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Matt’s life had gained over the past four months was gone.

CHAPTER SIX
    Eva Quiller used to get claustrophobic in the ticket booth. That was three years ago, when she was just getting started at the New Fairfax Cinema and all she could see were the three walls around her and the window onto the street.
    That was before she came to think of the box office window as a movie screen and the people who came to buy tickets as characters in a film. There was the fat, middle-aged man, looking to find love. There were the hipsters in their stupid hats with their soul patches, whiling away the time before they became rich and famous movie directors. There were the older hippies, who’d given up on dreams of fame and just enjoyed the show. There were the young female geeks, tattooed and pierced, trying to be cool, trying to find love, trying to find fame or just acceptance. Eva supposed she was one of those. But there was one difference between her and nearly everyone else here.
    They all hoped they’d get to meet Barnabas Yancey one day. Eva was sick of the sight of him.
    Barnabas Yancey was the wunderkind of the new cinema. He had made a splash ten years ago with a low-budget crime drama called Crush that had made him the darling of critics and indie-film buffs who had been looking for a new love since Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith had become too hip to be cool. Since then he had made a film a year ranging from postmodern spaghetti westerns ( Once upon a Time in New Mexico ) to gangster epics ( A Handful of Smoke ). They didn’t all make money—in fact, most of them had flopped—appealing largely to graduate film students who could understand his references to other movies. But he kept working and he kept making deals with studios that felt assured that one day his “buzz” would turn into boffo box office.
    Barnabas hadn’t gone to film school. He hadn’t even gone to college. In actual fact, his first name wasn’t even Barnabas; it was Norman. He’d taken the name in honor of Barnabas Collins, the lead vampire from Dark Shadows . That was another of the obscure but knowing references that made the film geeks love him so much.
    He (like Tarantino before him) had gotten his education in a video store. He’d worked as a clerk (shades of Kevin Smith) in a family owned store in Los Feliz and scraped together enough money to make that first film dealing drugs and (according to legend spread by Barnabas himself) selling blow jobs on Santa Monica Boulevard. That first film exploded like a supernova on the Internet and at the Sundance Film Festival (through canny marketing by Simon Einstein, the legendary producer who snapped up the distribution rights) and became a modest but very noisy hit.
    Barnabas never looked back. He spent his days partying with all manner of drugs and all manner of women (ranging from porn stars to pop stars) and his nights writing new screenplays. When he wasn’t directing on the set, he was either in rehab or in relapse. He even went into a coma for three days and came out of it with an idea for a movie, Zzzzzz , entirely about a man in a coma.
    It reportedly netted less money than any film he’d made thus far.
    But if there was one thing Barnabas loved (and it may have been the only thing), it was movies. Not films. Movies. The kind of Grindhouse cinema that people didn’t make anymore because everybody was too smart and too self-aware. Movies that were made in the seventies, on a shoestring, by people with no real knowledge of what they were doing other than wanting to make movies and make a buck. Movies like Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue .
    So for his fortieth birthday (how can a wunderkind be that old?), he bought himself a present: the New Fairfax Cinema, down the street from Eddie’s Deli and just across from Larchmont High School. The old, ornate movie theater was opened in the thirties, a minor movie palace in the Zoetrope chain. It had gone through many incarnations since then, from