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Celebrity Kyle Hawkins was what you’d call a self made man. His was a life that was by no means ordinary. Kyle was born to a middle class family living in post-nuclear Suburbia, devout churchgoers, decent, and uncommonly traditional. Needless to say, the aspirations his folks would have for him were humble, but respectable – get a well-paying job, college or not, a loving wife, a large family and bring them to visit their grandparents on Thanksgiving and Christmas and in the summertime. Wear the tie with pride, keep the white shirt crisp, and love your work. Read the Bible on family nights, and then have a game of Uno or Monopoly. Go out for ice cream after church on Sundays, help the kids with their homework on the weekdays, and take everyone out to a simple restaurant on Saturdays. So it would come as no surprise that Kyle Hawkins ended up going to a two-bit art school and caught what was to him a big break as a music video director, after sleeping with a producer. What was unusual, however, was that Kyle drank himself to sleep for the next several days over it, and swore that sort of “sleaziness” would never catch him in a moment of weakness again. What was even more unusual, though, was that Kyle read his Bible every Sunday night, alone in his apartment building. As a director, he became more and more well liked, and began to deal with rock stars and divas that normal people would scream through gates, arms extended, in worship towards. He found that he could manipulate anyone’s image, and teamed up with a genius songwriter, Henry Ruduarid, and a crafty producer, Ben Johnston, offering to clean glib sleaze into white-handed innocence, or the other way around. People would pay exorbant amounts of money to effectively control public image, he discovered. Pretty soon he found himself as the writer, director, and producer of an indie flick, funded by his savings from two and a half years of having all of his work debut with resounding success on MTV or VH1. The movie was about a drug-addled gangland hitman who found his redemption in his love with the widow of one of his targets. It made about as much money at the box office as it cost to create, but it won him numerous awards across the Cannes and Toronto film festivals. Universal then picked him up to do a multi-million dollar post-war drama, then a film adaptation on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. They both flourished at the box office, winning mild critical acclamation. The second of those movies won him a Golden Globe. Three flicks later, Kyle had his first Oscar. He was twenty-nine. Though his fame clung to him at all times, Kyle never loosed himself fully onto Hollywood society. It was now that he still read his Bible two Sundays a month, refrained from half the parties he was invited to, and rejected dates from two bombshell actresses (one turned from songstress who he had nurtured since his first days on the directing scene). “I just never really loved anyone else,” he told the press on his wedding day, to his attractive-but-never-glamorous college sweetheart, Amy Learhart, who had become a novelist since. While other filmmakers, his peers, continued to please the audience, delivering mindless summer popcorn flicks, Kyle was a rare director whose critical record was near-flawless. Never had he incorporated a slick car chase where expensive, well-detailed imports piled one on top of another, or a numbingly long shootout, where guns ran fire for minutes without reloads and men in expensive suits piled one on top of another. Kyle Hawkins became known as the thinking moviegoer’s director. Unfortunately, he discovered, uncompromising scruples in the quality he knew never raked in box office success.
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