The camera department mill about preparing their equipment, loading film and figuring out shots. Grip and electric crew yell as they set up the lighting, sound and video playback, run cables and prepare their carts. Hair and make-up are with the actors in dressing rooms or trailers, exchanging newsworthy gossip or listening to lines. And the sets! To walk through the lot is to walk through history. Who cares that Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul when over there on Stage 24 is where they filmed Friends, and right around the corner is where they did Jurassic Park. Marvel as the director goes over the script, deciding what will be shot, and how, with the director of photography. The chatter of sound mixers and assistants, caterers and producers. How many people say they want to make TV or movies? How many people actually get to do it? Everyone there has made it against the odds, and they know it. It’s what breathes magic into the air.

Fame, I’m gonna live forever.

The promise of all this – the lights, and the camera, and the action – is probably what made Duke Carlisle become who he is, Evie thinks. She got an extended bio through from her agent once they knew Duke was involved in the screen adaptation of her book. It said that little boy in Sunderland, England, knew that if he couldn’t do this – act, in Hollywood, for the whole world to see – then there wasn’t much point to anything. Now he’s internationally applauded, recognised everywhere he goes, and no doubt has as much money as … well, perhaps not God, but definitely a senior royal. He’s a working-class northern boy come good, just trying to make his mama proud, apparently. A direct quote from that bio? ‘It doesn’t get much better than this.’

But …

The reality of Hollywood is what makes Evie Bird want to avoid the movies for the rest of her life. She grew up on set, watching her dad give instructions to actors speaking the words he’d written – and she knows it’s not all as it seems. Abuse of power is real, and everyone works in the knowledge that one false move and they can be replaced like that, because there are a million other actors and directors and screenwriters ready and willing to take their place, so the hours are long and the morals dubious.

There’s fighting, there’s backstabbing, there’s torrid affairs … it was par for the course that Evie’s father would spend her childhood demonstrating the hat-trick, then.

When your parents are famous in Hollywood, you either want to be just like them, or nothing like them at all.

Evie couldn’t stand to end up like her father, and so no. She wants nothing to do with it, not ever.