Kubrick's Game Read online

  “So, come on,” Wilson said. “I’ve been on edge all day. What did Mascaro give to you?”

  Shawn pulled out the FDR photograph and explained its connection to Kubrick. He showed him the back.

  “Follow me to Q’s identity. What does that mean?”

  Shawn shrugged. “I think it’s the first piece of a puzzle. If we can figure it out, there’s no telling what it could lead to.”

  “Yeah, or it’s just junk and we could waste mad hours on a wild goose chase.”

  “I agree. I’ll be busy DP-ing Sami’s thesis film, but I think we should at least investigate a bit tonight and see what we can muster. Think of it as practice for the Fantastic Race.”

  “All right, man. Why not?”

  “And speaking of Sami’s film, she wanted me to ask you something. I know it’s probably beneath you, but there’s this really good part—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Are you asking me to act in a student film? I haven’t done that since I was six years old.”

  “I know. I promised I would ask.”

  “Send the script to my agent with an offer.”

  “She has no money.”

  “Dude, I’m messing with you! Of course I’ll do it! As a favor to you.”

  Shawn’s heart leaped. He couldn’t wait to tell Sami the good news. He pulled out his phone and tapped the numbers on his screen. “I’m going to let Sami know. I’ll also tell her about the photo. I think she could help.”

  “Whoa, wait, man, you sure? If this is a gold mine, we can’t bring in anyone we don’t trust. You feel me?”

  Shawn felt she was trustworthy, but Wilson had a point. While he prided himself on being one hundred percent honest, he always had to remind himself that most people were deceptive. After careful consideration, he said, “Let’s invite her over and gauge her trustworthiness.”

  “All right, man, your call.”

  Sami was elated to hear that Wilson had accepted the part, and agreed to come over for a read-through and to describe her vision.

  Shawn and Wilson used the time to begin unraveling the mystery of the image.

  “What are your ideas on who Q could be?” asked Wilson, inspecting the photo with a magnifying glass.

  “As far as I know, there wasn’t anybody in Kubrick’s life named Q, or character in any of his films named Q. I’m thinking it’s an initial or a nickname for somebody.”

  They had made no tangible progress by the time Sami buzzed from downstairs. Shawn hastily stuffed the photo into his backpack, but in his haste, a script fell out and landed at Wilson’s feet.

  “What’s this?” said Wilson, picking it up. “Strange Brain... by Shawn Hagan! Dude! You wrote a screenplay?”

  “Please give it back.”

  “First tell me what it’s about.”

  Shawn spoke hastily. “It’s about a guy who experiences the world differently from everyone else. His senses are all haywire. He hears color as sound and sees sound as imagery.”

  Sami knocked on the door.

  “You have to let me read it.”

  “It’s not finished.”

  Wilson ignored another round of knocks. “I don’t care. I have to see what comes out of that ‘strange brain’ of yours. Please let me borrow it just for tonight. I’ll give you notes on it. I give great notes.”

  Nobody had ever asked Shawn to read his writing before. It made him feel important. “Okay, but just for tonight.”

  “Yes!” Wilson threw the screenplay on his desk and headed to open the door for Sami.

  “Sorry,” Wilson said with a smile. “Just freshening up. Always gotta look your best for director meetings.” He winked at Sami.

  Sami covered her face with her hand to hide her blush and smile, as if not wanting to give the impression that charm or fame had an effect on her.

  Sami’s script was called The Confession. The premise was simple: an NYPD cop is tasked with eliciting a confession from a murder suspect by any means necessary; only problem is, the cop—to be played by Wilson—is the one who’s guilty of the murder.

  By the end of the reading, Wilson was excited about the part. He lamented that nobody had offered him this kind of role before—though twenty-five years old, most still thought of him as a goofy high-school kid. This role could help him to show the world, or at least his agent, that he had dramatic chops.

  Shawn and Sami discussed the camera and set-ups, trying to figure out how they could shoot fifteen pages in three days of production, which was all Sami could afford.

