“You seriously have a meeting in Hollywood?”

“Yes,” Shane says. “With a big producer on a studio lot.”

“What are you wearing?”

He sighs and tells her what Gene Pergo told him, that it doesn’t matter what one wears to a pitch meeting (Unless you own a bullshit-proof suit).

“I’ll bet I know what you’re wearing,” Saundra says, and proceeds to describe his outfit down to the socks.

Shane is regretting this call. “Just help me figure out where I’m going.”

“What’s your movie called?”

Shane sighs. He has to remember they’re no longer married; her bitter-cool ironic streak has no power over him anymore. “Donner!”

Saundra is quiet a moment. But she knows his interests, his reading table obsessions. “You’re writing a movie about cannibals?”

“I told you, I’m pitching a movie, and it’s not about cannibals.”

Clearly, the Donner Party could be a tough subject for a film. But pitches are all in the take, as Michael Deane wrote in the oft-copied chapter fourteen of his memoir/self-help classic, The Deane’s Way:

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts. I could walk into Fox today and sell a movie about a restaurant that serves baked monkey balls if I had the right take.

And Shane has the perfect “take.” Donner! will concern itself not with the classic Donner Party story—all those people stuck at the awful camp, freezing and starving to death and finally eating one another—but with the story of a cabinetmaker in the party, named William Eddy, who leads a group of people, mostly young women, on a harrowing, heroic journey out of the mountains to safety, and then—attention, third act!—when he’s regained his strength, returns to rescue his wife and kids! As Shane pitched this idea over the phone to the agent Andrew Dunne, he felt himself becoming animated by its power: It’s a story of triumph, he told the agent, an epic story of resiliency! Courage! Determination! Love! That very afternoon the agent set up a meeting with Claire Silver, a development assistant for . . . get this . . . Michael Deane!

“Huh,” Saundra says when she’s heard the whole story. “And you really think you can sell this thing?”

“Yes. I do,” Shane says, and he does. It’s a key sub-tenet of Shane’s movie-inspired ACT-as-if faith in himself: his generation’s profound belief in secular episodic providence, the idea—honed by decades of entertainment—that after thirty or sixty or one hundred and twenty minutes of complications, things generally work out.

“Okay,” Saundra says—still not entirely immune to the undeniable charm of Shane’s deluded self-belief—and she gives him the MapQuest instructions. When he thanks her, Saundra says, “Good luck today, Shane.”

“Thanks,” Shane says. And, as always, his ex-wife’s passionless, entirely genuine goodwill leaves him feeling like the loneliest person on the planet.

It’s over. What a stupid deal: one day to find a great idea for a film? How many times has Michael told her, We’re not in the film business, we’re in the buzz business. And yes, the day’s not quite over, but her two forty-five is picking at an open scab on his forehead while pitching a TV procedural (So there’s this cop—pick—a zombie cop) and Claire feels the loss of something vital in her, the death of some optimism. Her four P.M. looks like a no-show (somebody named Shawn Weller . . . ) and when Claire checks her watch—four ten—it is through bleary, sleepy eyes. So that’s it. She’s done. She won’t say anything to Michael about her disillusionment; what would be the point? She’ll quietly give two weeks, box up her things, and slink out of this office into a job warehousing souvenirs for the Scientologists.

And what about Daryl? Does she dump him today, too? Can she? She’s tried breaking up with him recently, but it never takes. It’s like cutting soup—nothing to push against. She’ll say, Daryl, we need to talk, and he just smiles in that way of his, and they end up having sex. She even suspects it turns him on a little. She’ll say, I’m not sure this is working, and he’ll start taking off his shirt. She’ll complain about the strip clubs and he’ll just look amused. (Her: Promise me you won’t go again? Him: I promise I won’t make you go.) He doesn’t fight, doesn’t lie, doesn’t care; the man eats, breathes, screws. How do you disengage from someone who’s already so profoundly disengaged?

She met him on what is now looking like the only movie she’ll ever work on—Night Ravagers. Claire has always been weak for ink, and Daryl, who had a walk-on (lurch-on? stagger-on?) as Zombie #14, had these great ropy, tattooed arms. She’d dated mostly smart, sensitive types (who made her smart sensitivity seem redundant) and a couple of slick industry types (whose ambition was like a second dick). She hadn’t yet tried the unemployed-actor type. And wasn’t this what she had in mind when she left the cocoon of film school in the first place, tasting the visceral, the worldly? And at first, visceral-worldly was as good as advertised (she recalls wondering: Was I ever even touched before this?). Thirty-six hours later, as she lay postcoital in bed with the best-looking guy she’s ever slept with (sometimes she just likes to look at him), Daryl matter-of-factly admitted that he’d just been tossed out by his girlfriend and had no place to live. Almost three years later, Night Ravagers remains Daryl’s best acting credit, and Zombie #14 remains a gorgeous lump in her bed.

No, she won’t break up with Daryl. Not today. Not after the Scientologists and the proud grandpas, the lunatics, zombie cops, and skin-pickers. She’ll give Daryl one more chance, go home, bring him a beer, nestle into his broad, tatted shoulder; together they’ll watch the TeeVee (he likes those trucks that drive across the ice on the Discovery Channel) and she’ll have that tenuous connection to life, at least. No, it’s not the stuff of dreams, but it’s a perfectly American thing to do, a whole nation of Night Ravager zombies racing across the horizon, burning through peak oil to get home and sit dull-eyed, watching Ice Road Truckers and Hookbook on the fifty-five-inch flat (the Double Nickel, as Daryl calls it, the Sammy Hagar).

Claire grabs her coat and starts for the door. She pauses, glances back over her shoulder at the office where she thought she might get to make something great—silly Holly Golightly dream—and once more checks her watch: 4:17 and counting. Outside, she locks the door behind her, takes a breath, and goes.

The clock in Shane’s rented Kia also reads 4:17—he’s more than a quarter-hour late, and he’s dying. “Shit shit shit!” He pounds the steering wheel. Even after finally getting turned around, he got caught in several traffic snarls and took the wrong exit. By the time he rolls up to the studio gate and the security guard shrugs and informs him that his destiny is at the other gate, he is twenty-four minutes late, sweating through his carefully chosen whatever-clothing. When he arrives at the proper gate, he’s twenty-eight minutes late—thirty when he finally gets his ID back from the second security guard, shakily slaps a parking pass on his dash, and pulls into the lot.

Shane is only two hundred feet away now from Michael Deane’s bungalow, but he stumbles out of his car the wrong way, wanders among the big soundstages—it is the cleanest warehouse district in the world—and finally walks in a circle, toward a nest of bungalows and a tram filled with fanny-packed tourists on a studio tour, holding up cameras and cell phones, listening to a microphone-aided guide tell apocryphal stories of bygone magic. The camera-people listen breathlessly, waiting for some connection to their own pasts (I loved that show!), and when Shane staggers up to their tram, the star-alert tourists run his disheveled hair, broad sideburns, and thin, frantic features through the thousands of celebrity faces they keep on file—Is that a Sheen? A Baldwin? A celebrity rehabber?—and while they can’t quite match Shane’s oddly appealing features with anyone famous, they take pictures anyway, just in case.