Director Jail
After ten years in exile, a washed-up film director's past comes back to haunt him.
Doniel is a film director who believes he is under someone's hypnotic influence. Ten years ago on the set of Paradise Five, he cast an unknown young man named Jackarind Bellows as the lead. When Jack insisted on doing his own dangerous stunts, Doniel had a car door welded shut to stop him. The plan backfired when the car started on fire with the young actor trapped inside. Read the previous installments here.
Director Jail
They shut down the production immediately. At first it was just for a week, then for the rest of the month, then indefinitely. Jackarind Bellows had suffered serious burns and extensive facial scarring. When Doniel went to visit him in his room at Cedar Sinai, he’d nearly recoiled at the sight of the boy.
“The good news,” Doniel said, as if it were his place to say anything at all, “is that they can do amazing things these days. Skin grafts. Reconstructive surgery.”
“Yeah, they tried,” Jack said.
Doniel frowned. He’d heard nothing about any surgical procedures.
“I told them to go to hell. I don’t want it.”
“You don’t want… surgery?”
“I don’t want to pretend to be something I’m not. I don’t want to walk around with skin from my ass glued to my face while everyone smiles and tells me how great I look.”
“I’m not sure exactly how it works, but I don’t think that’s-”
“I don’t want it!” The boy was screaming now. “This is me!”
And there it was. The dawning realization that Doniel’s worst fears had been correct. The boy was deeply disturbed. And now, if he got his way, he would be permanently disfigured as well.
Doniel left him like that. Alone, snarling is in his hospital bed. It would be ten years before he saw his face again, in that very building no less.
Over the next several weeks, the studio began its investigation of the “on-set incident.” If Jack refused surgery, then it was his own fault. Doniel had done what he did to try and save the boy’s life, hadn’t he? And Jack was alive. Wasn’t he?
When the investigators sat Doniel down and asked him about the welded metal found on the car’s driver-side door, he had surprisingly little trouble saying with a straight face, “I don’t know anything about that.”
It helped that, for once, a tragedy had worked in his favor. Some 36 hours after the accident, the production’s award-nominated stunt coordinator had been found by his wife in their guest bedroom with a needle in his arm, dead of an overdose. Or perhaps it wasn’t the accident it appeared to be. Perhaps his share of the guilt had weighed on him so heavily that he’d taken his own life.
Perhaps.
When the special effects technician was asked about welding the door shut, he explained that the order came directly from the coordinator, and the trail went cold. The only question was whether or not he had told anyone the full story before his untimely death. There was no way of knowing. All Doniel could do was wait.
At first there was the expected flurry of paperwork—statements to sign, lawyers to consult, insurance forms to fill out. The production was dead. Now it was just a matter of waiting for a lawsuit from the victim.
But it never came. If the studio preemptively settled with Jackarind Bellows, nobody told Doniel. He sat in fear for two years before realizing the other shoe might never drop.
If there were whispers about his culpability, he didn't hear them. He didn't hear much of anything anymore. Overnight he had become radioactive in the industry. His own agent had stopped taking his calls.
As usual, when it came to matters of emotional turmoil, Doniel’s brother Cooper was worse than useless. The brash, abrasive quality that made him so successful in business made him a horrendous companion in times of psychological strain.
“You’re in rough shape. It might be a lost cause,” he told Doniel several weeks after the incident. Cooper had stopped by to help Doniel understand just how much trouble his career was in. Of course, Doniel needed no convincing.
“I mean it, buddy. You’re fucked. It will eventually blow over-”
“I know.”
“-but then again, maybe it won’t.”
Cooper had a perpetually restless air about him, like he was dying to pace around the room, any room, but was just barely able to restrain himself. It gave others the feeling that Cooper had one foot out the door at all times, which created an unnerving sense of limbo, regardless of whether you wanted him to stay or go. At this particular moment, Doniel would have liked him to go.
“You can get out of director-jail. But you need to be a fighter. And let’s face it; you’re not a fighter.”
“What? I’m a fighter.”
“No, Don. You’re a cuck.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You took your wife’s name, for Christ’s sake. I don’t judge you for it. But let’s be honest, you’re a bit of a soyboy.”
“I’m not really sure what we’re talking about anymore.”
“We’re talking about you!” Cooper was screaming now. “Stop being such a cuck and go take what’s yours! Pick up the first blunt object you can find and just start beating people to death with it. You need to do whatever it takes. You understand?”
Doniel did not understand. But he needed to be alone now. For days, weeks, months. Maybe years. And Cooper wouldn’t leave until Doniel reassured him that he’d been heard.
“I understand now. And I’ll take that under advisement. Thank you, Cooper.”
They didn’t speak again for the better part of a year.
Family Man
The ensuing decade felt more like a century. The interminable awkwardness of power players avoiding him at the grocery store slowly gave way to an even more disconcerting phenomenon. Soon they were no longer avoiding him, because they no longer knew him. Soon after that, the power players became faces that Doniel himself no longer recognized.
He’d been frugal all his life, as frugal as someone could be in a city like Los Angeles. It was paying dividends now. His family wanted for little. They didn’t have to sell the house—though downsizing was never far from his mind—and while it might have been helpful if Nell had gotten a slightly higher paying job, her work as a part-time unlicensed physical therapist combined with his occasional gigs directing commercials for potato chips and gambling apps allowed them to keep their heads well above water.
