2003.
Los Angeles, California—the city of dreams, the place where everybody says they're "in the industry."
She knew every inch of this town.
The cracked asphalt that nobody ever fixes, the busted curbs, the half-dead palm trees, the narrow, grimy alleys stuffed with weird little shops, the flat stucco houses painted in that desert palette of beige, salmon, and dusty rose, the abandoned Angels Flight funicular…
This was L.A. to her. The real L.A.
Sure, people call it the City of Angels, La-La Land, the place where if you look past the palm trees, the snow-capped mountains, and the desert you'll see endless beaches. And if you ignore all the sketchy motels with cheap neon signs, you'll spot the finish line of every dream—Hollywood.
In this town full of actors, even the guy taking your order at McDonald's will tell you he's an actor. Becoming "an actor" here is the easiest thing in the world. Actually making it? That's the hard part. Most people are just extras who blink and disappear.
Generation after generation washes up here, gives it everything they've got, just trying to touch—even for a second—their movie dream.
She was shaking as she walked down Sunset Boulevard.
She never thought she'd be back.
Reborn. Sent back to 2003. Twenty-three years old again.
Back to the absolute worst year of her life—the year she lost everything, when everybody turned on her, doubted her, dragged her name through the mud.
Her name was Joey Grant, a orphan adopted by an American couple.
From the time she was little she'd been obsessed with movies, and somehow God had blessed her with real talent. Yeah, she was Asian—yellow skin, short, flat-chested—nothing that stood out next to the tall blonde California girls, but the girl could direct.
At sixteen she scraped together a few thousand bucks and shot her first feature. The indie world went nuts over it the second it dropped. She cleaned up at every small festival that year.
People in the industry started calling her a "once-in-a-generation prodigy," because who makes a movie that good at sixteen?
After that, offers poured in. She had one foot in the door of the big, dirty Hollywood machine.
Young, famous, insanely talented—of course the vultures showed up.
Plenty of child stars get chewed up and spit out by this town—Lindsay Lohan, Drew Barrymore, everybody knows those stories. But it's not just actors. A lot of young directors and writers get seduced too.
Joey Grant was one of them.
Nobody saw it happening so fast. In no time she was lost in the parties, the premieres, the endless cycle of fun.
DUIs, drugs, arrogance, messy personal life—you name it, the tabloids tied it to her. That stuff could've stayed "private life" territory, but in the seven years after her debut she cranked out seven straight bombs, one every year. People were stunned.
Where did that supernova genius go? Did she really fall that far and never climb out? Had she actually run out of talent?
She became another cautionary tale—one of those "one-hit wonder" kids who flame out and get forgotten in the Hollywood sand.
The big studios flat-out said, "Joey Grant will never get another dime from us."
Even the indie companies finally admitted she was washed up and stopped throwing money at her.
So at twenty-three she'd burned through every ounce of goodwill she'd earned. Every door in town slammed shut.
The town already had a long history of freezing out women directors and directors of color; once you give them an excuse, they're happy to bury you.
When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter. Besides a few party friends, she had nothing left.
The media crowned her "Queen of the Flops." Audiences said she only knew how to ruin movies. Critics wrote her off as "another prodigy Hollywood destroyed—here today, gone tomorrow, totally out of ideas."
In her previous life, that same year, too stubborn to quit, she mortgaged her last asset—a little house in the Santa Monica mountains—to self-finance one final indie called Harvard Days. She'd blown all the money she'd made, so that house was literally all she had left.
But when the movie was done she realized maybe really was finished. Not a single distributor would touch the thing. It was mediocre, and she was still persona non grata. The bank foreclosed, and the house was gone too.
She was completely broke.
Then the final blow: her fiancé of seven years dumped her.
His name was Hughes Redstone—a hotshot Paramount producer, the kind of guy whose movies always made money. He came from Hollywood royalty; his great-grandfather was Sumner Redstone, the legendary mogul who owned half the industry.
Three years earlier they'd been madly in love and engaged. She thought even if the whole world turned on her, at least she'd have Hughes—money, connections, power.
But at her absolute lowest, he walked too.
He said he was just…disappointed in her.
That's when it hit her: for seven years she'd been coasting, chasing highs and paychecks, totally squandering her gift.
She didn't even try to fight for him. She knew she didn't deserve him anymore. He'd put up with her downward spiral for seven whole years. Leaving now was actually patient.
That's when she remembered why she'd fallen in love with movies in the first place. She'd lost her way, but deep down she'd never stopped dreaming of giving up.
But she was too ashamed to stay in L.A.
Bankrupt and humiliated, she ran. She gave up the dream, vanished from the industry, and hid in a tiny nowhere town on the edge of Florida. Fifty years, gone, never showing her face again.
Five years after she fled, she read online that Hughes had died in a car wreck.
That pretty much killed whatever was left inside her. She spent the next five decades in that village, quietly following movies from afar but never daring to leave.
She still studied film craft every day, but it was pointless—nowhere to use it.
And then, at the very end, on her deathbed, the impossible happened.
She woke up twenty-three again, back in 2003.
Now she was trembling as she walked down Sunset Boulevard—a street she hadn't touched in fifty years, yet she knew every crack in the sidewalk.
The shaking wasn't fear. It was pure excitement.
Because this city still meant dreams to her.
Fifty years in exile and she'd never let the dream die.
The second her feet hit this pavement again, she felt it—how badly she still wanted this.
And now God, fate, whatever—had given her a second shot.
This time, in the worst year of her life, she wasn't running.
This time she was going to fight.