The Disney lot in Burbank hummed with a frantic, high-stakes energy.
Just a few years prior, the studio had been bleeding cash.
Then Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg were brought in from Paramount, and the two executives had forcefully hauled the company back from the brink.
They weren’t just the family animation house anymore.
Touchstone Pictures was churning out adult-oriented hits, explicitly designed to compete in the most cutthroat sectors of the market.
Pretty Woman was a Touchstone project, and CAA had its fingerprints all over the package.
The director, Garry Marshall, producer Steven Reuther, and screenwriter J.F.
Lawton were all Michael Ovitz’s clients.
Aaron fell into step alongside Gary Goldstein, a Disney executive producer, as they navigated a busy administrative wing.
“Where are we on the leads?” he asked, matching the executive’s brisk pace.
“Garry is pushing hard for Christopher Reeve,” Goldstein replied, flipping open a manila folder without breaking his stride.
“For the female lead, we’ve put offers out to Karen Allen and Molly Ringwald.”
“Any bites?”
“Radio silence.”
Aaron absorbed the reality of the board.
He was the one who had pitched the fairytale retooling of the script to Katzenberg.
He was the reason it was greenlit instead of buried in turnaround.
But walking the halls of Burbank, the hierarchy was absolute.
He was a junior agent from CAA—when it came to final casting, he had no vote.
His only official excuse to be on the lot was wrangling script revisions with Lawton, but he was always tracking the movement of capital.
Christopher Reeve made perfect sense on paper.
He had high global visibility, but his asking price had tanked after Superman IV bombed.
Molly Ringwald and Karen Allen were seasoned, affordable, and fundamentally safe.
“Silence means they’re passing,” Aaron said.
“No established A-lister wants to risk her brand playing a streetwalker.”
“We’ll keep issuing offers,” Goldstein said, sounding fatigued.
“If the veterans keep passing, we’ll have to start testing unknowns.
Open the casting.”
That was the fracture he was waiting for.
He couldn’t force Marshall or Katzenberg to hand the role to Nicole.
But if the established talent pool dried up, Touchstone would be forced to cast a wide net—Nicole just had to be positioned when they did.
Having pulled the intel he needed, Aaron wrapped his business on the lot and walked out.
Playing studio politics in the hallways was an inefficient use of his time.
By early April, Nicole’s Australian thriller, Dead Calm, hit theaters.
It was a contained, low-budget picture, but she proved she could hold the center of the frame for ninety minutes.
It gave him exactly what he needed: a verified asset.
Right on schedule, Quentin Tarantino dropped his finished script onto Aaron’s desk at the agency: True Romance.
Aaron locked him down with a full writing and directing representation contract immediately.
Reading the actual script, however, required endurance.
It was a brilliant, kinetic fever dream dripping with dark humor—but the physical pages were a disaster.
The formatting was chaotic, the grammar was nonexistent, and it was a minor miracle when Quentin spelled a character’s name the same way twice.
He dropped the heavy stack of handwritten pages onto an assistant’s desk in the script department.
She skimmed the first page, her expression going entirely flat.
“I’ve read three pages and counted twenty-seven spelling errors.”
“Fix the grammar so a studio executive doesn’t have an aneurysm trying to read it,” Aaron instructed, turning away.
“I’m going to sell it by Friday.”
As he stepped back into the hallway, Ovitz walked out of his corner office, phone pinned to his ear.
Junior staff instantly cleared the corridor.
Aaron matched his stride, completely ignoring agency hierarchy.
“Michael,” Aaron said, his voice quiet and steady.
“The Pretty Woman package at Touchstone is stalling on casting.”
Ovitz didn’t slow down, but his eyes shifted sideways.
Two passing senior agents froze in place.
“Garry Marshall has it handled,” Ovitz said flatly into his receiver, holding up a hand to pause his call.
“He’s chasing ghosts,” Aaron said without missing a beat.
“Ringwald and Allen are dropping out.
In two weeks, Katzenberg opens wide casting—I’m positioning an Australian actress to take the seat.”
A brief beat passed.
Ovitz offered a quiet, unreadable nod.
“Deliver the result, Aaron,” Ovitz said, stepping into his office and resuming his call.
Aaron walked back to his desk.
Before he reached his office, his pager buzzed.
Miramax.
They needed him at their Los Angeles outpost to nail down the Cannes Film Festival strategy for Steven Soderbergh.
He slid into his car and dialed Soderbergh on the built-in phone.
“Steven.
Where are you?”
“Florida,” Soderbergh replied, the sound of wind over the receiver.
“Taking some time off.
You coming down?”
Aaron put the car in gear, merging into the brutal afternoon traffic on the 405.
“No.
Just making sure you know you’re flying to France at the end of the month.
I’m heading to Miramax right now to map out the P&A spend for Cannes.”
“End of the month.
Got it.
I’ll pack a suit.”
He hung up.
He was grinding on the asphalt while his client was catching rays on the beach—that was the transaction.
Miramax was still a scrappy, hyper-aggressive independent distributor.
They were heading to Cannes primarily to buy foreign films for the US market, but they were throwing serious capital behind Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Aaron sat across from Harvey Weinstein.
“I hear the internal screenings went well, Harvey,” Aaron said casually.
“One point five million to acquire it, plus a two million P&A commitment,” Weinstein grunted, leaning his heavy frame over his desk.
“By the time we open this thing, I’ll be in the hole for three and a half million dollars.
Your judgment better be as good as you think it is, Anderson.”
Aaron held Weinstein’s gaze, his voice entirely flat.
“You bought a Palme d’Or contender for the price of a tax write-off.
When Soderbergh leaves Cannes with a trophy, the foreign presales alone will cover your P&A.
You’ll know exactly how smart you were to write that check.”
Weinstein let out a rough, barking laugh.
“Just make sure your kid knows how to play ball with the press when we get to France.”
“He’s a first-time director,” Aaron said, standing up.
“He’ll do whatever it takes to build a platform.”
Stepping back out into the bright Los Angeles sun, his car phone rang again.
It was Nicole.
Her voice was tight, stripped of its usual edge.
“Aaron…
a director just called.
He told me to meet him at the Culver Hotel tonight to discuss a script.”
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Thank you so much for reading!
Peace out,
Lucent