  They wrapped the meeting by making arrangements for the Fantastic Race that Saturday. Sami appeared enthusiastic about competing.

  “I’ve always had a knack for puzzles,” she said. “I get it from my father. He’s a doctor in India and he used to tell me how every diagnosis was like unraveling a riddle.”

  “Is that your ethnicity?” Shawn asked. “I honestly couldn’t tell.”

  “Half Indian, half Italian. My mom is Catholic. Wondering how it worked? It didn’t. They divorced when I was six.”

  Wilson gave Shawn a glance, cocking his head toward Shawn’s backpack. Shawn understood what he meant.

  “Sami,” said Wilson, “before you go, there’s something you should take a look at.”

  Shawn retrieved the photo and showed it to Sami, explaining how he came to possess it and the message on the back.

  She looked at it for no longer than five seconds before blurting, “A-ha. I get it. You see the trick here, right?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Shawn.

  “This isn’t the original Look Magazine photo. It’s been doctored.”

  Shawn pulled up the original image on his laptop and compared the two. “Oh my God, you’re right.”

  “What is it?” asked Wilson.

  Shawn shook his head. “In the original, the news vendor is pointing at a newspaper that says ROOSEVELT DEAD. But here, there’s a different image, a familiar one if you remember our class today.”

  Wilson studied the photograph for a moment, and then his eyes shot wide. “It’s the Gainsborough portrait from Lolita that switched places!”

  “Based on this piece of evidence,” Sami continued, “I can make an educated guess as to Q’s identity.”

  “Of course!” Shawn grew excited. “Clare Quilty, the character in Lolita played by Peter Sellers.”

  “And that’s the painting he was hiding behind when that dude shot him,” said Wilson. “You can see the bullet hole.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Shawn. “The message says Follow me to Q’s identity. If Q is Quilty, is he saying follow me to Clare Quilty? What does that mean?”

  None of them could come up with an answer, and they decided to call it a night.

  After Sami left, Wilson placed his arm on Shawn’s shoulder and said, “You’re right. We need her on our team.”

  When Saturday arrived, the Fantastic Race offered the perfect respite after a week of strenuous shooting prep. Shawn and Wilson hadn’t had a moment to continue working on the puzzle, but it was a growing itch in the back of Shawn’s mind.

  All three hopped into Wilson’s BMW 3 series and drove east into Hollywood. Shawn sat next to Wilson in the passenger seat while Sami busied herself with reviewing her shot list in the back.

  During the ride, it occurred to Shawn that Wilson hadn’t said anything about his script since he had asked to borrow it four days ago. “So, Wilson, did you read Strange Brain yet?”

  There was a beat of silence before Wilson replied, “Yeah, I read it.”

  “What’s Strange Brain?” asked Sami.

  “Shawn here wrote the weirdest, trippiest screenplay I’ve ever laid eyes on. And trust me, that’s saying something.”

  “Weird and trippy in a good way?” asked Shawn.

  “I don’t know. It’s like you sucked in the souls of David Lynch, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charlie Kaufman, dropped enough acid to kill a herd of elephants, and then turned your hallucinations into a s
crewball tragedy.”

  “I wanted to try something new.”

  Wilson cackled. “That it is, my friend. That it is.”

  “I admit most of the technology needed to produce the film doesn’t exist yet, but that didn’t stop Kubrick from making 2001.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way... because if you could make a film where the audience sees the world through Harvey’s brain, it would be freaking amazing. You got my twelve bucks. But a studio won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, so your only hope is to finance it yourself. And good luck with that.”

  Shawn’s head hurt. He wasn’t sure how to take this—another instance of being unable to interpret social nuance.

  “So... you liked it then?”

  “Dude, that’s like asking if I like the food on an alien planet. I have no idea! It might be the best thing ever. It might be the worst crap I’ve ever tasted. Won’t know ‘til I experience it firsthand.”

  “I think I have to read this script,” said Sami.

