1980s sleaze. It was a cramped room with cheap wood-veneer paneling. The desk was buried under stacks of manila folders, empty styrofoam coffee cups, and three overflowing glass ashtrays. The blinds on the window were partially bent, allowing harsh, artificial sunlight to cut through the hazy, smoke-filled air of the room.
Daniel stood near the camera dolly, holding a script rolled up in his hand.
"Alright, let's look at the blocking," Daniel said, walking into the middle of the set.
Al Pacino and Steve Buscemi walked in behind him. Pacino was wearing the cyan palm-tree shirt, the top two buttons undone. Buscemi was wearing his wrinkled brown suit, already looking physically uncomfortable in the heat of the stage.
"Tommy just walked in," Daniel explained, pointing to the heavy wooden door. "The deal just went south. You lost the money, you lost the drugs, and you had to shoot your way out of the docks. You are pissed, but you aren't yelling yet. You're trying to figure out what happened."
Pacino nodded slowly, his hands in his pockets. He walked over to the door and stood there, finding his starting position.
"Steve," Daniel turned to Buscemi. "Rosenberg is already at a ten. He set up the deal, which means he's the one the mafia is going to blame. He's probably been doing lines of coke since he got the phone call. I want you pacing behind the desk. Don't sit down. Just keep touching things. Pick up a file, put it down. Move the phone. You can't stay still."
"Got it," Buscemi said, stepping behind the cluttered desk. He picked up a pen and started clicking it rapidly.
"Let's run the dialogue," Daniel said, stepping back out of the frame and standing next to Bob Elswit, the cinematographer.
Pacino opened the door and walked into the office. He didn't rush. He took slow, heavy steps, letting the silence stretch out before he spoke.
"It was a setup, Ken," Pacino said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
Buscemi immediately started moving. He dropped the pen, picked up a stack of papers, and practically threw them back onto the desk.
"A setup? What do you mean a setup?" Buscemi stammered, his voice pitching up, his eyes wide and frantic. "I used the Vance brothers! They're reliable! They've been moving product through the port for two years without a single hitch!"
"Well, they hit a hitch tonight," Pacino said, walking further into the room. He bypassed the chairs entirely and leaned his hip against the edge of Rosenberg's desk, invading the lawyer's space. "Somebody knew we were there. They had a shooter on the roof. They took Sonny's money."
Buscemi grabbed his own hair, turning away from the desk to pace the short length of the back wall.
"Sonny's money," Buscemi muttered, his breathing getting shallow. He spun back around, pointing a shaking finger at Pacino. "Tommy, do you understand what happens now? Sonny Forelli isn't going to write this off as a bad day at the track! He's going to send guys down here! Guys with baseball bats and trash bags! They're going to chop us up and feed us to the alligators out on the highway!"
Pacino watched him spin out. He didn't move. He let Buscemi completely unravel for a few seconds.
"Shut up, Ken," Pacino said quietly.
Buscemi kept talking. "I can't go to jail, Tommy! I'm claustrophobic! And I can't get murdered, I have a sensitive stomach!"
"Ken," Pacino said, just a fraction louder.
"We need to go to the airport," Buscemi rambled, looking around the room frantically for a suitcase that wasn't there. "We get on a plane to South America. I know a guy in Bogota who owes me a favor—"
Pacino suddenly reached out, his hand snapping forward with terrifying speed, and grabbed Buscemi by the lapels of his wrinkled brown suit.
Buscemi physically jumped, cutting off his own sentence with a sharp gasp.
Pacino pulled him halfway across the desk. The intensity in Pacino's dark eyes was paralyzing.
"Nobody is going to Bogota," Pacino said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, deadly whisper. "And nobody is getting fed to anything. You're going to pick up that phone. You're going to call your contacts in the police department. And you are going to find out who jumped my deal. Because I'm going to find them, and I'm going to take their hearts out. Do you understand me?"
Buscemi stared at him, paralyzed, a bead of real sweat rolling down the side of his face. He swallowed hard and gave a tiny, jerky nod.
"Good," Pacino muttered, letting go of the suit jacket and stepping back.
"Okay, hold it there," Daniel said, walking back onto the set. "That was great. The pacing is perfect. Steve, when he grabs you, try to knock over the cup of pens on the desk. Let it spill everywhere, it adds to the mess. Al, your timing is perfect. Don't change a thing."
Daniel turned to the camera crew.
"Let's get the master shot first," Daniel instructed. "Bob, put the camera on the dolly track. Start wide on the door, then push in slowly as Tommy walks to the desk. I want the audience to feel the room getting smaller."
