Another Thing to Fall Read Online Free

eight episodes that will be used midseason on Zylon, that new cable network. And
Mann of Steel
isn’t a biopic at all. It’s about a young steelworker who gets knocked unconscious at work, in present-day Baltimore, and wakes up in Betsy Patterson’s era. He knows just enough about history to realize that she’s going to make a terrible personal mistake, marrying Napoleon’s brother Jerome, but he’s not sure what will happen if he dissuades her, how it will affect the larger course of history, if at all. Meanwhile, he has to get back to the present, because there’s a key vote coming up for the union, and he’s a shop steward.”
    As he outlined his story, Tumulty spoke with the flushed, excited air of a little boy enchanted with his own ideas, preposterous as they seemed to Tess. It wasn’t the concept of time travel via head injury that seemed most problematic to Tess, but the idea of a story centered on a steelworker in twenty-first-century Baltimore. Hadn’t these guys driven past the ghost town that was Sparrows Point? Didn’t they know that Bethlehem Steel had been sold and scavenged for its parts, leaving its retirees without so much as medical benefits or adequate pensions?
    “Sounds like
Quantum Leap
meets
Red Baker
by way of
The Dancing Cavalier,
” she offered.
    “I know
Quantum Leap,
” Tumulty said, his manner stiff, as if she had insulted him. “This is
nothing
like that. The other things you mentioned…”
    He paused, and she realized that he would not admit not knowing something, but he would leave a space if she wanted to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.
    “Red Baker
is one of the seminal works of Baltimore fiction. It’s about a laid-off steelworker. Back in the 80s.”
    Tumulty turned to the young woman. “Make a note on that, Greer. We might want to option it, if it’s available.”
    Greer promptly began to scribble on her clipboard. Short and a little top-heavy, she was a pretty girl, although she seemed to be playing down her looks. Her dark hair was slicked back in a tight, unbecoming ponytail, her clothes frumpier than they needed to be. She had lovely hands, though, with a perfect French manicure, a fitting showcase for the ring, which she had turned back around at some point.
    Tess asked: “You mean you’d make
Red Baker,
too?”
    “No, but we like to hold the options on similar projects, so they don’t beat us out of the gate.”
    “That seems a little… unsporting.”
    “Common practice. What’s the other one you mentioned?”
    “The Dancing Cavalier?
” Tess could forgive Tumulty’s ignorance of literature, but shouldn’t this son of a famous director, born and bred in Los Angeles, recognize a reference to one of the greatest movie musicals ever made? “It’s the film within the film of
Singin’ in the Rain
. Remember? They salvage the footage from the disastrous attempt at a talkie and recast it as a musical in which a young man travels back in time.”
    “Right. Of course. Well, ours is much more
meta
. It’s sort of like what Sofia was going for.”
    “Sofia?”
    “Coppola. When she made
Marie Antoinette
. We’ve known each other since childhood, of course. I met her on vacations and summers up in Napa, with my dad.”
    “Of course.”
My, don’t you like to have it both ways, at once denying and invoking your credentials as a second-generation Hollywood insider, while wearing a Natty Boh cap, as if you were a real Baltimore boy.
Of course, a real Baltimore boy would know that National Bohemian had pulled up stakes long ago. Tourists could buy the gear at a Fells Point shop and see the mustachioed mascot winking from a neon sign in Brewers Hill, but the beer itself was brewed out of state. Tess actively boycotted it.
    “At any rate, even though she’s second on the call sheet, Selene has more than her share of downtime. And she gets… bored. Rather easily.”
    “She wasn’t there for pickup this morning,” Greer put in. Her face was bland, but