Now Doniel had more time than ever to focus on his children, though they were, on the whole, indifferent towards him. If he was being honest, the feeling was mutual.
The notion that any of the Sherman children were equipped for a life outside the entertainment industry was a fantasy that Doniel and Nell liked to entertain from time to time, but which was in no way borne out by the facts. It wasn’t so much their lack of even the most rudimentary math and science skills—though that was growing more apparent and seemingly irreversible with every passing year. It was something else, something far more abstract and depressing.
Doniel’s brother Cooper had said it best one night. They’d invited him over for dinner and, after the children all went to bed, he sat at the table frowning, brow furrowed. “Something about those kids,” he said. “They don’t have… the ‘It factor.’ You know what I mean?”
“I’m sure I don’t,” Doniel said, his voice rising in anger.
But, of course, he knew exactly what Cooper meant. And he couldn’t agree more.
The children’s disappointing trajectories were only accelerated by the undue influence of their privileged, entitled peers. It didn’t bode well, for instance, when their eldest son Tarragon announced that his high school’s valedictorian had decided to forego higher education in order to start a “disruptive consulting agency” that would pair designer apparel brands with his father’s celebrity clients to create “high end, co-branded, athleisure footwear experiences.” The endeavor was a massive failure, until being acquired several years later for low-eight figures by a talent agency looking to diversify its portfolio. It was exactly the sort of industry-adjacent faux-entrepreneurship that Doniel worried might end up being the best case scenario for his middling children, should they ever try to break out on their own.
So when Randall James was born, some seven years after Doniel’s career imploded on the set of Paradise Five, Don was determined to do everything in his power to give the boy a long, fruitful life as far from the entertainment industry as humanly possible.
Tarragon, Jenna, and Jordan scoffed when Doniel came home with a stack of high-minded early education materials, books like Quantum Physics for Babies, and Day Trading for Toddlers. Doniel read the books to Randy over and over and over, hoping to see some sort of spark behind the infant’s cold, dead eyes. But there was no spark.
“Whatever you’re trying to do,” Nell told him, “just… give it time.”
But time was of the essence. Every day that passed, Doniel could feel his child absorbing the vacuous Hollywood culture that surrounded them through a kind of catatonic osmosis. Doniel only grew more determined.
“What the hell is that?” Jenna, then nine, asked when he brought home a “DIY Computer Engineering Kit” for his young son. The kit was intended for pre-teens, and Randy was still a toddler, but by now Doniel was convinced the boy was a tactile learner and needed to be engaged as such.
“It’s not for you,” Doniel told her. It came out sounding like an admonishment, but truthfully, he’d meant it as more of an insult. She failed to absorb the intended cruelty.
Randy showed little interest in the toolkit until one day, nearing his third birthday, when he was left unattended in the playroom for several hours. Around noon, Randy’s blood-curdling screams echoed through the house. Don rushed into the playroom, only to find that Randy had re-discovered the toolkit in the bottom of his toy chest and used its working soldering iron to conjoin several circuit boards into a sort of techno-punk Peter Pan hat. He’d put the hat on his head before the solder had cooled.
On the way to the emergency room, Randy announced to his father that he no longer wanted to be a costume designer.
“You… wanted to be a costume designer?”
Randy squirmed as he adjusted the icepack against into his badly burnt scalp. “Not anymore.”
“I’m impressed you got that soldering iron to work. I don’t think I would even know how to do that. You could be an engineer. Or, like, a welder.”
“What’s a welder?”
“You don’t want to be a welder. But you could be. That’s my point. You can be anything. You’re strong and smart.”
“No…” Randy countered, his voice trailing off as he gazed out the window. Doniel waited for a follow-up that never came, then drove the rest of the way in silence.
The parking valet outside the emergency room seemed in good spirits. “Right this way, sir,” he said gesturing towards the lobby. Doniel tipped him generously and walked in. They walked through the metal detector, and Randy scampered off to find a seat while Doniel checked him in.
When Doniel came to join his son on the plush couch in the room’s far corner, the boy was holding a glossy issue of The Hollywood Reporter that he’d plucked from a stack of periodicals. “Daddy, what’s a super agent?”
“There’s no such thing as super agents, Randy.” He took the magazine from the boy and flipped through it. He reached the end, flipped backwards absently, and was about to close it when a picture caught his eye.
His jaw dropped.
He’d heard about the meteoric rise of a new executive, recently promoted to President of the town’s oldest studio. But he hadn’t paid much attention. Not until now. On page 2, in a spread on the studio’s latest premieres, there he was. That jagged scar running down his race. “Studio Head Jackie Bellows Attends the Premiere of the Crayon Movie.”
Jack Bellows. Returned from oblivion. Staring through the camera lens, through the ink and paper, directly into Doniel’s soul.
Some part of Doniel knew: this was the beginning of the end. His past had come back for him. If he was smart, he would run for his life. But all he could do was stare.
He pulled out his phone and shot off a text to his neighbor, a prominent talent agent.
“Can you get me Jackie Bellows contact info?”
The response came in immediately. “Lol. Sure. One sec.”
The next installment of Dream Wars comes out soon. Subscribe to get it directly in your inbox. Thanks for reading!
Welcome back.