Joe and Umi move to West Cork and get married; childless, they divorce four years later, blaming each other for their sad, aging selves. After a few years apart, they see each other at a concert and are more understanding; they share a glass of wine, laugh at the perspective they lacked, and fall back into bed together. This reconciliation only lasts a few months before they go their own ways, happy at least to be forgiven in the other’s eyes. It’s the same with Dick and Liz: a turbulent ten-year marriage and one truly great film together, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (she gets the Oscar, ironically), then a divorce and a short reprise (more disastrous than Joe and Umi’s) before they drift their own ways, Liz into more marriages, Dick into more cocktails, until, at fifty-eight, he can’t be awakened in his hotel and he dies that day of cerebral hemorrhage, a line from The Tempest apocryphally left on his bed-stand: “Our Revels now are ended—” Orenzio gets drunk one winter and drowns, and Valeria spends the last years of her life living happily with Tomasso the Widower, and the brute Pelle recovers from his gunshot foot, but, having lost his taste for the goon business, works at his brother’s butcher shop and marries a mute girl, and Gualfredo gets a just case of syphilis that blinds him, and the son of Alvis’s friend Richards is wounded in Vietnam, returns home to work as a benefits advocate for veterans, and is eventually elected to the Iowa State Senate, and young Bruno Tursi graduates with degrees in art history and restoration, works for a private firm in Rome cataloguing artifacts and finds a perfect medication to balance his quiet, low-level depression, and P.E. Steve remarries—the sweet, pretty mother of one of his daughter’s softball teammates—and on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of the now—

—all those lovely wrecked lives—

—and in Universal City, California, Claire Silver threatens to quit unless Michael Deane leaves Debra “Dee” Moore and her son alone, and agrees to produce just one project from their trip to Sandpoint: a film based solely on Lydia Parker’s play Front Man, the poignant story of a drug-addicted musician who wanders off into the wilderness and eventually returns to his long-suffering mother and girlfriend. The budget is just $4 million, and after every financier and studio in Hollywood passes, it is funded entirely by Michael Deane himself, although he doesn’t tell Claire that. The film is directed by a young Serbian comic-book artist and auteur, who writes the script himself, based loosely on Lydia’s play, or at least the part of the play he read. The auteur makes the musician younger and, generally, more likeable. And, rather than having issues with his mother, in this version the musician has issues with his dad—so the young director can explore his own feelings for his distant, disapproving father. And, rather than having his girlfriend be a playwright in the Northwest, who takes care of her stepfather, the girlfriend in the film becomes an art teacher who works with poor black kids in Detroit, so that they can get some better music on the sound track and also take advantage of the big “Film in Michigan” tax break. In the final script, the Pat character—whose name is changed to Slade—doesn’t steal from his mother or cheat repeatedly on his girlfriend, but harms only himself with his addiction, itself changed from cocaine to alcohol. (He’s got to be relatable and likeable, Michael and the director agree.) These changes come slowly, one at a time, like adding hot water to a bath, and with each step Claire convinces herself that they’re sticking to the important parts of the story—“to its essence”—and in the end she’s proud of the film, and of her first coproducer credit. Her dad says, “It made me cry.” But the person most moved by Front Man is Daryl, who is still on relationship-probation when Claire brings him to an early screening. Late in the film (after Slade’s girlfriend Penny has confronted the gangbangers threatening the school where she teaches) Slade sends Penny a text message from London: Just let me know you’re okay. Daryl gasps and leans over to Claire, tells her, “I sent you that message.” Claire nods: she’d suggested it to the director. The film ends with Slade being rediscovered by a record executive vacationing in the UK, and headed for success—but on his terms. As Slade’s unpacking his guitar after a show he hears a woman’s voice. “I am okay,” she says, and Slade turns to see Penny, finally answering his text. In the theater, Daryl begins crying, for the film is clearly a harsh love letter from his girlfriend about his porn addiction, for which he agrees to seek treatment. And, in fact, Daryl’s treatment is an unqualified success; his not waking every day at noon to surf Internet porn and sneaking out to strip clubs at night has given him newfound energy and passion for life—which he channels into his relationship with Claire, and into a shop he opens in Brentwood with another former set designer, making custom furniture for industry people. Front Man plays at several festivals, wins the audience award in Toronto, and is generously reviewed. With the foreign box office, it even ends up earning Michael a decent profit—“Sometimes it’s like I shit money,” he tells a profiler for The New Yorker. Claire knows the movie is far from perfect, but with its success, Michael allows her to buy two other scripts for development, Claire happy to no longer expect the dead perfection of museum art, but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life. After some initial buzz, Front Man is passed over by the Academy Awards, but it does garner three Independent Spirit nominations. Michael can’t go to the ceremony (he’s off in Mexico recovering from his divorce and receiving a controversial human-growth hormone treatment), but Claire is happy to represent the film’s producers, Daryl accompanying her in an eggplant-colored tuxedo she finds for him in a thrift store. He looks great, of course. Unfortunately, Front Man doesn’t win any Indie Spirit awards, either, but afterward Claire feels buoyant with achievement (and with the two bottles of ’88 Dom Perignon that Michael generously reserved for her table) and she and Daryl have sex in the limo, after which she convinces the driver to veer through a KFC drive-through for a bucket of Extra Crispy, Daryl nervously fingering the engagement ring in his purple pants pocket—

Shane Wheeler uses the option money from Donner! to rent a small apartment in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Michael Deane gets him a job on a reality show he sells to the Biography Channel based on Shane’s suggestion, called Hunger, about a houseful of bulimics and anorexics. But the show is too sad for even Shane, let alone viewers, and he gets a job as a writer for another show, called Battle Royale, in which famous battles are re-created through computer graphics, so that history is like watching Call of Duty, all accompanied by a fast-moving narration by William Shatner, the scripts written by Shane and two other writers in modern vernacular (“Restricted by their own code of honor, the Spartans were about to get totally stomped . . .”). He continues to work on Donner! in his spare time, until a competing Donner Party project makes it to the screen first—William Eddy portrayed as a lying coward—and this is when Shane finally gives up on cannibals. He also tries once more with Claire, but she seems pretty happy with her boyfriend, and once Shane meets the guy he understands: the dude is way better-looking than Shane. He pays Saundra back for the car, and throws in a little more for her ruined credit, but she remains cool to him. One night after work, though, he hooks up with a production assistant named Wylie, who is twenty-two and thinks he’s brilliant and eventually wins his heart by getting an ACT tattoo on her lower back—