Men didn’t usually get into an event like this without already having a recognized name.
Looking around the room, she could place almost every other face that looked roughly Adam’s age—working actors with credits she knew.
Adam was the one exception.
And his clothes, she noticed, weren’t doing him any favors either.
That made him interesting in a way the room rarely offered.
She smoothed her expression into something more deliberate and walked over.
“Hi.
I noticed you eating by yourself over here, and I got curious.”
Angelina Jolie had spent the last couple of years on the edge of the industry, taking modeling work that paid the bills while she waited for the kind of breakthrough most people in this room had already achieved.
“Adam Cole,” he said, without elaborating further.
She tilted her head slightly, a flicker of mild annoyance crossing her features at the lack of an obvious hook to latch onto—though on her, even that read more like practiced charm than genuine irritation.
“I direct,” Adam said after a beat.
“Saw—the film that opened a couple weeks ago—that’s mine.”
Her whole posture shifted.
Saw was, without question, the one thing everyone in town had been talking about—a $1.3 million picture that had already cleared forty million in its first week alone.
And the person responsible for that return was standing right in front of her.
“You’re the one who made that,” she said, genuinely impressed.
“It’s a remarkable piece of work.
I’d love to hear more about how you put it together—maybe somewhere a little quieter than this.”
Adam raised an eyebrow at the directness.
He had a solid idea of what she meant.
Ovitz’s advice from earlier echoed back to him—that simply mentioning the film tended to open doors faster than expected.
Apparently, the agency president had not been exaggerating.
Knowing the trajectory her career would eventually take, he hesitated for only half a second before answering.
“Sure.
I’d be glad to talk more.”
Before either of them could continue, a voice cut in from a few feet away.
“Wait—that’s no nobody.
That’s the director of Saw.”
A heavyset man in an expensive jacket peeled away from the people he had been talking to and made his way over, moving like someone entirely used to being the most important person in any conversation he joined.
Harvey Weinstein ran one of the most prominent independent distributors in town—Miramax Films—a company that specialized in smaller, prestige-driven cinema built for awards season rather than opening weekend.
He had a reputation, and not a flattering one.
He was known for cornering promising talent before anyone else could, for squeezing predatory deals out of filmmakers who lacked the leverage to push back, and for leaving a long list of partners who walked away feeling like the terms had been altered after the fact.
“Director Cole.
Harvey Weinstein.
Miramax Films.”
He said it assuming the name alone commanded immediate respect.
Adam, mid-conversation with Jolie and irritated by the abrupt interruption, didn’t bother softening his response.
“Never heard of you.”
He had, in fact, heard of Weinstein.
Every working director eventually learned which figures in town were worth avoiding, and Weinstein’s reputation for breaking agreements once he held the upper hand had reached him secondhand more than once.
Adam simply saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
He had built his momentum by doing things the straightforward way; he had zero interest in getting tangled up with a distributor known for the exact opposite.
He also wasn’t worried about brushing him off.
A director with an unbroken streak of high-yield success held more leverage than people realized, and Adam intended to keep that leverage firmly in his own hands.
Weinstein’s expression tightened for a fraction of a second before he recovered, deciding—incorrectly, but conveniently—that Adam simply hadn’t been in the business long enough to know who the real players were.
“Miramax specializes in the kind of cinema that wins Oscars,” Weinstein said, undeterred, his eyes locked on Adam.
“The films nobody else wants to touch, but everybody remembers come February.”
“Ever think about making something with real awards potential for your next project?”