Chapter 7 : Cold Open

Chapter 7: Chapter 7 : Cold Open

The problem came down to one port.

Fifteen minutes after Maya walked off, Ethan was back in the room with Noah’s Dell laptop.

First thing, he registered WhoWonTheGrand.com on GoDaddy. Eight ninety-nine for the domain, seven ninety-nine a month for hosting, on his own debit card, and the login went to the email address Maya had scribbled in the corner of his notebook.

Second thing, he set the Handycam next to the laptop and turned the laptop over, checking every side. To get footage off a MiniDV camera you needed FireWire, a small flat port almost every Mac in 2006 came with. Noah’s eight-hundred-dollar Dell had USB on the left, USB on the right, and more USB in the back.

"Can’t you just use USB?" Noah asked.

"Not on this camera. The USB only does stills. Somebody at Sony hates us."

And even if the footage got in, cutting eight minutes in Windows Movie Maker would probably kill the laptop first.

There was exactly one place on campus to cut video: the editing lab in the basement of the media building. Eight Power Mac G5s running Final Cut Pro, upper-level media students only, by reservation, after a training course. A freshman who hadn’t sat through a single class yet had about as much chance of getting in there as getting into the president’s office.

Noah shut the laptop. "What time does it close?"

"Two. First week of school, nobody books it at night. The night guy’s a senior."

Noah stood up and jammed his ball cap on. "Then we go now."

The basement of the media building had a smell, old carpet and burnt coffee and warm electronics. Ethan knew it the second he hit the bottom of the stairs.

He’d spent four years down here once.

Three months from now, the week before Thanksgiving, he’d been sitting at the machine in the third row, against the wall, when the call came from home.

It was his mother. She kept her voice light, a little too light. Some trouble with Frank’s business, honey. Your dad’s handling it. Don’t you worry.

He asked if it was serious. She said no, she just wanted him to know. Somewhere behind her, through a wall, his father was talking to someone in the living room, too low to make out.

He said I’ll come home this weekend, hung up, and turned back around to keep cutting. He believed her, because believing her was easier.

He didn’t go home that weekend. Or the one after. By the time he finally stood in the driveway at Christmas, the garage was stacked with moving boxes, and there was nothing left for him to do but help carry them.

He didn’t look at the third row.

A skinny senior in black-framed glasses sat behind the counter with his feet up, flipping through a dog-eared film magazine. His T-shirt had the Reservoir Dogs poster on it. The tag on his chest said SAM ORTIZ.

Ethan knew him. He’d spent most of a freshman year cutting under this guy’s nose. Sam talked like the rulebook was all he had, and the rulebook went out the window for exactly two things: movies, and people who actually loved them.

"You’re not on the sign-up sheet." He didn’t look up.

Ethan opened his mouth, about to start with the movies, but Noah already had an elbow on the counter.

"Reservoir Dogs." Noah nodded at the shirt. "Good movie. But if we’re talking cheap, nothing beats Clerks. Twenty-seven grand, right?"

Sam’s eyes came up over the magazine. "Twenty-seven five. He sold his comic book collection."

"Then you’ll like ours," Noah said. "Our budget was a thousand bucks. And we gave the whole thousand to a girl."

"...What?"

"Three hundred people watching. A campus cop for a referee. A girl dumping water over her boyfriend’s head. One camera." Noah paused. "And the battery died the second the ending happened."

Sam took his feet off the desk and looked at the two of them for a second. "Wait. The thing on the lawn this afternoon? The thousand-dollar thing?"

"That was us."

"I’ve been hearing about it all night." He frowned. "It died? You didn’t get it?"

"Right at the end."

"So who actually won? I’ve heard like four versions today. One guy said the big dude. Somebody said the baseball kid. My roommate swears the cop confiscated the money."

Noah grinned. "You want to know?"

"Obviously."

"Then you’re like everybody else. You wait for the video."

Sam stared at him. "You’re messing with me."

"We’re messing with everybody," Noah said. "You’re just first."

Sam leaned back, tossed the magazine aside, and pulled off his glasses and chewed on one arm of them. "The battery dies right at the ending," he said slowly. "That’s either the worst thing that could happen or the best."

"The best," Ethan said.

Sam looked at him properly for the first time.

Noah went in for the close. "First line of the credits, special thanks to Sam Ortiz. And a large pepperoni from Domino’s every night we’re down here."

Sam looked at the clock on the wall, then at the two of them. "Two hours. Back row, machine eight. Anybody asks, you’re my cousins."

"Both of us?"

"Big family."

On the way to the back row, they traded a look. Noah raised his eyebrows at him, chin up, the whole thing written all over his face: see that?

Ethan ducked his head to keep from grinning. Four years of rooming with him the first time around had taught Ethan exactly who Noah was. Thirty seconds to make a best friend out of anybody, and then he had to turn around and make sure you’d seen it. Noah was still Noah. Ethan understood audiences. Noah understood people.

"Show-off," Ethan muttered.

"You’re welcome."

Capturing footage took as long as shooting it. Forty-some minutes on the tape meant forty-some minutes of watching it play into the machine.

Ethan didn’t wait around. He pulled a yellow legal pad out of his bag and wrote one thing at the top: 8:30.

"Why eight-thirty?" Noah leaned over.

"YouTube caps uploads at ten minutes right now. Go over and it won’t take it. The other minute and a half is my margin for screwing up."

He worked his way down the page. One line per timestamp, one line per shot. Kevin fighting him for the mic. Tyler and Mac squaring off. Hendricks’s first appearance: I’m not going to ask twice. Tyler’s pitch. The buyout. Every forty seconds or so, something that made you go wait, what?

