VP Rodney Muir leaves 20th Century Fox for a senior VP job at Paramount after supervising the monster hit Face Lift ($32M budget/$480M worldwide cume). Attending a drug-fueled bachelor party for his brother Scott in their hometown of Washington, DC, Rodney meets Thør Rosenthal, a North Hollywood-based filmmaker and requests a link to watch one of his no-budget movies (the wedding was called off; Scott would later be named White House press secretary after the suicide of Bob McAtee).
Alone at the hotel, Rodney decides to watch Thør’s latest horror film, Deathbed. One room. One night. One angle. A young couple thinks their mattress is haunted so they set up a video camera in the corner of the bedroom to record all the freaky shit that happens to them after 3:33 a.m. Turns out it’s not the mattress that’s disturbed, it’s the girlfriend, whose family had a death curse put on them for generations by a legendary witch in Roanoke, Virginia. Rodney thought the movie was raw but the idea had potential. He calls the director to say business affairs at Paramount would be making an offer to buy the genre film. Thør tells Rodney his ideas for a Deathbed quadrilogy; Deathbed duvet covers, Deathbed pillowcases, and a promotional tie-in with Mattress Discounters. Rodney humors Thør, never revealing his intention to remake the title and blast the original into outer space.
Rodney’s splashy arrival at Paramount coincides with the announcement of a development deal remaking an untitled DIY horror film with Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon attached to produce and star. Rodney commissions several scripts and they all came in terrible. None of them kept the fixed camera conceit of Deathbed; “jump scares” were added, along with a needless backstory explaining the house was once a troubled orphanage that burned to the ground in a suspicious fire.
The senior VP visits Paramount’s head of distribution Steve Bosco and begs him to hold a test screening for Deathbed at the Arc Light in Sherman Oaks. When the audience cards come back, Bosco orders Rodney into his office as if the executive had shit the bed. Bosco says he has never seen such scores in his life. Deathbed got a 92 percent score. Rodney silently thanks the Movie Gods. Bosco says he only pays attention to the combined score of the top two boxes (“Excellent” and “Very Good”) and the “Definite Recommend” box. Deathbed received a deflating 4 percent top two box score and a “Definite Recommend” score of 2 percent. Rodney asks about the 92 percent and Bosco says: “Ninety-two percent said the picture was poor.”
Rodney remembers the old saw that nothing good ever happens after four in the morning and no horror movie sprung from the legs of a stripper at a bachelor party ever gets a theatrical release.