The eighty thousand dollars didn't sit quietly in the bank account. It hummed. To Daniel, the money felt like a live wire—a ticking countdown that began the moment he'd walked out of the lender's office. In the mountains, time was a river; in Hollywood, it was a meat grinder.
For the first week of February, Tom's apartment ceased to be a living space. It became a tactical command center. The coffee table was buried under equipment manifests, and the walls were papered with a "Who's Who" of the North Hollywood crew circuit.
"I'm telling you, Benny is the only guy who won't charge us a 'sanity tax' for this script," Tom said, his shoulder pinned against his ear as he scrolled through a chaotic contact list on his laptop. "He's a genius with a boom pole, but he's got the personality of a cactus. He's tired of recording footsteps for reality TV. He wants to hear people talk."
They met Benny at a diner where the coffee was strong enough to strip paint. Benny looked exactly how Daniel expected: a man who had spent twenty years wearing heavy headphones, his hair a permanent nest of tangled cables. He stared at the script Daniel had slid across the table like it was a suspicious package.
"No score?" Benny asked, his voice a gravelly rasp. "You want ninety minutes of twelve guys shouting in a box, and you don't want a single violin to tell the audience how to feel?"
"The room is the score, Benny," Daniel said. He leaned forward, his hands steady. "I want to hear the rattle of the vents. I want the sound of a heavy chair dragging across floorboards to feel like a thunderclap. If a man's throat goes dry, I want the audience to hear the click when he swallows. It has to be surgical."
Benny squinted at him, looking for the amateurish "film student" spark, but found only a cold, professional clarity. He let out a short, sharp grunt. "Surgical, huh? Most kids your age just want to hide their bad dialogue behind a Kans Trimmer rip-off. If I do this, your actors can't mumble. I'll catch every stray breath."
"That's exactly what I'm paying for," Daniel replied.
Next was Sarah, an Imaging Technician Tom had tracked down through a UCLA alumni thread. She was a digital alchemist, the kind of person who could make a sensor see things the human eye missed.
"We're shooting on a RED V-Raptor," Daniel told her as they walked through a rental house in Burbank, checking out prime lenses. "But I don't want the 'Hollywood Glow.' I want a custom LUT that emphasizes skin texture and salt. I want the air to look yellow, heavy—like New York in a heatwave before the rain breaks. And we're staying on the long end of the glass. 85mm and 100mm for the close-ups. I want to see the pores breathe."
Sarah ran a hand over a lens casing, a slow smile spreading across her face. "You want to trap them. Most directors are obsessed with wide-angle 'scope.' You want to crush the depth of field until there's nowhere for the actors to hide their eyes."
"Precisely."
---
The technical skeleton was forming, but the project still lacked a soul. For that, they needed the "Theater Rats."
Following Leo's invitation, Daniel and Tom spent three consecutive nights in the "Actor's Basements" of Los Angeles—the Odyssey Theatre, the Antaeus, and several nameless black-boxes in NoHo. These weren't the glitzy venues of the Westside; they were places that smelled of stale coffee, old velvet, and the desperate, beautiful energy of people who practiced their craft for the sake of the work itself.
Leo met them at the stage door of the Odyssey after a late rehearsal. He looked different here—sharper, more vibrant than he did behind the burger grill.
"I've put the word out," Leo whispered, leading them through a maze of props and flats. "The 'Theater Underground' is talking. Word is there's a script in town that actually requires a pulse. No green screens, no 'fix it in post.' The guys are hungry, Daniel. They're tired of playing 'Armed Guard #2' in streaming shows just to pay their health insurance."
Daniel watched the rehearsals from the shadows of the back row. He wasn't looking for a "performance"; he was looking for the "click"—that moment when an actor stopped reciting lines and started living in space.
He saw a man in his late fifties playing a broken father in a Chekhov revival. The man's hands shook slightly as he poured an imaginary drink.
A subtle vibration hummed behind Daniel's eyelids. The System, which had been a quiet observer for days, flickered into life.