"How’d you come up with forty seconds?"

"People watching online keep a finger on the close button the whole time." Ethan didn’t look up. "Right when they’re about to click, you give them another reason not to."

Halfway down, he stopped, then circled one line: 4:15. Sierra, the water.

"That one has to land dead center."

"Why?"

"Because YouTube grabs the frame from the exact middle of the video and uses it as the thumbnail."

The thumbnail was the sign over the door. Somebody scrolling a page full of videos gave each little picture less than half a second. A girl holding up a bottle, a guy soaked to the skin, a fistful of cash still raised over his head. That picture didn’t need a caption. Anybody would want to know what happened.

They kept at it, writing while they waited, and by the time the capture finished, it was past eleven.

Ethan put his hands on the keyboard and stopped thinking. J back, K stop, L play, B for the blade. Cut, delete, ripple. His eighteen-year-old fingers didn’t know the moves, but his thirty-eight-year-old brain remembered every shortcut. The first three minutes were clumsy. After that, his hands caught up.

The very first shot started an argument.

"Shouldn’t it open with your intro?" Noah pointed at the screen. "’First day at Southern Coast. Five freshmen.’ That was cool."

"Nobody cares who we are yet." Ethan dragged it further back. "They care about the money."

The first second of the cut was a close-up of cash. That was Noah’s doing. He’d just gotten his hands on the camera and didn’t know what he was doing yet, and the moment Ethan pulled out the money, he’d zoomed all the way in on instinct. The whole screen was Ethan’s thumb fanning a stack of twenties, green enough to hurt. In any film class, that shot would’ve gotten him yelled at. Here, it was the best first frame the video could have.

Then, smack. The whole stack hitting the speaker, and the mic turning it into a gunshot. Cut wide: three hundred people dead silent, five mouths on stage still hanging open from the argument. At the three-second mark, Ethan’s voice. "Last hand on wins one thousand dollars."

Cut to black. Title.

TV had figured this out a long time ago. They called it a cold open: before the opening credits, drop the viewer straight into the middle of something. Online, it was even more brutal. The first five seconds were your whole pitch, and the viewer was one click from gone. If those five seconds didn’t give them a reason to stay, it didn’t matter how good the next eight minutes were. Nobody would ever see them.

They were still at it at twelve-thirty, when Sam came back to kick them out and ended up standing behind them for five minutes without a word.

"Where’d you learn Final Cut?" he finally said. "They don’t teach shortcuts here till junior year."

"Summer job."

"Doing what?"

"Weddings."

Sam looked at the timeline, then at the frame on the screen, Sierra holding the bottle over Dylan’s head. He sighed, went back to the counter, flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED, and picked his magazine back up.

Ethan’s phone buzzed on the desk just after one.

Maya: Site’s up. Domain kicks in by morning. The handshake didn’t mean anything.

Ten seconds later, another one came in: Don’t reply to that.

Ethan didn’t reply. The first text had a temporary link in it, a string of numbers. Ethan opened it on the G5. White background, black text, one line in caps across the top: WHO WON THE GRAND? Five names under it, each with a little circle next to it. A box for an email address and a button: LOCK IT IN. Below the button, in small type: Tell a friend, get a second entry.

Ugly, but clean. Everything exactly where it needed to be.

The twenty-four-hour countdown was almost four hours gone. And she’d built the whole site, alone, in less than four.

Ethan read down the names. Tyler. Dylan. Sierra. Mac. And at the bottom: Maya (the quiet one).

He stared at the words in the parentheses for two seconds, and the corner of his mouth got away from him. She’d given herself a label. And it was better than anything he’d come up with.

They walked out of the media building at 1:40 with a freshly burned CD in Ethan’s pocket. Eight minutes, thirty seconds. A hundred megabytes.

The dorm’s Ethernet cord ran from the wall, and the campus network was fastest in the middle of the night. Ethan logged into YouTube, picked the file, typed the title: Last Hand On Wins $1,000. The description was three lines. We know who won. You don’t. Yet. Guessing closes Friday at midnight. The ending goes up Saturday. WhoWonTheGrand.com

He hit upload.

The progress bar moved once, then stopped moving. One percent. Two. Noah lifted his head from the bed by the window, grunted, and dropped it again. Ten minutes later his head came back up. Twenty minutes later he gave up, rolled out of bed, and dragged a chair over next to Ethan.

Forty minutes.

At 2:36, the page changed. Processing. A few more minutes, and the little player showed up, with one line of gray text under it. Views: 0.

Noah grabbed the headphones off the desk and put them on. "I’m just checking it uploaded okay."

He hit play.

In the first five seconds, his shoulders twitched. A minute in, he was leaning toward the screen. At Tyler’s pitch, he pressed a fist to his mouth. At four-fifteen, when Sierra raised the bottle, he jerked back so hard the chair almost went over.

He’d been up on that stage, right next to Ethan, three steps from the pelican. He’d shot every frame himself. Nobody alive knew better what was coming next.

Eight minutes, thirty seconds. The screen went black. Two seconds of nothing. Then white text, one line at a time. Somebody caught the ending. You’ll see it Saturday. Guessing closes Friday at midnight. Who won the grand? WhoWonTheGrand.com

Noah took off the headphones and sat there with them in his lap.

"I was there," he said finally. His voice came out a little rough. "I know who won."

He stared at the white text.

"And I still want to click the link."

Ethan reached over and hit refresh.

Views: 3.

He hit it again.

Views: 11.