The crew jumped into action. The dolly grip checked the wheels on the metal track. The lighting assistants tweaked the angle of the artificial sunlight pouring through the blinds to make sure it hit the smoke in the air perfectly.
"Picture is up!" the first assistant director yelled out. "Settle down everyone!"
The low murmur of the crew died out completely.
"Roll sound," Daniel said.
"Speeding," the sound mixer confirmed.
"Roll camera."
"Rolling."
The clapperboard snapped shut in front of the lens.
"Action," Daniel said quietly.
Pacino opened the door and walked in. The scene played out exactly as they had rehearsed it, but with the added pressure of the rolling camera, the performances tightened up even more. Buscemi's frantic pacing felt incredibly genuine, his nervous energy bouncing off the cheap wood paneling. Pacino was a brick wall, absorbing all the panic and reflecting it back as pure aggression.
When Pacino grabbed the suit jacket, Buscemi's elbow hit the plastic cup on the desk. Pens and pencils clattered loudly onto the floor, the sharp noise perfectly punctuating the threat.
"Cut," Daniel called out. "That was good. Let's do it again right away. Reset the pens. Steve, take it just a little bit faster on the Bogota line. You're so panicked you can barely get the words out."
They shot the master angle three times. Then they moved the camera to get the over-the-shoulder coverage, shooting from behind Pacino to focus on Buscemi's terrified reactions, and then flipping the setup to shoot from behind Buscemi to catch the cold, dead look in Pacino's eyes.
It was a slow, methodical process. There was no screaming, no massive explosions. Just a quiet room, hot lights, and two actors dialing in the exact rhythm of a conversation.
Daniel checked the playback monitor after the final take. The footage looked incredible. The heavy shadows, the sweat on their faces, the aggressive cyan shirt against the drab brown office. It felt entirely lived-in.
"That's a print on the coverage," Daniel announced. "Good work. Let's take a twenty-minute reset while the crew moves the camera outside the office door. Go get some water."
Pacino let out a breath, rubbing his neck as he walked off the set toward the craft services table. Buscemi followed right behind him, fanning himself with a file folder.
Daniel pulled his headset off, letting it hang around his neck. He grabbed a bottle of water and walked out the heavy soundstage doors to get some fresh air while the grips tore down the dolly track.
---
Rick chewed on the inside of his cheek, staring through the dirty windshield of his rented Toyota Corolla.
It was eight o'clock at night. He had been sitting in the driver's seat for the last nine hours, parked halfway down the winding residential road outside Daniel Miller's Bel Air estate. The engine was off to save gas, and the inside of the car smelled like stale french fries and cheap deodorant.
Rick was a freelance paparazzi photographer, and he was currently having a terrible month. The market was completely flooded with shots of Margot Robbie running errands, and the magazines were paying less and less for them.
He needed a whale. He needed a shot that nobody else had.
He had tipped a guy twenty bucks at a local coffee shop to find out that Daniel Miller rarely left his house before noon when he wasn't in active production. But the problem was the house itself. The walls were ten feet high, covered in thick ivy, and the security gate was completely opaque. Rick couldn't see a damn thing inside.
He took a sip of warm water from a plastic bottle, keeping his eyes locked on the heavy iron gates down the street.
Suddenly, the red light on top of the call box flashed.
Rick sat up straight, tossing the water bottle into the passenger seat. He grabbed his heavy DSLR camera, resting it on his lap.
The iron gates slowly swung open. A sleek, black Range Rover pulled out, turning right and heading down the hill toward Sunset Boulevard.
Rick immediately started his engine. He didn't pull out right away. He waited ten seconds, letting the Range Rover get a solid lead, before easing off the curb and following it.
Tailing a car in Los Angeles traffic was an art form. You couldn't get too close, or the driver would spot you in the rearview mirror. You couldn't get too far behind, or some idiot in a Prius would cut you off and you'd lose the target at a red light.
Rick kept three cars between himself and the Range Rover as they merged onto the 405 North.
They drove for thirty minutes, heading deep into the San Fernando Valley. Rick frowned as the Range Rover exited the freeway. They weren't heading toward the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. They were heading into a mostly industrial area near the edge of the mountains.
The Range Rover turned onto a wide, newly paved private access road.
Rick hit the brakes, pulling his Corolla over to the dirt shoulder. He couldn't follow them down there. The road was blocked by a heavy chain-link security gate with a guard booth.
