She submitted her Michael Collins script on a whim, half-daring, half-mocking herself, expecting nothing—certainly not a response. For weeks, the submission sat in the outbox of her mind, a punchline to her parents' well-meaning interrogations about "What are you doing after school?" She was fifteen, an age at which adulthood was both a threat and a punchline, and she had no intention of growing up gracefully. The script was written in a fever over two holiday breaks: the first flush of inspiration over Christmas vacation, fueled by too much American television and a stack of her grandfather's battered history books; the second draft hammered out in the bitter, slushy weeks after a failed mock trial competition, when all she wanted was to prove she could manipulate narrative better than the sanctimonious overachievers on the debate team.
She sent the script to the Irish Film Board, printing out three copies on her father's groaning dot-matrix printer, and wrote a letter of introduction so saccharine she nearly gave herself a cavity. She addressed it not to a specific person, but "To whom it may concern," and signed it, with a flourish, "R. L. Olivier." She liked the sound of it—continental, mysterious, like the protagonist of a French spy novel. She figured she'd never hear back.
She did, of course. The response came in the form of a phone call, the sort of phone call that rearranges the furniture in your head and forces you to sit upright, suddenly self-conscious of your posture and the grease in your hair. The voice on the other end was friendly, efficient, and did not ask her age. "We're intrigued," it said. "Can you fly to Dublin for a meeting?" She could, and she did, accompanied by her mother, who spent the entire train ride rehearsing her own questions and answers in a spiral notebook. The meeting was a blur: fluorescent lighting, styrofoam coffee cups, a panel of three men in ill-fitting blazers whose names she instantly forgot. They asked about her research, her intentions, her ability to rewrite under pressure. She replied without thinking, as she always did, and watched as one of the men scrawled excitedly in a yellow legal pad.
Six weeks later, she received a registered letter on Cream Laid Bond, the kind of stationery that only exists in legal dramas and government offices. The letter congratulated her, but only in the most careful, hedged language, and it offered a sum of money large enough to make her mother weep into the Sunday roast. Geffen Pictures wanted to option her script. "Option" was a new word for her; so was "collaborative development." She read the letter three times before it occurred to her she would have to say yes, and then she hugged her brother so hard he squeaked.
The numbers themselves meant less than the validation.
The script was good, at least as good as she could have made it given the time and resources. She knew it wasn't going to break box office records or overturn the conventions of biographical drama, but it was—the phrase repeated itself in her mind—an "entry point." A foothold in the unscalable cliff of professional writing. She was under no delusions about Hollywood's appetite for novelty, or about the long odds of seeing her name above the title in the opening credits, but she'd been given a ticket to the dance and intended to make the most of it.
She included, with her final draft, a list of casting suggestions. Not whims, but carefully plotted choices, each actor's strengths catalogued in the margins, their ages and accents cross-referenced against history itself. In her cover letter, she wrote, "I believe these choices will lend credibility and emotional depth to the project. I hope you'll consider them." She wondered if anyone would bother reading that far, or if the list would be crumpled and tossed before the end of the first paragraph.
She was, after all, just turned fifteen in the year 1995. And while she wasn't arrogant enough to believe she knew more than the producers and casting directors with decades of experience, she was just self-assured enough to hope her voice might squeak through the din. She had, at least, written something that felt honest—messy, complicated, fraught with contradiction, and alive.
Whether they would accept her suggestions, she didn't know. But she hoped—fiercely, irrationally—that they might.