Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story Read Free Page B

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    So that’s how we met and how Cameron and I became the very best of friends. But now you’re curious about that other thing: how he became famous. That’s quite the crazy story.
    There’s a book that’s adored by millions of women around the world. Actually, adored is probably too trite a word to describe how they really feel. These women are obsessed with this series. For years there’d been rumors it was going to be optioned into a movie franchise, and then it happened but nothing ever came of it. One studio owned the rights, but when they couldn’t lock down a script the author approved, they’d sell those rights to a different studio. It was like a hot potato everyone wanted to get their hands on but no one ever managed to hold on to for any length of time.
    After awhile people stopped paying attention but then last year seemingly out of nowhere the author announced on her Facebook page that she was working with a major studio to bring it to the big screen. The industry went insane – again – and immediately entertainment magazines and gossip sites began speculating who would be cast as the male lead.
    That speculation was nothing though compared to the reaction of the fans. Whole campaigns were launched on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to lobby for the actors and actresses they’d been imagining for so many years. People tweeted directly at random Hollywood executives who had nothing whatsoever to do with its production in hopes of getting their favorites cast. It was madness, complete and utter insanity.
    And then when Broderick told me he’d been chosen to make The Ties That Bind , I knew my life was about to change dramatically. All of our lives, really.
    When the fandom found out he’d been named the director, they tracked down everyone who had anything to do with him and started stalking them on social media. Strangely, I began receiving tweets telling me who I should push for in casting, as if I had anything to do with Broderick’s decisions. It was as if overnight I’d become famous by proxy which was weird as shit.
    But it wasn’t just the fandom that had gone nuts. It seemed like every actor and actress in Hollywood – both known and unknown – wanted a shot at the major roles. Some even leaked to the press they were in the running. Broderick hadn’t yet put a PR team in place because he actually loathed the whole philosophy behind public relations. And so quite suddenly my job description expanded exponentially. I wasn’t just doing PA duties anymore, but also began reaching out to bloggers on his behalf to offer them interviews in exchange for their help in stopping the negative rumors from escalating. If I hadn’t developed some sort of rapport with a handful of them early on I don’t know what would have happened when a particular actress with a really terrible, widely known drug problem started telling the world she was in talks for the female lead. While I cleaned up messes and put out fires about fake casting, Broderick and his team went about trying to find the actual actors and actresses they wanted for the roles.
    At first they looked at some of the big names, celebrities with name recognition who they could bank the success of the franchise on. But as time wore on it became increasingly clear it would be difficult to build a series of movies around the schedule of someone already so well established. That’s when they started looking at unknowns on the down low.
    You see where this is going, right?
    Again, I probably shouldn’t have said anything but one night over margaritas I mentioned that little known fact to Cameron who didn’t take me seriously. In fact, he laughed and told me I was crazy. He didn’t think he was right for the role but somehow, over the course of our enchiladas and tacos, I managed to convince him otherwise. Once I had him believing he was the right sort of actor for the part, I told him what I had learned. As the