Case closed

INT. DAY – POLICE INTERROGATION ROOM

The rain hits the only window in the room with ferocity. Nothing can be seen outside because of a heavy haze.

The camera moves away from the window and settles on a corner, watching the center of the room. There’s a large table and two chairs, a pasty white guy is seating in one of them. No one sits in the other chair.

The man lays his head on the table, apparently crying but there are no tears on his face. The door to the outside opens. It’s a policeman. He’s very tall, black and carries a gun on his belt.

DETECTIVE MARKO

You sure were difficult to pick up, Vince.

 The detective sits on the empty chair. He grabs a pack of cigarettes from his chest pocket, pulls one out and offers it to Vince.

DETECTIVE MARKO

Wake up, man.

 Vince raises his head. His eyes are red. He looks pale and desperate. He grabs the cigarette. Marko pulls out a lighter from the cigarette pack and lights Vince’s smoke. He inhales once and clearly enjoys the taste of it.

DETECTIVE MARKO

Now, where’s the girl?

Her dad’s here, Vince.

Vince looks at the door, nervous. Marko sits back on his chair, crossing his arms and looking straight at Vince, who looks like a trapped mouse.

DETECTIVE MARKO

We know everything, Vince. We know what you did to them.

To her. We just need you to help us find her.

But Vince doesn’t seem to mind the presence of the detective. He suddenly stands up and walks towards the window. He stays there, looking at the rain, not saying a word.

Marko’s fingers start playing with the cigarette pack.

DETECTIVE MARKO

Did you know her dad is congressman Walters?

The one whose face is all over town, seeking reelection?

(For a second, he waits for an answer)

He’s calm right now. If he gets mad, you’re fried.

But Vince keeps looking out the window. The drops of water hit the glass hard but the man doesn’t seem startled or annoyed. He just looks at the rain in the most peaceful way.

Then, he starts mumbling.

DETECTIVE MARKO

What’s that?

Marko stands up from his chair and walks towards Vince, who’s still talking under his breath.

The men are separated then by a few meters but Marko does not understand what Vince is saying. He mumbles as if he was repeating things to himself, not to really talk with anyone.

DETECTIVE MARKO

Hey! Stop it! You’re dyin’, dumbass!

Don’t you wanna save your ass?

 Vince remains unresponsive. He keeps repeating, mumbling. His cigarette is consuming itself on his hand.

Detective Marko closes his fists, ready to be harder on Vince than he was authorized to. But he refrains. A muted sound enters the room from outside.

DETECTIVE MARKO

I can make them see you’re not well.

You don’t have to die, Vince.

Vince then turns around and looks at Marko straight in the eye. He smiles softly. He walks one step towards the detective. He then reaches out with one hand, caressing Marko on the cheek.

VINCE

But I do have to die. You know that.

 Marko looks scared. He cannot move away from Vince. He stares at the criminal, but does not seem to know what to do next.

VINCE

And she will have to die too.

You also know that.

 His hand caresses Marko further, feeling his three-day stubble. His smile grows, making his face look weirdly deformed. If he looked pale and lanky before, he now looks insane.

VINCE

Tell the congressman to make the arrangements.

Vince pulls back his hand. Marko seems to be able to move now. He turns around suddenly towards the door but it opens before he can reach it. A woman stands there, dripping water.

OFFICER GARCIA

Sorry to interrupt, sir.

DETECTIVE MARKO

(Looking back at Vince)

It’s ok. What is it?

OFFICER GARCIA

Sir, it’s the congressman.

Marko turns his attention to her, his eyes wide open.

OFFICER GARCIA

He said he was going for a coffee.

But some officers saw him running towards the street,

without his coat.

Vince chuckles. Marko looks at him again but his face goes back to Garcia in a second.

DETECTIVE MARKO

What happened?

OFFICER GARCIA

(Nervous)

We went after him. He seemed out of his mind.

He didn’t look before crossing and…

Marko understands. Vince starts laughing, first slowly but then faster and louder. The detective seems to be losing his patience.

OFFICER GARCIA

We found this on him.

(She pulls out a cellphone from her coat)

It’s…

Marko takes the cellphone without asking. He looks at it and sees something he would have wanted not to see.

On the screen, a live feed is still ongoing. The camera is apparently under water and, for a moment, you cannot see much.

Then, a head tilts forward and it becomes noticeable. It’s the face of a young woman. She’s clearly dead, having turned purple already.

Garcia takes the cellphone back, saying something about evidence. Marko’s head turns. He walks towards the chair and drops there. He grabs his head, it hurts. Vince’s laughter is loud.

VINCE

I had to do it Marko.

You knew. You always knew.

Marko looks at him, his eyes a bit watery. He looks at Vince laughing but doesn’t seem to have the same power and stability than before. He looks lost, confused even.

Two policemen enter the room and pull Vince out of it. Marko looks how the man is dragged out, how he’s still laughing. Finally, a tear runs down Marko’s face. The men leave and he’s alone with that tear.

The rain punches hard on the glass.

Sex sells

   Because it does, doesn’t it? When Michael had the idea to make his own website, every single person he knew thought he was going insane. But what they weren’t thinking about was the time he had wasted on so many other projects that had only failed one after the other. He had gone to law school but he had never been hired by a proper firm, only as an intern and they had told him, in very few words, that he should be as far from the word of law as he could. It was a bit brutal back then but he understood what they meant. In any case, he had tried to make anything and everything in order to be his own man and have a life of his own, to make his parents proud. Because what he wanted was to repay them for all their efforts to raise him.

