Marty Nichols really wanted the movie called Lickety Split. A lot of people tried arguing such a decision would be in incredibly poor taste. Marty didn’t particularly care. He was a movie producer. He was used to getting it his own way.
Smaller production companies, from in-state, had tried to claim the rights. Marty scoffed at the very idea. This was a national story, now. People all over the country had been riveted to news broadcasts, to their phones, concerning poor Kate Meadows. She’d filled endless copy in the tabloids, in the weekly magazines, in the papers, where her name hadn’t left the top of the front page since it first appeared, at least in the local ones.
In short, Kate had become a household name. License to print money. Cable networks had already filmed shitty TV movies, several streaming services.
Marty had a vision. In recent decades the most reliable source of box office returns had been massive, corporate-owned IPs. Bookstores had shelves filled with Kate Meadows books, too, eventually. That one author who seemed to have a new book cowritten every week just released. He had one, too. Marty saw Kate as a commodity, like anything else. He knew at least one young actress with just the right amount of sex appeal to sell the tragedy in all the right ways, young actors maybe not so much with name recognition but talent enough to seduce poor Kate in celluloid.
He didn’t have an opinion of what’d happened. He didn’t care. He saw it as a timeless, classic piece of Americana, another dream lost in a life cut too short. Out in the wilderness. Like all the best stories.
In his mind, Marty saw Bishop hopping aboard his fishing boat and setting out of Casco Bay, Malkovich hopping into his Outback and speeding toward Portsmouth.
Lickety split. Bad luck, Kate…
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