He watched the Range Rover get waved through the gate and disappear down the road.
Rick killed his headlights. He picked up his phone and opened a satellite map app. He zoomed in on his current location.
The map showed a massive, empty dirt lot. But Rick knew maps were usually a year or two out of date. He looked out his window at the rolling dirt hills surrounding the valley. The property the Range Rover just drove into was massive, bordered by a long, high ridge on the east side.
Rick looked at his camera. He looked at the dark ridge.
He grabbed his heavy camera bag from the backseat, slung it over his shoulder, and got out of the car.
The hike was miserable. The dirt was loose, slipping under his sneakers. He had to push his way through dry, scratchy brush, sweating heavily in the cool night air. His lungs were burning by the time he finally crested the top of the east ridge.
Rick dropped to his knees, hiding behind a thick cluster of dry bushes. He unzipped his bag and pulled out his camera, attaching his largest, heaviest 400mm telephoto lens.
He crawled forward on his stomach until he reached the edge of the drop-off. He looked down into the valley.
He expected to see some boring, half-finished warehouses, or maybe a dirt lot where they parked studio trucks.
Rick actually stopped breathing for a second.
Down in the basin, sitting completely isolated in the middle of the California dirt, was a massive, glowing, violently bright slice of a city.
He pulled the camera up to his eye and looked through the viewfinder. The lens magnified the scene perfectly.
It was a street. But it wasn't a modern street. The pavement was slick and wet. A massive hotel facade painted in pink and green stood on the left, glowing with miles of hot pink neon tubing. Extras on roller skates were milling around. Parked right in the middle of the street was a pristine white 1986 Ferrari Testarossa.
It looked like 1980s Miami.
Rick's heart started hammering against his ribs. Nobody knew about this. The trades hadn't reported anything. Daniel Miller had just finished Joker, and he was already shooting a massive, big-budget 80s movie in total secret.
Rick frantically adjusted his focus ring, scanning the set through the lens. He needed a face. He needed the director, or an actor, to prove what he was looking at.
He panned the lens toward the video monitors set up near the curb.
There he was. Daniel Miller. He was wearing a headset, pointing at something down the street.
Rick held his breath and held the shutter button down. Click-click-click-click. He fired off twenty shots in rapid succession, capturing Daniel in sharp focus.
He kept scanning. The camera moved slightly to the left.
Standing next to a lighting rig, talking to a crew member, was Al Pacino.
Rick blinked, pulling his eye away from the camera for a second just to make sure he wasn't hallucinating. Al Pacino. The legendary, serious dramatic actor. And he was wearing a bright blue, short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt covered in palm trees, with feathered hair.
It was the most absurd, incredible thing Rick had ever seen.
He slammed his eye back to the viewfinder. Click-click-click-click-click. He emptied his memory buffer, taking over fifty photos of Pacino in the ridiculous outfit, capturing the neon lights reflecting off the white Ferrari in the background.
He had it. He had the scoop of the century. Entertainment Weekly or TMZ would pay him fifty grand for these photos by midnight.
Suddenly, the dirt around Rick lit up like the surface of the sun.
Rick gasped, flinching violently. A massive, high-powered spotlight beam had just swept across the top of the ridge, hitting him dead center.
"Hey! You on the ridge! Stay right there!" a voice boomed out of a megaphone from down in the valley.
Rick panicked. He grabbed his camera, shoving it into the bag without taking the lens off. He scrambled backward, ripping his jeans on a sharp rock, and half-ran, half-slid down the back side of the dirt hill in total darkness.
He heard the sound of an ATV engine revving to life somewhere down below.
Rick sprinted the last hundred yards to his car, his chest heaving, adrenaline flooding his system. He threw his bag into the passenger seat, jammed the key into the ignition, and tore away from the shoulder, kicking up a massive cloud of dust as he sped down the dark road back toward the freeway.
He gripped the steering wheel, laughing out loud, his hands shaking. He had done it. He had infiltrated the most secret movie set in Hollywood, got the golden photos, and escaped right under their noses.
He was going to have an expensive smoke.
---
Twenty minutes earlier, down on the backlot.
Daniel stood near the video village, taking a sip from a bottle of water. They were prepping the exterior set for a wide tracking shot down Ocean Drive. The crew was busy adjusting the neon tubing on the hotel facade and spraying more water onto the asphalt to keep the reflections sharp.
Tom Wiley walked over, looking at a clipboard.
"Pacino is ready," Tom said, checking his watch. "If we move fast, we can probably get three takes before we lose the extras to meal break."
