Film School: Part Four

Mike went the next few days without opening his document of plans, without really thinking about it. There were other things to concentrate on, like work and school and the inevitability of death and the fact that Sarah still didn’t know that he existed, despite multiple attempts to get her attention. Really the whole situation with her reeked of middle school. Maybe relationships were like that, forever feeling juvenile and pathetic, even when you were older and over it.
It was silly. He was silly. She was silly. School was silly.
And so he opened the document again, this time while Grant was there. Mike knew that Grant wasn’t fully on board with the idea, but it was okay. When he saw how great this movie was going to be, he would get on board with the idea, and probably say that it had all been his idea in the first place. Clearly, he would win on this issue, which was a good thing, because there was no way Mike could handle it all on his own.
Vivian, he realized, was going to be an issue. She was sort of friends with Grant, for some strange, inconceivable reason. If he was to be involved in a major way, then she would have to involve herself too. Vivian was the kind of a crazy control freak.
Crap.
The next time he saw Grant he wanted to bring it up, he was thinking about it the whole time they were talking, but he couldn’t find a way to say it without going outright and saying “ I hate Vivian. “
He couldn’t do that, but he had to do something.
As Grant was walking away, towards his next class, he blurted out, unintentionally, “Vivan knows.”
Grant turned around, slowly, puzzled. “What does Vivian know?”
“She knows about the movie.”
“What movie?”
“The movie we’re making.”
“We’re not making a movie, Mike. We’re going to school.”
“We can do both.”
“Not well. You get one or the other or half ass on both. I want school, Mike.”
Mike gave him a condescending look. “Grant, let’s face the music.”
“Face the music? Really? Such a cliche’d line.”
“You know what I mean. Facts. Reality. You’re going to have to see the truth. You don’t give a damn about school because you’re a little rich boy who doesn’t even need college and daddy’s paying for everything you need, and he’ll keep on paying for as long as you need. You don’t have anything in your life that you’ve ever worked for. This is something that you can work for, that all of us can work for.”
“Mike, you don’t have a clue. Get out of here.” His voice was lower than it had been before, and he spoke slowly, as if every word was taking extreme effort on his part.
“Just because you’re too stupid to try anything at all doesn’t mean that you have to hold everyone else back!”
“Just because you’re too pathetic to do anything on your own doesn’t mean you have to drag other people along on your stupid ideas.”
And with that, Mike left the room and Grant, pausing for a second to ponder Mike’s new obsession, got back to his previous occupation. It was stupid, wasn’t it? Mike had those kinds of ideas all the time, Grant had seen this sort of thing before. Last month he had decided to start a business farming cockroaches, and thrown away the idea when he realized that he was terrified of cockroaches. Was this the same thing?
But movies were different. Mike really loved movies, more than anyone else he knew. He could give you the plot and starring actors of every movie he had ever seen. Even animated movies, which neither of them had seen in the past fifteen years. He was obsessed, so if he could succeed at anything (a questionable concept) he could succeed at this. They were film students, anyway. Making movies was the kind of thing people like them did. Was it really unreasonable? A cockroach farm was unreasonable. No one farmed cockroaches. But people made movies all the time. Maybe they didn’t make money at it, and maybe no one ever saw them, but it happened. So...why couldn’t it happen for them?
Clearly, it couldn’t happen for them because they were not the right people. They were not the right ones who had the right set of skills to make something happen. Or...were they?
They weren’t, Grant assured himself. They couldn’t be.
He went back to playing video games.
Grant had never been the kind of person who cared. Some people would have considered this a personality flaw or a lack of character. He did not. He considered his mentality to be a result of a privileged upbringing lacking extreme hardship, for which he considered himself to be incredibly lucky. He didn’t have to work hard for anything in his life, and it had given him a unique, if rosy, outlook on life. It was neither good nor bad, it just was, and it could not and would not be changed at present. He would cope. He would move on. He would never be the kind of celebrity who went to third-world countries to adopt babies and be photographed doing charitable works. He would be sheltered and he would be privileged, and that would be okay with him and everyone else.
Was there something wrong with that?