Paula Dalton lived in Thousand Oaks, about 30 minutes away from our house. Max drove us in his BMW X5 SUV, opting for that instead of his Porsche, saying, “I don’t drive this as fast and I want you to see the scenery.”
It was a gorgeous sunny day, and we had the top down. I had to hold my hair in place as the Pacific breeze whipped through it. We didn’t talk, but instead listened to the songs on my iPhone as we rode up.
Max’s mother lived in a one-story ranch home. The lawn was perfectly manicured, and I made a comment to Max about it as we pulled into the driveway.
“Don’t get out just yet,” he said, looking over at me as he put the car in Park.
I thought he meant that he was going to open my door for me, but just as I was about to ask why, the answer was provided by the yelping of two white West Highland Terriers who were circling the car, checking it out, and barking a warning to their owner.
“They have free run of the place,” Max said, “but they have those electronic fence collars.”
He got out and the two dogs gathered at his feet. I opened the door and before my shoe hit the driveway, the little guys had lost all interest in Max and greeted me, the newcomer, instead.
I knelt down to pet them.
Max came around to my side of the car and said, “Meet Zeke and Dolly. Don’t ask me which is which.”
Just then I heard his mother’s voice. “Max, you can tell them apart by their collars.”
“The way they move so fast, it’s hard to tell.”
I looked up and saw Max hug his mom and kiss her on the cheek.
I stood from my crouching position, as the dogs yelped their disapproval of not having my full attention anymore.
Max’s mother was in her late fifties, but didn’t look it. The old pictures Max had showed me led me to believe she just might answer her door wearing an apron, with her hair up in a bun, and sporting glasses with a beaded chain. I guess maybe I was expecting someone who looked more like Alice the housekeeper from The Brady Bunch than a woman who looked like she could have been a character actress who stepped off the set of a soap opera.
She had blonde hair, deep blue eyes, and perfectly straight, white teeth. She was in as good a shape as any fifty-something-year-old woman I had ever seen.
She took a step toward me and opened her arms to hug me. “Olivia, it’s so nice to finally meet you.”
We hugged and I said, “You, too, Mrs. Dalton.”
“Call me Paula, I insist.”
She kept her hands on my shoulder as she pulled back to look at Max, then back at me. “He’s so secretive, I thought I’d never get to meet you.”
“I told you about Olivia months ago,” Max said.
“Well, when you’re this serious about a lady, you shouldn’t hide her from your mother.”
That’s when she looked at me, saying, “Don’t ever think you have to get his permission to visit me,” and then immediately asked if I wanted a “pop.” Ah, yes. “Pop.” Despite her newfound California style, Paula Dalton was still a Midwesterner at heart.
We spent a good portion of that Sunday afternoon at his mother’s house, eating roasted chicken with carrots and green beans and big helpings of rice. Paula, in true mom mode, showed me pictures of Max as a child, mostly school pictures, but also some from holidays. My favorite was one of him when he was seven years old, lying next to the Christmas tree, surrounded by wrapping paper. Paula said she had snapped that photo in the mid-afternoon, when Max had fallen asleep, exhausted from playing with his new toys for hours on end.
As she flipped through the pages of the photo album, I noticed that there were no pictures of his father. On the way home, I wanted to ask him about that, but decided not to. It was obvious why his mother had purged the albums of pictures of his father. And it wasn’t worth bringing up because the scars his father left on his life — and on his mother’s life — were of the kind that probably never fully healed, and I erred on the side of caution and let it go.
. . . . .
Over the next several weeks, I noticed a change in Max. There was a solemn mood about him almost all the time.
Sometimes I would watch him as he worked with a pen and notebook on the den couch, scrawling out ideas for a script he was working on, I supposed. I didn’t ask because as his manager, I’d be reading the first draft of his scripts when he was done. He liked my suggestions, but only after he got the whole story down first.
Occasionally, I would lie next to him, putting my head in his lap as he worked. We usually had the TV streaming something from Netflix or Hulu or playing a DVD. Neither of us liked much of what TV programming had to offer, except for a few shows on HBO and AMC, but that was about it.
One night, as I was lying there with my head on his thigh, drifting off to sleep and missing most of the end of a movie, he put the notebook in front of my face.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I had to blink a few times to clear my eyes.
Max had sketched a logo for his production company. For weeks, he’d been toying around with different names and couldn’t settle on one, even any that I suggested. It was important that he come up with something that would stand out, something recognizable, if not to the general movie-going audience then at least within the industry.
My eyes focused on the paper he held in front of me. The name of the company was in a simple, clear font with a curved line over the top of the name that ended in what looked like a flash — a shooting star of sorts.
“You aren’t serious,” I said, looking from the sketch up to his face.
His eyebrows rose on his forehead as his expression stayed serious.
I sat up, looked back at the paper, back at him, and said, “I love that.”
The name of the company would be: OliviMax.
“But,” I said, “doesn’t that sound too much like Miramax?”
He shrugged. “Who cares? This is what we’re going with.”
To think that my name — minus the “a” — would be part of a major film production company was as mind-blowing as anything that had happened to me since I arrived in L.A.
Well, almost anything.
TWO
Six weeks later, I was feeling much better and had been working at Max’s film production company, an independent venture he had decided to rekindle over the last several weeks.
He no longer wanted to enter into development deals with the studios. The freedom associated with independently producing and distributing his own movies was something he had wanted for a while now. Back when he confessed to me that all he wanted to do was write, what he really wanted was independence from corporate filmmaking.