“What’s wrong with you?” Downey asked, his actor’s intuition easily reading the tight lines of Adam’s posture.
“You don’t like it here, do you?”
Adam shook his head, managing a faint smile.
“I actually came to tell you something.
My first film is about to come out.”
“That fast?” Downey leaned back, genuinely stunned.
He had always known the kid had talent, but securing financing and locking a picture before even graduating from USC was a timeline that didn’t make sense.
Downey had fully intended to wait until Adam graduated, then bring him to his father—an industry heavyweight with an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and quiet, behind-the-scenes polish work on classics like The Godfather and Mission: Impossible.
The plan had been to use that familial leverage to get Adam a low-level assistant director gig.
He had never expected Adam to bypass the ladder entirely.
Even now, Downey wasn’t particularly optimistic that a student’s debut feature would actually succeed.
But it didn’t matter; if it flopped, Downey figured he could still ask his father to open a door or two to soften the fall.
“I’m going to make you a big star, Downey,” Adam said, his voice entirely serious.
“I mean it.”
“Is that so?
Then I’ll wait,” Downey smiled, humoring him.
But Downey’s smile faltered when Adam didn’t laugh with him.
“You have to promise me one thing, though,” Adam said, the levity dropping completely.
“Stay away from the heavy shit.
The drugs.”
Downey stiffened.
Adam knew the reality of the situation was far darker than a standard Hollywood party phase.
It was a family inheritance.
From the moment Downey was seven years old and had been handed his first joint by his own father, he hadn’t known a life without it.
Adam knew a casual warning wasn’t going to rewrite decades of chemical dependency, but he couldn’t sit across from him and say nothing.
Only hitting rock bottom would truly force a change, but Adam intended to give him the best possible parachute for when he finally decided to pull the ripcord.
“What are you talking about?” Downey chuckled awkwardly, immediately deflecting.
He grabbed Adam’s shoulder and pulled him out of the booth.
“Come on, let me introduce you to some people.”
Downey dragged him right back into the center of the crowd, surrounded by a dozen scantily clad aspiring actresses.
“Listen up!” Downey announced over the music, wrapping an arm around Adam.
“My brother here is a director.
His first feature is hitting theaters in a month.
You all know exactly what that means, right?”
The shift in the atmosphere was instantaneous.
In Hollywood, stars didn’t make themselves; directors made them.
A director with a theatrical release was a winning lottery ticket, and within seconds, Adam found himself entirely swarmed, the center of a very sudden, orbit of attention.
The next morning, Adam woke up in a sprawling, unfamiliar hotel suite.
He quietly disentangled himself from the bodies beside him, feeling a dull ache in his temples.
Looking around the wreckage of the suite, he couldn’t help but feel a dry, cynical amusement at his own expense.
He had spent years judging the excess of the industry, yet the corrupting power of Hollywood had taken exactly one night of actual leverage to drag him into it.
He dressed quickly and left the suite without a backward glance, heading back to his original hotel where Salma was still waiting.
After a few days of managing his post-production exhaustion and slipping back into his disciplined routine, the morning of the preview screening finally arrived.
At the New Line Cinema lot, Shay was personally standing at the entrance, enthusiastically greeting the arriving trade press and influential film critics.
To an outsider, the president of a studio playing doorman might look desperate, but Adam knew it was just a gesture.
Shay had quietly authorized a staggering public relations budget for this single morning.
Three hundred thousand dollars had been distributed through backchannels to the critics, and another two hundred thousand to the print media.
A half-million dollars in “goodwill” just to ensure the room leaned positive.
It was a cheap insurance policy compared to a dead box office.
Adam put on a pleasant, professional expression as he walked into the lobby, silently observing the critics mingling by the bar.
He thought, not for the first time, about how profoundly the internet would eventually decimate this specific class of gatekeepers.
In a decade or two, these people would be swept into irrelevance, replaced by aggregate scores and direct audience consensus.
But right now, in this era, their word could make or break a film.
By the time the doors to the large fifth-floor screening room closed, over twenty critics and a dozen print journalists had taken their seats.
Nobody skipped a screening that came with an envelope.
Among them sat Roger Ebert.
He was the single most respected film critic working in the country, and his presence changed the gravity of the room.
Studios generally avoided inviting him to preview screenings unless they were absolutely certain of the picture’s quality.
They still paid him the standard honorarium—not to buy his praise, which was impossible, but to keep him from actively tearing a bad film to shreds on national television.
Ebert was ruthlessly principled.
He would take the studio’s money for his time, sit in the dark, and then write exactly what he thought.
If the movie insulted his intelligence, he would destroy it.
If it moved him, he would use his massive platform to elevate it.
The lights dropped.
A handful of small, yellow aisle bulbs provided the only illumination.
The New Line Cinema logo flashed on the screen, followed by the stark, scrolling text of the cast and crew.
Then, the film began.
For the next ninety minutes, Adam sat in the back row, dividing his attention between the screen and the silhouettes of the critics in front of him.
Reactions rippled across the room in real time.
He saw flashes of scorn from the purists, quiet mockery from the cynics, and genuine, wide-eyed admiration from the genre fans.
Saw was too brutal to satisfy everyone in the room; Adam had known that going in.
But as the trap closed and the impossible choices unfolded, Adam saw the one thing that actually mattered.
Regardless of their personal tastes, the entire room had gone completely still.
Every single person in the theater was entirely hooked, desperate to know who Jigsaw really was.