A Million Views Read online

  PENGUIN WORKSHOP

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Penguin Workshop,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2022

  Text copyright © 2022 by Aaron Starmer

  Jacket art copyright © 2022 by Penguin Random House LLC

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  PENGUIN is a registered trademark and PENGUIN WORKSHOP is a trademark of Penguin Books Ltd, and the W colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593386958

  Design by Sophie Erb, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Problem with Bottomless Pits

  Chapter 2: Character Motivation

  Chapter 3: Instructions for Loneliness

  Chapter 4: A Portal Story

  Chapter 5: A Trailer for a Movie That Doesn’t Exist

  Chapter 6: Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

  Chapter 7: Proper Screenplay Format

  Chapter 8: Battling Blobulor

  Chapter 9: Don’t Hate the Cosplayers

  Chapter 10: The Dreaded Blank Page

  Chapter 11: Premature Preproduction

  Chapter 12: We Have a Few Notes

  Chapter 13: Gorilla Style

  Chapter 14: The Warburton Factor

  Chapter 15: We’ll Fix It in Post

  Chapter 16: Truly Special Special Effects

  Chapter 17: They’re Called Call Sheets

  Chapter 18: Lights, Camera . . . Inaction!

  Chapter 19: Here Goes Nothin’

  Chapter 20: Dad Being Dad

  Chapter 21: A Grunt for Grunt Work

  Chapter 22: Time Travel Machines

  Chapter 23: Storyboardin’

  Chapter 24: Cue the Montage

  Chapter 25: One Condition

  Chapter 26: The Snidious Nurk

  Chapter 27: Find a Way

  Chapter 28: Best Laid Plans

  Chapter 29: Piper at the Gates of Dawn

  Chapter 30: Steve McQueen

  Chapter 31: The Chocolate Milk Shot

  Chapter 32: What You Do with Friends Who Don’t Return Your Messages

  Chapter 33: A Million Views

  Chapter 34: Winner Winner Chicken Sandwich

  Chapter 35: Live from the Red Carpet!

  Chapter 36: The New Kids

  Chapter 37: Carly Lee and the Land of Shadows

  Chapter 38: A Billion Views

  Chapter 39: Coming Soon to a Barn Near You . . .

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To the kids who dream big and the friends who encourage them to dream even bigger—AS

  Chapter 1

  The Problem with Bottomless Pits

  Brewster Gaines had to push a friend into a bottomless pit. Simple enough, right? All he needed was the pit and the friend to push in. Plus some special effects to add in post.

  Post, in case you don’t know, is what directors call postproduction. And that’s what Brewster was: a director. He made movies. Or to be completely accurate, he made videos. The latest video he was working on was called “What Do You Do with Friends Who Don’t Return Your Messages?”

  The answer to that age-old question? Push them into a bottomless pit, of course.

  The whole thing was going to be about ten seconds long. The first five seconds would feature a boy, played by Brewster, holding a phone and approaching his friend while saying, “Hey, I messaged you two days ago! Why didn’t you answer?” Then the friend would shrug, and the boy would run over and push the friend into the pit.

  The other five seconds of the video would show the friend falling through the darkness of the pit, screaming, “I deserve thisssss!” while their body would get smaller and smaller but never hit anything.

  Okay, maybe it wasn’t that simple. In fact, Brewster discovered it was nearly impossible.

  First, digging a bottomless pit was no easy task, even one that wasn’t technically bottomless. Brewster only needed to dig one that looked bottomless from a certain angle, with specific lighting. It still took him hours to carve out anything even halfway suitable. He was a director, after all, not a backhoe.

  Second, finding a friend to push into a bottomless pit was a little bit easier, though not much. Brewster had to convince someone to fall over backward multiple times. Because this video would require multiple takes. Twenty, at least. Maybe as many as fifty. The fall needed to be perfect, with the perfect windmilling arms and the perfect panicked facial expression. Anything less than perfect would mean the video would have no chance of going viral.

  Finally, there was post—the aforementioned postproduction. That’s all the editing and manipulating that Brewster had to do to the video once he completed the principal photography. In other words, after digging a suitable bottomless pit and finding a talented actor willing to be pushed into it over and over again, Brewster needed to create the special effect of having that actor’s body continue to fall for a full five seconds. This would probably be quick work for someone who had professional 3D-rendering apps and skills with computer graphics, but Brewster had none of those things. He had access to the software that came with his six-year-old MacBook, and he had a willingness to try. In case you didn’t know, old software and a willingness to try don't always translate into awe-inspiring special effects.

  And so, Brewster was faced with a lot of problems to solve in order to create a ten-second video.

