Back in the conference room, Michael Ovitz closed the folder.
The silence in the room stretched just long enough to make the point before he nodded toward Derek, offering something that looked like approval but carried the weight of a mandate.
“Solid work,” Ovitz said, his voice carrying effortlessly to the back of the room.
“This is a complete proposal, not just a half-baked concept with a budget stapled to the back.
It looks like Derek has finally landed himself a client worth our time.”
He turned his attention back to the broader table.
“I’ll see about moving this forward myself.
If any of you have directors with something similarly bulletproof, bring them to me.
I want to see more of this.”
Envy is a quiet thing in rooms like that.
It usually just looks like polite nodding.
But a few of the agents near the bottom of the table exchanged glances that couldn’t quite hide the resentment of watching someone else catch a break.
At least two of them were already mentally running through their Rolodexes, wondering which film school showcases they needed to start attending before someone else beat them to the punch.
And a handful, if they were being honest with themselves, were quietly hoping the whole project would implode in development.
Three days later, back on the USC campus, Adam finished registering the Saw rights with the Writers Guild and filing his paperwork with the Directors Guild.
When it was done, he sat at his desk and pulled up his bank account.
It wasn’t a reassuring number.
The tuition loans from his first two years of school were sitting there in the dark, gathering interest, waiting for the post-graduation grace period to run out.
If this film didn’t work, he’d be staring down close to sixty thousand dollars of debt with absolutely no leverage to pay it back.
The math simply didn’t leave room for failure.
He’d known that conceptually, but seeing the actual figures laid out in front of him made the oxygen in the room feel a little thinner.
“Hey.
How’s the project coming?”
Marcus dropped into the chair across from him, wearing the same tired jacket he’d had on since breakfast.
He looked at Adam with the specific, measured curiosity he always used when he wanted information but didn’t want to seem desperate for it.
Adam managed a small smile.
USC turned out competent technicians by the hundreds every year, but the ones who actually understood the craft—the ones his memory from his past life kept circling back to—were a much smaller, sharper group.
Marcus was one of them.
Over the last week, Adam had quietly started pulling them together, building the foundation of a crew he wanted locked in before the studio executives started making suggestions.
“You talked to everyone?” Adam asked.
“Talked to all of them,” Marcus said, leaning back.
“They’re in.
Whatever you’re doing for your thesis film, they want to be part of it.”
Adam felt a knot in his chest loosen slightly.
He’d assumed they would say yes, but in this business, assuming cost people their careers.
Hearing it confirmed mattered.
Having his own people in place gave him the one thing a first-time director rarely got: actual insulation.
In an industry run by producers, directors without leverage often found themselves taking credit for films they barely controlled by the time the cameras rolled.
Adam couldn’t let that happen here.
The version of Saw he remembered had been crafted by a filmmaker with a highly specific sense of pacing, someone who knew exactly how to build dread without showing the seams.
Adam was pulling this story into existence a decade early, lacking the years of practical, on-set experience that director had accumulated.
If he couldn’t control the execution down to the frame, the script alone wouldn’t save him.
The script was just the skeleton; somebody still had to put the muscle on it, and he needed a crew that would listen to him when he did.
He had already mapped out his strategy for the impending negotiations.
He was entirely prepared to walk away from his directing fee if it bought him final cut approval.
Upfront money was irrelevant compared to keeping his hands on the final edit.
But he wouldn’t budge a single inch on the copyright.
That stayed his.
He had no intention of spending the next twenty years directing the inevitable sequels himself, but he knew exactly how much those sequels, spin-offs, and merchandise would eventually be worth.
Holding the underlying rights was the only real power play on the board.
His phone buzzed—a heavy, blocky piece of early-nineties plastic that still felt absurdly large in his hand compared to the sleek glass he was used to.
He answered on the second ring.
“This is Adam.”
“It’s Derek.
You free this afternoon?”
Something sharp and electric in the agent’s voice made Adam sit up straighter.
“Yeah.
What’s going on?”
“We’ve got the financing.
Three different production companies are interested.
Come down to the office and we’ll go through the terms, figure out whose money you want to take.”
“I’ll be there,” Adam said, keeping his voice deadpan, even if his pulse had just doubled.
He hung up the plastic receiver and looked at Marcus.
“Investors are in.
Three companies.
I’m heading over to CAA to sort out which one.”
Marcus’s face lit up, shedding the casual college-kid detachment instantly.
Getting a feature greenlit straight out of school was a statistical anomaly.
For people like Marcus—the camera operators, the editors, the below-the-line talent who actually made the movie function—the climb was notoriously slow.
Nobody handed a twenty-two-year-old cinematographer a real budget without a decade of proof first.
But an actual, theatrical credit this early could shave ten years off that grind.
It meant real union hours, real money, and access to rooms that remained permanently locked to anyone without a finished feature on their resume.
“I’m going to go tell the others,” Marcus said, already out of his chair and moving toward the door.
“Go handle the suits.
We’ve got the ground game covered.”
Marcus headed straight for the dining hall, where the rest of their makeshift department had agreed to meet for lunch.
When he walked in, he bypassed the cafeteria line entirely, dropping into a chair at a corner table surrounded by five other film students.
“Where’s Adam?” one of them asked.
Marcus grinned.
“Taking meetings.
The project has funding.
Three studios.”
The table went dead silent for a second before the reality set in.
“No way,” a sound mixer muttered.
“I knew it.
The guy just sees things differently.
You remember that short he directed last semester?
Double Vision?
The faculty didn’t shut up about the blocking for a month.”
“To the genius,” someone else said, raising a plastic cup of dining hall soda.
The rest followed suit, toasting a contract they hadn’t even read yet.
Gossip is the primary currency of any film department, and word moved fast.
By the time they finished their lunch, half the campus already knew the broad strokes of the story.