BEAUTIFUL VICTORY

Sigrid Helgudóttir struggles to navigate the rough waters of Hollywood and keep her small movie production company financially afloat. Balancing artistic integrity and commercial viability is challenging, but quitting is not an option. Scarred by an unhappy childhood spent with her alcoholic mother in Iceland, Sigrid is trying to make sense of her personal history full of neglect and attempts at forgiveness. In the City of Angels, City of Dreams, she feels like a fish out of water, trying to maintain her artistic integrity while making low-budget movies. But her little production company is bleeding, and she is forced to reevaluate her beliefs and give the most important role she’s ever written to an actor whose acting prowess she deems questionable.

FROM CHAPTER ONE

She remains sitting for a long time after Jack stomps out of the restaurant, as alone and detached as the remote island she grew up on, trying to remember why she’s doing this in the first place. Detesting ratings but being imprisoned by the hard figures and the red ink on the bottom line of her company’s balance sheet is her private version of hell. She wants to write about truth and beauty, and translate the tumult in her mind into the dance of light and shadows, but her reality is the terror of digits—gross revenue, expansion numbers, per-theater-average. It’s the art of staying afloat around breaking even until you forget why you started running this race in the first place and the only thing left on your mind is the necessity of staying in motion.

There are other ways of paying the bills—if not easier, at least more peaceful. There are ways that don’t keep you awake at night. The thought that she could quit appeases her instantaneously. It’s a transparent lie, providing both comfort and maneuvering space, even if only temporarily. Somewhere inside her there’s an uncompromising, immutable chunk of hard lava rock that keeps her going, powers her wading through the fiendish seas, keeps her ship afloat. It fuels her urge to tell her story, the multitude of her stories, to shape her reality into something more than a simple sum of random events that befall her, something that gives life an ulterior motive, an almost transcendental meaning.

Every character she’s ever written cost her a piece of her soul, but Jimmy Sharp somehow stole more than she was willing to give. It’s the main reason she could never trust someone like Kyle Engelberg to play him. She will inevitably end up molding Jimmy to fit Kyle, adding lines to reflect his mannerisms, the lilt of his voice, his stature, making simple and yet meaningful changes. All that makes her even more unwilling, for letting him wear Jimmy’s skin is giving him part-ownership of her creation.

The food on her plate is already cold and unappealing, so she slumps back in her chair, closes her eyes, and remains still, listening to the rhythm of the waves. It’s the noise of her childhood, smelling intensely of disheartened loneliness and unrest. It makes her think of foggy coasts and low skies, and the place she once upon a time called home.