  After parking underground at the Hollywood-Highland complex, the three joined a crowd of hundreds of other teams already gathered in front of the legendary Chinese Theatre.

  The mass of people carpeted the iconic footprints and handprints of the Hollywood royalty invited to etch their identities in cement for all of history. The usual throng of out-of-work actors, dressed as superheroes to bilk tourists out of dollars for a quick photo, scratched their heads at the unusual gathering drawing all the attention and cutting into their business.

  The sound of a ringing bell quieted the crowd, and the two architects of Fantastic Race, Rich Greenstone and Luke Wexler, stepped onto a platform. Rich was in his forties with a head of thick brown curls. He sported his trademark Rubik’s cube T-shirt. Luke, his polar opposite, was tall and svelte with a wavy silver mane. He looked like the handsome doctor on every soap opera, which he used to be back in the 80s.

  Rich lowered the bell and addressed the crowd. “Welcome, adventure-seekers, to the Fantastic Movie Race! Each team will be given packets containing the first clue. When solved correctly, you will be pointed to the next location, where increasingly diabolical puzzles await you. At the end, the winner will be drenched in glory and riches.”

  Luke piped in. “But mostly glory.”

  Volunteers walked through the crowd handing each team an envelope.

  “The first puzzle begins here at the Chinese Theatre. Open your packages on my mark.”

  Once ready, Rich and Luke counted down. “One... two... three... go!”

  Shawn tore open the envelope and removed the contents: a pair of thin white gloves—each finger numbered one through ten—and a sheet of paper that read:

  GEORGE CLOONEY – 8

  JANE WYMAN – 2, 10

  MATT DAMON – 1

  ANNE BAXTER – 9

  CLARK GABLE – 1, 3

  MAURICE CHEVALIER – 4, 5, 7

  MORGAN FREEMAN – 6

  JOHNNY DEPP – 9, 10

  PETER O’TOOLE – 1

  The story continues at:

  Shawn’s team studied the key trying to make sense of it.

  “Okay,” said Shawn. “It looks like we need to find the letters that will spell out our next location.”

  “I think we just count the letters in the name and get the letter,” said Wilson. “So the eighth letter would be the L in George Clooney.”

  “Nah, that’s too easy for these guys,” said Sami. “The key is to figure out what the numbers on the gloves have to do with the numbers beside the names.”

  The other teams seemed to be struggling as well.

  That’s when Shawn noticed a name at his feet. “Johnny Depp,” he said out loud. Under the name was a handprint. “Give me the gloves.”

  He slipped his hands into the gloves and pressed them into the handprints. The ninth and tenth digits pointed to the double ‘pp’ in Depp.

  “We have two of the letters!” Moments later, Shawn ran around the courtyard searching frantically for each name on the list, pressing his hands into the print and writing down the correct letters.

  When put together, the letters seemed to form a mash of gibberish:

  PPACRPIICNAKFA

  “It’s an anagram,” said Sami. “Brilliant move. If any teams cheated by watching what others were doing, the weak are still weeded out. Let’s see. We have a “p,” “a,” “r,” and a “k.” I bet it’s a park.”

  Wilson blurted out, “Pan Pacific Park!”

  Sami and Shawn looked at him impressed.

  He shrugged. “I played basketball there yesterday.”

  They were the first team to bolt out of the Chinese Theatre complex, followed closely behind by several others.

  Back in Wilson’s car, they headed to Pan Pacific Park a few miles southwest in the Fairfax District.

  They arrived and ran through the open baseball field searching for the next clue.

  “Over there!” shouted Sami.

  At the northwest corner sat an amphitheater built into the hillside, with rows of stone benches embedded into the slopes facing a raised stone stage. On each side of the stage, a group of six males faced one another. One group had dark hair and wore bright polo shirts tucked into dark slacks. The other group had light hair and wore jeans and sweaters.

  Ornately-decorated tubes the size of tennis ball cans were resting on top of the benches.