 Michael opened a cupcake store, which had to close only a month after it opened because absolutely no one bought anything. He had learned how to bake for several months and it all when to the trashcan in a matter of days. Then, he decided to team up with a buddy from college and open a dog walking business. They did everything an owner could want like bathing them and walking them, doing exercises and so on but they failed miserably once his partner let one of the dogs escape and the owner sued him for it. Michael had also tried to make it in the call center world but they told him in the interview his voice was not the right one for the job and in a Burger King they told him he was tall enough, but they failed to tell him what his height had to do with anything.

 So many tries and failures had made him a little bit bitter and more of a loner that ever before. He had never been the kind to go out a lot or something like that. He would prefer to stay home and watch movies. So maybe that’s when the idea came to him. Like any man his age, he watched porn from time to time, when being specially aroused. He had never really paid any attention to the movie as such, only to the act they were performing. He must have been really bored that day because he remembered thinking it all look so fake, so prepared and too rushed for his taste. It was gay porn by the way, for reasons not worth explaining as they explain themselves.

 The thing was he watched the same clip, which was about fifteen minutes long, like ten times. He watched every single part with detail and then realized sex sells. It was that easy and he had never thought about it. But then he realized he hadn’t thought of it because of how people perceived pornography, no matter if it was between two men, two women or a straight couple. If you said that you worked in porn, must people would think you’re a pervert or that you just want to be having sex all day long and that’s not what it is and that was something Michael understood that night, when he decided to properly investigate.

 So, must of the films done in the country were low budget and that’s why their production was such garbage. He knew the video he saw must have been made with a handheld camera and some sort of small microphone and not much else. He investigated further and found out these productions companies, which normally only made very few clips a year, sold what they did to larger companies in the United States and there they were marketed online or, not very often, in sex shops all around that country. But that had to imply to movie was good because if it wasn’t people would make it here and just sell it here or upload it online or something. The thing with all of this was to win money and to make it a proper business, to make it a proper job with everything correctly labeled.

 The next thing for Michael was to find the money for it. He had some savings from his earlier jobs and knew he could convince some of his friends but before that he had to have an idea in order to sell it properly. He came up with a film called “The spy”. At first, it seemed like some ridiculous thing but then you realized it had everything a person would want in a movie: sex, drama and even a bit of romance and comedy. He wrote it with the help of a friend that went to film school. His name was George and he was the first person to tell him how insanely great his idea was. He promised to help Michael with cameras and lights and so on if the movie got made but, as a student, he had no money to share with him to do the movie.

 Michael decided to pitch it to every person he knew, no matter if the movie was gay porn or if he want it to do it in a way he had never seen porn being made. Most people just looked at him as if he had turned insane in mid sentence. Others were interested but only because it seemed like such a crazy idea. And the only people that were on board, two men and a girl from George’s film school, told Michael they could help with the production and give only a small amount of money. It was a beginning but they needed much more in order to make the movie as such. He tried to remove things from the script and George got the cheapest but best camera he could find at that price and they still weren’t close.

 Their next step was to go to the local production companies and offer them a place in the movie if they had money to invest. But all of them were very harsh; telling them you just couldn’t get in into an industry and try to change out of nowhere. They told them they had to have experience and a way of doing things that wasn’t too out there because in porn, differently than in movies, people just wanted the same thing that they had always seen and no one would invest in a movie that, in appearance, seemed to be more like an art film than a porno. Michael was disappointed but George told him most people in cinema were just like that, as they hated competition specially when the competition was good.

 Their last resource was to get financing from abroad. So Michael wrote hundreds of emails and sent them all the same day, hoping to be shooting the movie soon. In the mean time, they had created profiles for the characters and, to make things cheap, they had decided that everyone in the crew would appear on the movie but without getting paid, only their names on the credits. One month passed and it was a long wait. Michael was beginning to lose hope but George always tried to cheer him up, trying to make him focus in things about the movie they had not yet thought about like lighting, costumes, makeup and so on.

 Finally, when all hope had been lost, Michael received a letter, a proper physical letter, from one of the biggest production companies in the United States. They had agreed to finance the movie but only if it was done according to certain standards they had, mostly things they could agree on easily on a contract. The next month, it was all about flying to Los Angeles and signing the contract. There, an executive told Michael that his vision for pornography was very interesting and that, if the film was a success, they could be thinking about working with him again. They were so happy that day, that George and Michael had a nice dinner to celebrate and, at the end of it, they shared their first kiss ever. They realized right there; they had feelings for each other.

 But production started days after that so they put all their focus on the movie. They got some good looking but different guys to participate in the movie as actors and they shot it in the streets of their cities, except the sex scenes of course. For those, George’s friend Alexa had a thing for everything related to art direction. She transformed a room in an old house owned by Michael’s grandparents into a perfect replica of what Michael had imagined for the movie. It was supposed to be the place were the two lovers escaped to be together, away from all the looks. The scenes when they had sex were incredibly easy to film and they even got some money from a condom company because they would show a close up to one of the wrappers.

 Filming lasted for a whole month and, at the end, they had a great party to celebrate their success. They announced that a friend of George’s that had already graduated was going to make the editing of the film. He was very good and told George he wanted to be part of the film. The production company sent a guy to monitor their progress and everything went as planned. Another party was held when the movie was displayed as a “new feature” on the website of the production company. In only one week, a million people paid to see it. The movie was an absolute success all over the world, making the actors stars and the crew simply heroes.

 They would be hired again for more movies, one of them being a proper sequel to “The spy”. George and Michael began dating and eventually got engaged. They never moved to the United States, even at the insistence of their job. They knew what they did was special because it had another scent to it, if you will. Michael was proud of his achievement and shared it with everyone. Some people left his life but others were just proud of him too, even his parents who wouldn’t see the film but celebrated it all the same.