  Which was fine. Which was great, actually. This was what he loved.

  * * *

  • • •

  “It’s ready,” Brewster told Carly Lee on Thursday as they rode the bus to school.

  He was talking about the pit. He’d spent the last three evenings digging, and it was finally the proper depth where it could pass as bottomless, so long as his phone was mounted correctly on the tripod and the sun wasn’t too high in the sky.

  Carly had agreed to play the role of the friend. She was a skateboarder and accustomed to falling. In fact, she was quite good at it.

  “What time do you want to start?” she asked.

  “As soon as school is over,” he said. “Maybe sooner. Would you be willing to skip?”

  “Would you be willing to dress up as me and take my detention?”

  “I would,” Brewster replied.

  This wasn’t a lie. Brewster had proven he was willing to suffer for his art. He’d broken bones—two fingers during a GoPro recording
of a go-kart stunt at a local carnival. He’d contracted a stomach virus—after which he decided that working with toddlers, even well-behaved ones, might not be worth it. He’d been kicked out of Target more than once—store managers aren’t always appreciative of stop-motion video productions being filmed in the produce section with borrowed toys. So yes, he was always ready to make some sacrifices to ensure top-notch productions.

  At this point Carly was, shall we say, less dedicated, but she was still on board. “We’ll take the bus home at the normal time,” she said. “I’ll get off at your stop and we’ll start right away. But you better have snacks.”

  “Will potato chips work?” Brewster asked.

  “What type?”

  “Salt and . . .”

  “Vinegar?”

  Brewster nodded reluctantly. Salt and vinegar chips were an acquired taste, and one that not many people acquired.

  “Acceptable,” Carly finally said, and Brewster felt the relief wash over him. He also took a couple of mental notes: In the future, buy a larger variety of snacks. For now, be thankful that Carly is very cool.

  Other than being very cool, Carly was a bit of a mystery. Brewster knew that she was a transplant from New Jersey and had moved into town at the beginning of the year. She seemed to be okay with living in Vermont, though sometimes she’d crack jokes about distinctly Vermont things, such as creemees and witch windows. He rode the bus with her, and they’d make small talk from time to time. She wasn’t exactly his friend, but she tolerated him. Which was saying something, because not everyone tolerated Brewster.

  Brewster would often see Carly at the skate park next to the playground where he filmed a lot of his videos. She was often filming videos too, skateboarding tricks that she’d post on her TikTok channel. She’d usually acknowledge his presence with a nod as she stood at the top of the quarter-pipe. Then she’d hop on her board and do something that was liable to break her neck. But she wouldn’t break her neck because she, in her own words, “didn’t completely suck.”

  When Brewster had approached her at that skate park a few days earlier and asked her to appear in “What Do You Do with Friends Who Don’t Return Your Messages?” he did so saddled with low expectations. Since she wasn’t exactly his friend, he didn’t have to take her rejection personally. And he expected rejection. It came with the territory for visionaries like Brewster. Anything more would be considered an enormous win.

  When her response was, “Sure, why not?” Brewster raised both hands in celebration. Which made Carly laugh. Her laugh was like chocolate milk. Really good.

  Chapter 2

  Character Motivation

  Carly Lee chomped on salt and vinegar potato chips as Brewster set up the tripod.

  “All I have to do is stand here and then you’ll push me?” she asked.

  “There’s more to it than that,” Brewster said. “When I walk up to your character, you’ve got to be ambivalent.”

  “Ambivalent?”

  “It means you don’t care.”

  “Got it.”

  “So think about something you don’t care about.”

  “That’s a lot of things.”

  “Focus on one.”

  “Okay. I’ll think about owls.”

  Brewster paused to consider owls for a moment. Then he asked, “What’s wrong with owls?”

  “They’re creepy,” she replied. “Not a fan.”

  “So you do care about owls, then?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not ambivalent about owls,” Brewster said. “Owls give you emotions. I need you to be emotionless. Think about something you don’t care about at all. Something that gives you no feelings whatsoever.”

  “Fine.” Carly closed her eyes. “Mustard. I’ll think about mustard.”

  If it worked for her, then it worked for Brewster. He went back to setting up the tripod. He figured that the sun would be in the right position for at least forty-five minutes. The pit would look sufficiently black while the grass around it would look sufficiently green. That is, if he got the angle right. The stiff tripod wasn’t doing him any favors.

  “Here’s an idea,” Carly said. “What if I think about owls when you push me?”

  Brewster opened a level app to make sure the phone was perfectly straight on the tripod before he answered. “What do you mean?”

