The Map of Tiny Perfect Things Read online

  At that point Aaron Ryder, who is president of production at FilmNation, and whose faith in this whole project never wavered (or at least not in front of me), decided they were tired of messing around and were going to make the movie themselves. Amazon jumped in and said they would put it on Prime Video. Suddenly it all felt very possible. Though I was still in a state of high anxiety—in fact even after all this, even after it was cast and staffed and sold, I never really believed the movie was going to be made until the first day of filming, when one of the producers sent me a selfie from the set.

  I wanted them to make the movie in Lexington, but because of somebody’s schedule the movie had to be shot in wintertime, even though it’s very much a summer movie. That meant going somewhere warm, which turned out to be Alabama, specifically a lovely and quite convincingly Lexingtonian town called Fairhope.

  Everybody should have the experience of visiting the set where a story they have written is being filmed. They won’t, but they should, because it’s not like anything else. Stories are generally written alone, with no assurance that they’ll ever actually be published, let alone turned into movies, and with the overwhelming feeling that you’re engaging in a futile and antisocial hobby. Imagine going from there to a film set, where there’s a hundred people working and laughing and joking together. There’s free food, and an entire village of trailers, and everywhere people have actually built the things you’ve described, and other people—very good-looking ones—are dressed up as your characters, and everybody’s happy to see you. It’s a special feeling.

  William Goldman (who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) once said that “the most exciting day of your life is your first day on a movie set, and the dullest day of your life is the second day.” And I do know what he means: There’s nothing for a screenwriter to do on set, so you just stand there getting in the way and looking at your phone and making the actors uncomfortable with that expression on your face that says you’re mentally questioning their line readings. In one scene Kyle Allen, who plays Mark, has to chuck a water bottle at a door just as it’s swinging closed, at exactly the right moment so it’s trapped between door and frame, thereby keeping the door from locking. It took me one try to write this in the script. It took Kyle, conservatively, about sixty takes to pull it off on film. It probably gave him some idea of what being trapped in a time loop would feel like.

  That was dull. But just as often, I was walking around awestruck and moved to my deepest parts: seeing Margaret’s sad bedroom, seeing her and Mark ride through the school on Mark’s bike, just watching the two of them walk down the street together. Also I had to film my cameo appearance in the movie—I’m the guy in the beige blazer whom Mark saves from getting pooed on by a bird. We didn’t need as many takes as Kyle did with the water bottle, but it was close. I did a little drama in high school and therefore harbor the secret suspicion that I could have been a movie star, but as it turns out, just having a camera pointed at me is enough to make me lose all control of my face and limbs.

  The shoot ended just as COVID-19 clamped down on the country. In fact the virus shut down the set a few days early, and those scenes of Mark and Margaret at the airport had to be shot six months after the rest of the film. But by early November—in that nervy interval between Halloween and the 2020 presidential election—I was watching the movie of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.

  And it wasn’t perfect. I mentally questioned some of the line readings. The cast could’ve been more diverse. There was no Sean Bean in it, and Mark never saves the little girl’s balloon.

  But none of that mattered, because through all those years of work, all those drafts, the index cards, the rookie mistakes, the trial and error, the self-doubt, the Walt Disney Company, the casting, the coronavirus, through it all the fragile things that were at the heart of the story had somehow survived and come out the other side fully intact. It was like one of those tiny butterflies that migrates a thousand miles, over cities and rivers and forests, across state and national lines, to lay its precious eggs.

  Time spares nothing, everything dies—but the thing time comes closest to sparing is art. I’ll change, and the world will change, but every time I watch The Map of Tiny Perfect Things it’ll be exactly the same. I’ll always have that moment, that feeling I wanted so badly to get on paper, and then on-screen, and whatever truth might or might not be in it. It’s not a time loop, I’m not stuck in it, but I can go back to it whenever I want. And now you can, too.

  —Lev Grossman

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  Beowulf Sheehan

  Lev Grossman is the author of six novels, including the #1 New York Times bestselling Magicians Trilogy, which has been published in thirty countries and adapted for television, and a bestselling novel for children, The Silver Arrow. He’s also an award-winning journalist who spent fifteen years as the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine. Grossman has written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Believer, the Village Voice, NPR, Salon, Slate, and BuzzFeed, among many others. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.