[ENTITY DETECTED: MORRIS, MARCUS]
[ROLE_PROFILE: VETERAN_THEATER]
[TALENT_METRIC: EMOTIONAL_DENSITY]
[NUMERICAL_EVAL: 8.4/10]
[COMPATIBILITY: JUROR_03_CANDIDATE]
Daniel made a sharp, clean note on his clipboard. "Invite the guy playing the father. Tell him the character is 'The Antagonist,' but tell him he's the hero of his own story."
"You're like a scout at a minor league game," Tom whispered, shaking his head. "How do you know? He hasn't even said his big monologue yet."
"I don't need the monologue, Tom," Daniel said, his eyes never leaving the stage. "I need to see how he listens. Acting is 10% talking and 90% reacting. He's doing the work in silence."
—
By the second week of February, they had secured their "Cage."
To protect the TPC (Total Production Cost), they'd avoided the professional casting studios on Sunset. Instead, they found a dilapidated dance studio in North Hollywood, tucked between a radiator repair shop and a vegan bakery. The rent was $150 a day. The mirrors were spider-webbed with cracks, and the floorboards groaned like a sinking ship, but the light—a harsh, unforgiving sun that cut through the high, grimy windows—was exactly what Daniel wanted.
"It's perfect," Daniel said, walking the perimeter of the room. He felt the geometry of the space. "It feels like a trap."
"It feels like I'm going to need a tetanus shot," Tom muttered, setting up a folding table and a single tripod with a 4K camera to record the sessions. "But the acoustic dampening isn't bad. The brick walls keep the radiator shop noise to a dull hum. Benny can scrub that out."
They arranged twelve mismatched chairs in a circle—an imaginary table in the center. Daniel wanted the actors to feel the spatial tension the moment they crossed the threshold.
---
February 15th. 8:00 AM.
The line of men stretched down the sun-baked sidewalk of NoHo. There were veteran character actors with leather-bound portfolios, young theater kids with nervous energy, and a few guys who looked like they'd just stepped off a construction site.
Tom sat at the table, a stack of fifty headshots and resumes in front of him. He looked like a man about to sit for the Bar exam—tense, clutching a lukewarm latte like a lifeline. Daniel sat beside him, his leather portfolio open, his face a mask of clinical focus.
"First up," Tom called out, his voice echoing in the hollow room. "Greg Vance."
A man in his early thirties walked in. He was handsome in a generic, "Midwestern Dad" sort of way. He wore a crisp, ironed button-down and a confident smile. He looked like he'd just stepped out of a high-end insurance commercial.
"Whenever you're ready, Greg," Daniel said. "We're doing the Juror Eight 'Architect' beat from Page 14. The moment he decides to stand alone."
Greg took a deep, theatrical breath. He planted his feet. He delivered the lines with professional, polished precision. His diction was flawless. His eye contact was steady. He hit every emotional "beat" exactly where a textbook would tell him to. He finished with a flourish, his eyes welling with a single, perfectly timed tear.
"How was that?" Greg asked, his smile returning instantly. "I can do it with more 'grit' if you want. Or more 'heroic'."
"Thank you, Greg. We have your contact info," Daniel said, his voice flat.
As the door clicked shut, Tom leaned over, his eyes wide. "He was... actually good, right? I mean, he didn't stumble once. He looked the part. He's got 'Lead Actor' written all over him."
Daniel looked at the blank space on his legal pad. He looked at the System's readout, which stayed a cold, stagnant gray.
[EVALUATION: VANCE, GREG]
[PERFORMANCE: POLISHED_SURFACE]
[NUMERICAL_SCORE: 5.6/10]
[COMMENT: ACTING_TO_BE_SEEN_NOT_TO_BE_HEARD]
"He was 'good enough,' Tom," Daniel said. He crossed Greg's name off the list with a single, brutal stroke of his pen. "He acted like a man who knew he was being filmed. He didn't act like a man who was trapped in a room with the weight of a boy's life in his hands. He was performing 'Emotion.' I don't want a performance."
Tom let out a long, weary sigh, looking at the forty-nine remaining headshots on the table. The sun was getting higher, and the room was getting hotter.
"Fifty guys, Dan," Tom whispered, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. "If that guy was the top of the pile... this is going to take a hell of a lot longer than two days, isn't it?"
Daniel didn't answer. He just looked at the door as it opened for the next candidate.
"Next," Daniel said.