He’d grown tired of Los Angeles: the place, the people, the lifestyle. He’d grown tired of his friends as well, their smugness, their self-absorption, their condescending attitude toward anyone outside their clique, the mandatory elitism that afflicted what passed for their culture. He’d fallen in with a group of film snobs—hip writers for entertainment publications, young academics from prestigious film schools, wannabe indie figures—people with little in common save their interest in cinema. As a successful video distributor, a lifelong movie fan who had made millions working on the fringes of filmdom, he himself was an inspiration to his friends, proof that the wall could be breached, yet he knew that while they pretended to be supportive of him and had no qualms about taking advantage of his generosity, they were, at the same time, jealous, and when a serious discussion of film came about—as it often did—his opinions were treated with slightly less respect, just to let him know that he was not really in their intellectual league.

That had always irritated the hell out of him.

He was the only member of the group who exhibited even the least bit of independence, who did not automatically fall in with the prevailing opinion and conform to preexisting tastes with lockstep homogeneity. They were nobodies, really, but they always acted as though they were society’s arbiters of filmic quality, and it was a given that any film of which they approved was a work of art. They’d sit around and summarily dismiss contemporary comedies, yet rhapsodize about a Laurel and Hardy pie fight. It wasn’t that the pie fight was intrinsically better than, say, the slapstick antics in a Jim Carrey movie, it was just that they considered it “classic,” and that was automatically supposed to elevate its level of quality.

He’d grown increasingly tired of this intellectual incestuousness over the years, weary of the monotonic interests and attitudes. It was partly his fault. They were his friends and he had chosen them. He’d made his bed and had to lie in it.

So he’d simply pulled up stakes one day, sold off his Brentwood estate, and relocated to Santa Fe.

Now he conducted his business from here.

Stormy sped through Truchas, the small village where Robert Redford had filmed The Milagro Beanfield War.

He’d first visited New Mexico as a teenager, on a trip with his family, and he had never forgotten the place. They’d done the tourist loop—White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Santa Fe, Taos Pueblo—and it had made a big impression on him. He was a city kid, born and bred in Chicago, and the dry heat, the open space, and the spectacular sky had all spoken to him in a way that nothing else had. He’d realized even then that this was where he wanted to live when he grew up, where he wanted to spend his life.