"No rush," Daniel said, looking down the street at the white Ferrari. "Let them take their time with the lighting. The neon needs to pop perfectly against the dark sky."
From the edge of the set, a man in a dark tactical jacket walked briskly toward them. It was Martinez, the head of Miller Studios security. He was a former military contractor, a guy who rarely raised his voice but commanded instant authority.
Martinez walked up to Daniel, stopping a respectful distance away so the crew wouldn't overhear.
"Daniel," Martinez said quietly, keeping his face entirely neutral.
"What's up, Martinez?" Daniel asked, turning away from the monitors.
Martinez pointed a finger subtly toward the dark, rolling hills on the east side of the property.
"My perimeter guys on the east fence just radioed in," Martinez reported. "We've got a trespasser. A guy parked a sedan on the main road and hiked up the dirt ridge. He's sitting in the brush right now with a telephoto lens pointed straight at the set."
Tom Wiley immediately frowned, looking toward the dark hills. "Damn it. The trades are going to have photos of the set by tomorrow morning. Do you want to shut the lights down?"
Daniel didn't panic. He didn't yell at security. He looked up at the dark ridge, completely invisible against the night sky, and let out a soft, thoughtful hum.
"Martinez," Daniel said, crossing his arms. "Can your guys get up there quickly?"
"I have two guys on ATVs sitting at the base of the hill right now," Martinez replied instantly. "Say the word, and they'll be up there in ninety seconds. We can bag the guy, confiscate his memory cards, and hand him over to the local PD for trespassing."
"No," Daniel said.
Martinez blinked, slightly confused. "You don't want us to stop him?"
"I want you to wait exactly five minutes," Daniel instructed calmly. "Give him enough time to get his camera focused. Let him take a bunch of photos of the hotel, the cars, and the wardrobe. Make sure he gets a good look at Pacino in that shirt."
Tom stared at him. "Dan, what are you talking about? We've kept this project completely under wraps for a reason. If he sells those photos, the secret is out."
Daniel turned to Tom, a slow, highly calculated smile spreading across his face.
"Tom, think about the psychology of the internet for a second," Daniel said, keeping his voice low. "If Elena sends out a polished, official press release tomorrow morning saying, 'Miller Studios is directing Al Pacino in an 80s crime movie,' what happens?"
"The trades report it," Tom said. "It gets a news cycle."
"Exactly. It's a standard press release. It's safe. It's boring," Daniel explained, gesturing to the glowing neon set around them. "But what happens if, at three in the morning, TMZ and Reddit suddenly get flooded with blurry, low-res, stolen photos of a massive, secret neon city in the middle of nowhere? What happens when people zoom in and see Al Pacino wearing a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt next to a Ferrari?"
Tom's eyes widened slightly as he caught on to the strategy.
"It creates a mystery," Daniel continued. "The internet loses its mind. They start tearing the photos apart, trying to figure out what the movie is. They build the hype themselves. They generate millions of dollars worth of marketing buzz, and it doesn't cost us a single dime. The word 'leaked' is ten times more powerful than the word 'announced'."
Martinez crossed his arms, a faint smirk touching his lips. "So you want to use him."
"I want to use him," Daniel nodded. "But we have to make it look real. If he just takes the photos and walks back to his car, he might think it's a setup. He needs to feel like he barely escaped with his life."
Daniel looked back at Martinez.
"Wait five minutes," Daniel ordered. "Then tell your guys to hit him with the high-powered searchlight. Yell at him through a bullhorn. Rev the ATV engines and make a lot of noise. Spook him. Chase him off the ridge, but make sure you don't actually catch him. Let him run back to his car and drive away."
"Understood," Martinez nodded, tapping his earpiece. "Holding for five minutes, then initiating the scare."
Martinez turned and walked away, murmuring instructions into his radio to the guards waiting at the base of the hill.
Tom Wiley looked at Daniel, shaking his head in absolute disbelief.
"You are a very cynical man, Dan," Tom laughed quietly.
"I'm a pragmatic man, Tom," Daniel smiled, turning back to the video village monitors. He looked at the glowing pink neon of the Ocean View Hotel on the screen. "We built a great set. We might as well let the world see it."
Daniel picked up his headset and slipped it over his ears. He grabbed his bottle of water, perfectly content to direct his actors on the ground, while a terrified photographer up on a dirt ridge did his marketing work for him.
-----
A/N: Read ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/AmaanS
Also throw some power stones at the book. I think I should be asking this often but I forget :p