All four heads in the folding chairs turned.
For a moment they just looked at him, trying to work out where he had come from and how long he had been there and whose kid he was.
The man holding the coofe said slowly, "Who are you."
"The bus," Reese said again.
"Kid, you can't be in—"
"You push it."
"Okay, security is—"
"They push the bus," Reese said, and he stepped forward one step, not much, just enough to be in the room instead of against the wall. "That's the whole movie. The bus doesn't start. They all get out and they push it."
The woman named Karen, had gone still.
"Get him out of here," the pen man said to nobody in particular.
Nobody moved.
Reese wasn't looking at any of them. He was looking at the paused screen, at the freeze-frame of the family halfway out the door of the yellow bus, laughing, still running.
"You can't sell the comedy," he said. "She's right. People'll come once and hate you. And you can't sell the sad one because nobody goes to a sad one on a Friday."
"Oh my god, who is this kid," the man holding the pen said clutching his head.
"You sell the pushing," Reese said.
A silence followed.
"The pushing," said the man holding the cup of cofee as the realization of what Reese is saying dawned on him.
"Yeah."
"The—"
"They push the bus," Reese said again, a little louder, like they weren't keeping up. "That's the poster. The yellow bus. All of them pushing it. That's it. You don't say anything about the movie. You just show them pushing. And then at the end you put the little kid in the red dress in the back window looking out."
The man with the pen opened his mouth again with a angry expresion, but he didnt say anything.
The woman named Karen, lifted one hand without looking at him and the pen man closed his mouth.
"Keep going," she said, to Reese.
Reese shrugged.
"That's it," he said.
"That's not it," Karen said. "Keep going."
Reese frowned.
This was the part where people usually told him to stop talking, not keep going, and he wasn't sure what to do with the reverse.
He thought about it for a moment.
"Okay," he said. "You know how like. When you make a sandwich."
Li, on his shoulder, curiously stared at him.
"When you make a sandwich," Reese said, "and it's a weird sandwich, like you put something weird in it, like peanut butter and a pickle, which is actually good, nobody believes me but it's good. If you put it on a plate and you call it a peanut butter and pickle sandwich, nobody eats it. They think you're trying to poison them. Right?"
"Right," Karen said, completely deadpan.
"But if you just put it on the plate and you don't say anything. And somebody picks it up. And they take a bite. Then they like it. Because they tasted it before they had to have a feeling about it."
"The movie is the sandwich," Karen said.
"The movie is the sandwich," Reese said with a nod. "The bus is the plate."
The room went quiet.
The man holding the cofee set his coffee down on the floor very carefully, like he was worried about spilling it.
"The pushing is the plate," he muttered, to himself.
"Yeah."
"Because you can't describe the taste of the sandwich without making it sound bad."
"Yeah."
"But if they see the plate first."
"Yeah."
"And the plate is appealing."
"The plate is a yellow bus with a family running next to it," Reese said. "You can't make that look bad. You couldn't make that look bad if you tried. It's a yellow bus. It's a family. They're running."
The pen man was looking at Reese now with a different expression than he had started with.
Karen said, "The little girl at the end."
"In the window."
"Not on the stage."
"No. Not on the stage. She's in the window. Looking out. That's the shot."
"Why not on the stage." Karen asked.
Reese thought about it.
"Because the stage is the sandwich," he said. "If you put the stage on the poster people'll think it's a movie about a pageant. It's not a movie about a pageant. It's a movie about them all getting on the stage."
"But you're not showing them getting on the stage."
"No. Because you can't. It won't make sense on a poster." Resse said.
"So you show them pushing."
"Yeah."
"Because pushing is the same thing as getting on the stage." Reese paused for a moment after speaking.
He hadn't thought about it like that, he had just felt the emotion in him. But the woman had said it in a tone that sounded like she was figuring something out and he didn't want to interrupt her by disagreeing, so he just said:
"Yeah."
Li's color, very briefly, at the edge of its small round body, went warm for a moment.
Nobody saw it.
Reese didn't see it.
Li filed its own changes similar to how it had been filling away its own "emotions" something It was actively figuring out as well.
The coffee man was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped under his chin, looking at the paused screen.
"The push-start scene is forty seconds in," he said, to nobody. "We open on it. Full scene. No dialogue over it. Title card at the end."
"Tagline?" Karen said.
"No tagline."
"No tagline."
"We don't need one. If the tagline works, the image didn't."
The man holding the pen paused for a moment, "Marketing's going to lose their minds."
"Marketing can lose their minds." Karen said.
"They'll want a tagline."
"They can want a tagline."
Karen turned around in her folding chair and looked at Reese properly for the first time.
She was maybe forty. Dark hair. No makeup. The kind of tired that came from looking at the same problem every day for weeks. She looked at Reese and Reese looked back at her.
"How old are you," she said.
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen?"
"Yeah."
"And you're on this lot because."