Across town, stepping off the elevator at CAA, Adam felt the difference in the air the second he walked onto the floor.
Success has a specific gravity in Hollywood, and Adam could feel it shifting toward him.
Three production companies wanted to finance the same script.
That alone confirmed what he already knew—that the mechanics of Saw, even read coldly on paper in 1991, carried the exact same visceral weight they had when audiences first saw the film more than a decade later.
It was a steadying thought, and he held onto it as Derek met him near the reception desk.
“We sent the proposal out through the agency’s primary networks,” Derek said, keeping his voice low as they walked down the glass-lined hallway toward the main conference rooms.
“About a dozen mid-size and larger companies in total.
Three of them came back immediately wanting to sit down with you.
New Line Cinema, Grand Jazz Pictures, and Great American Films.”
Adam turned the names over in his head.
Grand Jazz and Great American meant absolutely nothing to him.
Whatever they were doing right now, they wouldn’t exist by the time he had any use for them.
Mid-size independents with no distinct identity rarely survived the brutal corporate consolidations that were coming to the industry.
They were dead weight.
New Line Cinema was entirely different.
Adam knew exactly where New Line was headed.
Within a few years, they would be absorbed into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, sitting alongside major studios and legacy networks that would define the next two decades of entertainment.
More importantly, New Line had built its entire foundation on exactly the kind of film Adam was pitching—cheap, incredibly sharp horror that punched massively above its weight class.
They had also just enjoyed a banner year distributing a foreign martial arts picture the major studios had been too nervous to touch, meaning their acquisition pockets were unusually full.
If nothing went sideways in the next hour, Adam already knew exactly whose money he was taking.
He nodded to Derek to signal he was ready, and Derek pushed open the heavy oak door to the meeting room.
Inside, two long leather sofas faced each other across a low glass table.
The three executives seated there looked considerably more relaxed than Adam had expected.
Today wasn’t the hard negotiation; today was an audition to see if the kid who wrote the script possessed the actual temperament to direct it.
All three men stood as Adam and Derek entered, offering handshakes with a level of professional courtesy that caught Adam slightly off guard.
He had half-expected the stereotypical Hollywood hostility—the table-pounding studio bosses aiming to intimidate a twenty-one-year-old first-timer.
But the more he thought about it, the more their politeness made sense.
Power is cordial until it doesn’t need to be.
He hadn’t given them a reason to treat him like a liability yet.
That would only happen if he failed.
Adam took the open seat across from them.
Dean, the executive from New Line who seemed the most genuinely invested in the project, took the lead.
“I want to ask about the female lead,” Dean said, leaning forward resting his forearms on his knees.
“Why specifically write her as this kind of knockout?
The script is a gritty psychological thriller.
Why lean so hard into the sex appeal?”
Adam understood the subtext immediately.
The industry had a private, highly effective way of sorting young directors into two distinct camps: the arthouse auteurs who chased prestige at the expense of profit, and the commercial pragmatists who understood that a film was a product meant to be sold.
Studios were infinitely more willing to finance the second kind.
Dean wanted to know which camp he was dealing with.
Adam knew the exact answer the room needed to hear.
“Because audiences like looking at attractive people in dark rooms,” Adam said simply, keeping his face deadpan.
A beat of silence passed before a genuine laugh rolled around the table.
The tension in the room evaporated.
The point landed perfectly: Adam wasn’t here to waste their money on self-indulgent art.
He understood the baseline mechanics of selling movie tickets, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
From there, the conversation opened up effortlessly.
All three companies were offering roughly the same boilerplate terms.
A total production budget of $1.3 million, which covered absolutely everything from equipment rentals down to Adam’s directing fee of $50,000.
Even by 1991 standards, it was a razor-thin budget, and his personal fee was essentially scale.
None of that bothered him.
If Saw achieved even a fraction of the cultural impact he remembered it having, $50,000 would be a rounding error.
The real, generational wealth was sitting in the franchise copyright he had already legally bound to his own name—a value none of the three executives sitting across from him could possibly comprehend yet.
Adam had no intention of educating them today.
What he did want, far more than an upfront fee, was a structural stake in the backend.
A first-time director with no finished features to his name was in no position to demand gross points.
But Adam wasn’t operating on a normal timeline.
“I do have one idea I’d like to put in front of you,” Adam said, shifting the tone of the room.
“I’m confident enough in how this film will perform to ask for something a little unusual regarding my compensation.”
“What kind of idea?” Dean asked, his eyes narrowing slightly.
The executives from Grand Jazz and Great American leaned in.
None of them showed any competitive hostility.
Companies at this tier crossed paths often enough that gentleman’s agreements were common; they weren’t going to get into a bidding war over a college student.
Whatever Adam was about to propose, they were all going to evaluate it together.