Another night, Grace was no less transfixed by the breathless reporting of Paige from a comedy club in West Hollywood, where the underage Toby Goode had been busted by a bouncer for having a fake ID. Toby was with what Paige called “an older woman”—she was not that much older, as it turned out. Toby’s date was over twenty-one; at least she was old enough to drink. “Like father, like son,” Paige crowed.

“She doesn’t have children,” Grace said. The poor kid—the scum journalists should leave Paul Goode’s kid alone, I was thinking. I didn’t want to know what Grace was thinking. Imagining, as I knew she was, a Paul Goode memoir—maybe she was thinking the more dysfunction in the family, the better.

I saw Otto and Billy one night, albeit briefly. The two bodyguards made an appearance on Paige’s Hollywood gossip show. The paparazzi were blocking the entrance to a Santa Monica restaurant as the limo pulled to the curb. Otto got out of the driver’s seat; Billy held the back door open for Paul and Toby. It was night, but father and son were wearing dark glasses. Otto was clearing a path through the paparazzi. “Here come the bad boys now, and I don’t mean the bodyguards,” Paige was chirping, when Billy spotted the TV camera; his hand covered the lens—then blackness.

“Are those two thugs always with him?” Grace asked me.

“It seems so,” I said.

When you write screenplays that don’t get made, you lose your sense of humor about the bad movies that do get made—like Forgetting Nebraska. Grace slept through the end of that movie—good judgment on her part. Masochist that I am, I always watch the end.

The camera crosses the open porch of a run-down farmhouse in the prairies. Through a screen door, we see the supper dishes being cleared from a kitchen table. Two small children come out the screen door, climbing on the porch rail. In the distance, something catches the children’s attention. One of them just stares, but the older of the two runs back inside, bringing an elderly man back out. The old man stares into the distance, then sits down in a chair on the porch; he collapses into the chair as the music fades in. Off a blacktop road, a straight line through farmland, a dusty car turns in to the dirt road leading to the farmhouse.