Fic: It Came from Hollywood (Sports Night)

[scrunchy.livejournal.com]

Title: It Came from Hollywood
Fandom: Sports Night
Rating: PG
Summary: Dan's just going to start calling himself "The Sundance Kid" until it comes true
Notes: Thanks slodwick for the beta and for giving us a part 3 in this awesome challenge.

They'd filmed their bit a week earlier, right there in the studio. It was weird for Dan, sitting at his desk, reading out fake news and feigning concern (Acting. He was acting. He had to remember that for the premiere), all the while staring at weird new cameras manned by, frankly, weird new people.

The director was a guy Casey used to know. They went to college together, or nursery school, or their parents lived near the same wheat field or something. Casey was so excited it was a little ridiculous. He started reading the script, then stopped abruptly and spent two weeks debating whether or not he wanted to wait to find out how it ended. After they'd shot their part, when the director (Jim? Jimmy? Ronald? Something like that) said they should stop by the set, Casey's face lit up like it was Christmas. Dan smiled and shook Jim's hand (Yeah, it was Jim). Casey bounced around the office for another two days before Dan started writing his part of the scripts in the editing room, far away from the ball of kinetic excitement that was his partner.

It was a mystery story, a serial killer murdering athletes, only Morgan Freeman and Cute Blonde Ingénue #594 can stop it, blah blah blah. Dan was mildly irritated that his first appearance on the big screen would be in such run of the mill fare. He always assumed that someday he'd meet a scruffy writer in a scruffy bar. They'd bond over a scruffy band. Later, when the writer was a Sundance darling, he'd call on Dan to be the unconventional (yet dashing) lead in a moody, significant indie. Sports guys didn't do indie films, though. So, a week after successfully looking concerned while uttering the line, "baffled police have no leads," (and really, who would say that on television? Ever?) with a straight face at the camera, Dan found himself standing in upstate New York, in the woods where a portion of Scrimmage was being filmed. At least, he tried to comfort himself, it wasn't The Mighty Ducks 4.

It was just shy of six, and Dan never realized that they made movies so early in the morning. Not because it was so hard to be awake, he was just surprised that images stuck to celluloid at that hour. He was having a hard enough time figuring out how the lid of his coffee cup worked.

He wandered around, just like Jim had suggested. He didn't even recognize the female lead when he saw her standing at craft services, looking wholly uncomfortable standing so close to food. Apparently the camera added fifty pounds, since she looked to Dan like she was composed mainly of acute angles and hair extensions. She'd never be in his indie film. He walked further on the little road, got lost in the woods for a few minutes, then backtracked on the same path until it ended at the edge of a shot that had just been set up.

The body lay across one side of the path, surrounded by little crime scene accoutrements. Stretched between two sawhorses was crime scene tape at Danny's waist. There were little picks with numbers on them near the body's head. Dan watched CSI, he knew what they were.

"Pretty gruesome, huh?" The voice so near his ear startled him. It was the ingénue, now dressed in a baggy NYPD windbreaker over a tank top, tight pants, and high heeled boots totally inappropriate for any sort of police work. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, though, which Dan figured was some sort of Hollywood code for "professional."

He smiled tightly, and looked away from her. It wasn't gruesome at all, really. The body was clearly a dummy, quite a portly, pale dummy for a victim who was supposed to be a star basketball player at an all-black college, and the manner in which the serial killer dispatched his victims wasn't particularly graphic. He knocked them out, strangled them, then dumped the body.

Dan had read Casey's script on what had been an unbearably slow news day.

They hauled the dummy away, and an actor lay down in its place. Someone was standing off to the side, teaching the ingénue how to use her prop camera. Morgan Freeman was standing with Jim and Casey a few yards behind Dan; he made out the words "Bettman," "asinine," and "fans have suffered enough," and figured they were talking hockey.

Someone was walking around the actor playing the dead basketball player, artfully mussing his clothes. A makeup artist was kneeling over his head, stippling clots of fake dried blood around his neck. Morgan Freeman was standing at the periphery of the set, rolling his neck around and flipping between two pages of the script.

"You all right, man?" It was Casey now, standing where the girl had stood, close enough to prickle the hairs on Danny's neck. At least with Casey, Danny didn't feel like he was being stalked by death her overly Botox'ed self.

"Yeah. Why?"

"You've been standing here staring at a corpse in the road for fifteen minutes."

"I'm observing the process."

"You're corpse-staring."

"It's a murder mystery, Casey. The corpse is an integral part of the process."

"True. I just wanted to make sure you were ok. That it wasn't ... bringing things up."

Dan looked back at him, confused for exactly three seconds.

"You mean ... Casey, Sam wasn't a six foot African American collegian."

"Dan."

"I'm fine. It never crossed my mind until you mentioned it. Thanks, by the way." He smiled, and Casey smiled.

"I do what I can."

Jim called for quiet and pulled Dan and Casey back near his chair and out of the shot. Later, walking to the car, Casey admitted not only that he'd caved and read the whole script, but that he was stunned by its mediocrity. On the way home, Dan told him all about his indie film.