  “It’s a cryptex!” said Shawn, holding up a tube. “It can only be opened with the correct combination.”

  Three other teams arrived.

  The men on stage began doing a choreographed dance-fight, snapping their fingers and making exaggerated lunges.

  Shawn and Sami said together, “West Side Story!”

  Wilson rolled his eyes. “I’m not into musicals.”

  Two performers met in the center of the stage, but instead of commencing a knife fight like in the film, they began a battle of Rock-Paper-Scissors.

  The light-haired man won the battle on the third call of “paper!” and the dark-haired man keeled over dead. Immediately after, all the actors moved back into their original positions.

  Wilson threw his hands up in confusion. “Who just won the battle?”

  “In the movie, the Sharks are Puerto Rican and the Jets are Polish-American,” said Sami.

  “Got it,” said Shawn. He spelled on the cryptex, J-E-T-S.

  It snapped open and a Polaroid photograph fell out. The photo showed a dingy motel that looked familiar to Shawn.

  Underneath, it read:

  Don’t believe his lies.

  “I know this!” said Wilson. “That’s a line from Christopher Nolan’s Memento. That motel is where Guy Pearce holes up in the film.”

  Sami did a quick search on her phone. “They shot Memento in a motel off Sepulveda in the Valley.”

  “Then that’s our next checkpoint,” said Shawn.

  When they looked up, two other teams were already sprinting out of the park.

  Minutes later, Wilson cruised down the 101 freeway. During the twenty-minute drive, Shawn found his mind wandering back to the Kubrick puzzle.

  Follow me to Q’s identity.

  What does it mean: “follow me”? Was Kubrick referring to himself? If so, how can we possibly follow him? He’s dead, after all.

  He stared through the windshield and noticed his reflection staring back at him. Maybe Kubrick didn’t mean to follow him literally. Maybe he meant an image of himself—like the mysterious portrait that switched places—but where was there an image of Kubrick? He never made cameos in his films, except for....

  Shawn jumped in his seat.

  Wilson and Sami turned to him.

  “You okay back there?” said Wilson.

  “I think I just figured out a key piece of the puzzle,” said Shawn.

  “Good, cause we’re almost at the motel.”

  “No, not that puzzle. The Kubrick message. Remember when Mascaro showed us the frames where Kubrick seems to have ‘accidentally
’ appeared during the crossfade in Lolita?”

  “I know what you’re talking about,” said Sami. “It’s technically the only time Kubrick appeared in one of his films.”

  “But what if it wasn’t an error? What if he purposefully edited himself into those frames as a marker?”

  “A marker?” said Wilson.

  “It’s something that sticks out indicating a clue,” said Shawn.

  “Think of it like those actors in the park,” Sami added. “We knew to follow the game over there because we noticed something was out of the ordinary.”

  Wilson shook his head. “You really think Kubrick made an intentional editing flub in his film just to hint at some game he created?”

  Shawn had to admit it seemed kind of farfetched. On the other hand, it did explain a lot. Kubrick didn’t make mistakes—at least not in the final edited versions.

  When they arrived at the motel, several teams stood already at the front desk. When they approached the clerk, he handed them a key with a blue tag that said Room 27. They ran upstairs.

  Inside room 27 there were hundreds of Post-it notes of different colors stuck to the walls, the furniture, and the appliances. On each one, a word or phrase was written, but with no rhyme or reason.

  “There must be a message in the notes,” Sami whispered. “So how do we find it?”

  “Think about the movie,” said Wilson. “Why did Guy Pearce write notes to himself?”

  “Because he couldn’t form permanent memories,” said Shawn.

  “Right,” said Wilson. “But he’s able to make it work because he has a system. What is the system here?”

  It looked chaotic.

  Sami looked at the key and her eyes widened.

  “That’s it!” she said a little too loud, drawing looks from two other teams who were scouring the notes and writing down all the phrases. She pulled them in and whispered, “The tag on the key is blue. Blue is the key! That’s the system. Check all the blue notes.”