  Carly walked over to the pit, stood at its edge, and said, “So I’ll be over here thinking about mustard, all like, ‘Eh, mustard, who cares about mustard?’ But then when you push me, I can be all like, ‘Owls! Creepy owls everywhere! Owls, owls, owls!’ ”

  She threw her arms in the air and waved them wildly. It was all a bit much, but Brewster couldn’t tell her that. It was never a good idea to critique an actor so early in a shoot.

  “We can definitely try that,” Brewster said.

  Directors in the not-too-distant past had to shoot on film, and while Brewster did have romantic notions about shooting on film, he knew that shooting on digital was the better choice for him. Film costs money because film is an actual thing. With digital, he could shoot for days and not worry. It took up hardly any space at all. It cost nothing. Or almost nothing—he had rented a terabyte of storage from Google for one year. Which meant he could humor his performers and do multiple takes without worrying about financial consequences.

  “Let’s do it, then,” Carly said, and she practiced her flailing as Brewster stepped back from the tripod.

  The framing was as good as it was going to get. It was time to shoot.

  “Okay,” Brewster said and tapped the circular red record icon. “We’re rolling, but I’ll say ‘action’ when it’s time to do it. And let’s do it over and over without stopping so we can make the best use of the current conditions.”

  “But I’ll get dirty each time,” Carly said. “Won’t we have to, like, clean my clothes and comb my hair after each take?”

  Good point. Why didn’t Brewster think of that earlier? Because there were so many other things to consider, that’s why. Sound. Performance. The movement of the earth in relation to the sun!

  “Okay,” Brewster said. “We can’t clean you up after every take, so we’ll work with it. Let’s pretend your character is an ambivalent . . . slob.”

  “Who hates owls,” Carly added.

  “Sure,” Brewster said. “An owl-hating slob who’s often ambivalent.”

  Carly nodded. “I’m okay with that.”

  “Does that mean you’re ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  Good enough for Brewster, so he stepped out of frame and pointed to the spot where Carly was supposed to stand. He had marked it with a small black stone. Carly moved into position, and Brewster said, “Aaaand . . . action.”

  He counted quietly to three, then he paced into the frame while delivering his line: “Hey, I messaged you two days ago! Why didn’t you answer?”

  Carly shrugged her ambivalence. And he gave her a mighty push into the pit.

  “Whoa,” she said as she climbed out. “You really went for it there.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No, no, no. I can handle it, but remember I’m a human person with bones and guts and everything.”

  “As long as you remember that this is art. And art is more important than people.”

  Whoops. Brewster immediately regretted saying that. This was why some people didn’t tolerate him. Brewster’s passion was overwhelming. Feelings were always secondary. Or tertiary, which meant they came third. Or maybe even farther down the list. His videos—his art!—would always be number one, and he could never imagine anything else muscling its way into the top slot.

  Again, he was lucky that Carly was very cool. She snorted. “You’re a funny kid, Brewster. Just promise not to break my arm, okay?”

&nbs
p; “Technically, I can’t make that promise,” Brewster said, because he was an honest guy, and injuries can never be entirely ruled out on a set.

  Carly shrugged and replied, “Fine. Promise me if you do break my arm, it will at least look amazing.”

  “That I can do,” Brewster said.

  He took one more mental note: In the future, make all actors sign a contract that says if they break their arms, then they can’t sue me.

  * * *

  • • •

  They did it over and over, twenty times at least, and Brewster let his phone continue recording throughout. Carly got quite good at her part, improving her reactions with every take, and always displaying her natural charisma and athleticism. The only reason they had to stop the filming was because of Brewster’s neighbor from across the street, Piper Barnes.

  “Brewster Gaines!” Piper hollered as she strode across the yard pointing at him. “What the heck do you think you’re doing?”

  Before Brewster could respond, Piper shouldered him out of the way and came to Carly’s aid. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Carly responded.

  “Because this little psycho was pushing you into a hole.” Piper glared at Brewster as she said it.

  Carly laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Piper said.

  “You called Brewster a psycho,” Carly said. “Li’l harmless Brewster.”

  Brewster didn’t like being called a psycho. Or li’l. Or harmless. And he certainly didn’t like Piper interrupting his production. “We’re wasting valuable time,” he said. “We can only shoot for another ten minutes. No distractions.”

  “Wait,” Piper whispered to Carly. “You’re okay with this?”

  Carly shrugged. “He’s not paying me or anything, but it’s still kinda fun. I’m curious how it’ll turn out. And what people will think of it.”

  Piper looked at Carly, then at the hole, then at Brewster, then at the phone mounted on the tripod, then back at Carly, then back at the hole, then back at Brewster.