Beautiful Ruins Read Online Free PDF

but the rest is just as she imagined— great résumé, wonderful references, impressive interview . They’ve met with the full museum planning board, and after much deliberation (they offered it to someone who passed, she figures) they’ve decided to offer her the job. And with that James nods at Bryan, who slides a manila envelope forward on the little round table. Claire picks up the envelope, opens it a bit, just enough to see the words “Confidentiality Agreement.” Before she can go further, James puts out a cautioning hand. “There is one thing you should know before you look at our offer,” he says, and for the first time one of them breaks eye contact: Bryan, looking around the room to see who might be listening.
    Shit. Claire riffles through worst-case scenarios: The pay is in cocaine; she has to kill the interim curator first; it’s a porn film museum —
    Instead, James says, “Claire, how much do you know about Scientology?”
    Ten minutes later—having begged the weekend to think over their generous offer—Claire is driving to work, thinking: This doesn’t change anything, does it? Okay, so her dream film museum is a front for a cult—wait, that’s not fair. She knows Scientologists and they’re no more cultish than the stiff Lutherans on her mother’s side or her father’s secular Jews. But isn’t that how it will be perceived? That she’s managing a museum full of the shit Tom Cruise couldn’t unload at his garage sale?
    James insisted that the museum would have no connection to the church, except to provide initial funding; that the collection would start with the donations of some church members, but the vast majority of the museum would be up to her to build. “This is the church’s way of giving back to an industry that nourished our members for years,” Bryan said. And they loved her ideas—interactive CG exhibits for kids, a Silent Film vault, a rotating weekly film series, a dedicated film festival each year. She sighs; of all the things they could be, why Scientologists?
    Claire mulls as she drives, zombie-like—all basic animal reflex. Her commute to the studio is a second-nature maze of cut-offs and lane changes, shoulders, commuter lanes, residential streets, alleys, bike lanes, and parking lots, devised to get her to the studio each day precisely eighteen minutes after she leaves her condo.
    With a nod to the security guard, she drives through the studio gate and parks. She grabs her bag and walks toward the office, even her footfalls deliberating ( quit, stay, quit, stay ). Michael Deane Productions is housed in an old writer’s bungalow on the Universal lot, wedged between soundstages, offices, and film sets. Michael doesn’t work for the studio anymore, but he made so much money for it in the 1980s and 1990s that they’ve agreed to keep him around, a scythe on the wall of a tractor plant. The lot office is part of a first-look production deal Michael signed a few years back when he needed cash, giving the studio the first crack at whatever he produced (not much, as it turned out).
    Inside the office, Claire turns on the lights, slides behind her desk, and switches on her computer. She goes straight to the Thursday night box-office numbers, early openers, and weekend holdovers, looking for some sign of hope that she might have missed, a last-second break in trend—but the numbers show what they’ve shown for years: it’s all kid stuff, all presold comic-book sequel 3-D CGI crap, all within a range of algorithmic box-office projections based on past-performance-trailer-poster-foreign-market-test-audience reaction. Movies are nothing more than concession-delivery now, ads for new toys, video game launches. Adults will wait three weeks to get a decent film on demand, or they’ll watch smart TV—and so what passes for theatrical releases are hopped-up fantasy video games for gonad-swollen boys and their bulimic dates. Film—her first love—is dead.
    She can pinpoint