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Blockbusters: A Mike Holman Novel, Episode 7
Editor’s Note: This is the seventh of nine episodes of Scott McKay’s forthcoming novel Blockbusters, offered in serial form as an exclusive to The American Spectator readers in advance of its publication in October. Blockbusters is the third novel in the Mike Holman series; the first two, King of the Jungle and From Hellmarsh With Love, were also serialized at The American Spectator prior to book publication.
Mike Holman, the protagonist in the series, is an independent journalist who’s been called The World’s Greatest Newsman. But in Blockbusters, he’s literally going Hollywood — choosing to head up a campaign chiefly funded by Pierce Polk, Mike’s long-time friend and one of the richest men in the world, to reform and save American and Western culture.
Starting with an attempt to fix the film and TV business.
In Episode 6, PGFI, the equity fund that Mike and Pierce, and their allies have put together is now rolling on all fronts. That enables the players in the great game to revamp and revitalize the entertainment industry to innovate and think bigger. But there are still some significant hurdles yet ahead…
Liberty Point, Guyana – May 3, 2025
“Mr. Mike,” he said, “my name is Grant Paxton and I’m the executive director of a company called Surge Vision in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”
“Hi, Grant,” I said. “I’m familiar with your company. In fact, the president is attempting to put us together as I understand it.”
“Well, sir, I sure would like the opportunity to make a pitch to you. I’m a longtime fan of your site and your podcast, and I’m very much in agreement with what you’re doing with your culture project.”
“Is that so?”
“It is, Mr. Mike.”
“Grant, please do me a favor and just call me Mike. I’m feeling old enough these days as it is.”
“OK, fair enough, Mike. Well, as I said, I’m the number two guy here, and we’re a little bit under siege. You see, Paul Renzler is the owner of our studio, and we’ve run into some difficulties of late, and those have gotten a little worse since the fires out in L.A.”
“You had a production facility in Malibu Canyon that you lost, is that right?”
“That’s correct, sir, along with Mr. Renzler’s house. He’s our founder; he’s 79, and not in the best of health, and while we’ll get an insurance payment that can make the company somewhat whole from the fire, Mr. Renzler is ready to retire, so…”
“I can imagine at 79, it’s more than enough time to hang it up.”
“That’s correct. And Mr. Renzler’s children are estranged, so there isn’t really an heir to take over the business. If that’s anybody, it’s me.”
“All right, Grant. What’s your background?”
“Well, I’ve got an accounting degree from Ole Miss, and I’m a veteran — I served a couple of tours in Afghanistan, I was with the last company out of Bagram in 2021. My cousin was in a couple of Surge Vision productions, and she got me a job in the finance department, and I guess I stuck around long enough to move up to where I am.”
“Well, you seem like you understand difficult circumstances.”
“Yes, I guess you could say that. But I’m a movie guy, Mike. I really do want to stay in the business. And even though we’ve struggled a bit of late, there’s a lot to Surge Vision that isn’t fully appreciated. If we were to be taken over by an organization like yours, we’re a sleeping giant.”
From what little I understood about Surge Vision, they were nobody’s giant. I told Paxton I’d be happy to hear him out, but cautioned that we were just getting going with Belmarsh Entertainment, and so we weren’t desperate for an additional film production studio.
“The thing is,” he said, politely cutting me off, “I think once you’ve heard some more about what we can do for you, you’ll see things differently. But I hate to do this over the phone. Is there any chance I could fly down and see you?”
“Well, you can,” I said, a bit surprised. “But on Thursday a whole bunch of us are flying down to Liberty Point for a conference with Pierce, so it’ll have to be before then.”
“How’s tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
And he met Gardocki, Stan, Melissa, and me at PGFI’s headquarters.
I liked Grant immediately. He was a classic Mississippi upper-crust redneck, which is to say he was all Southern Tide and Ralph Lauren, well-groomed and perfectly mannered, but there was an edge to him that told you he wouldn’t just refuse to shrink from physical danger but relish the chance to confront it. He was no taller than 5’10”, and he had the makings of a dad bod, but his forearms were tree trunks, and he had the shoulders of a much larger man.
The handshake was as firm as you’d expect, and Grant made eye contact like it was a competition.
My impression of him from the initial phone call was that he was affable but inconsequential. In person, you could tell that wasn’t who he was at all.
And when we sat down at the conference table at PGFI’s offices, Grant handed out copies of a prospectus on Surge Vision. Most of it was standard company bilge, attempting to convince us that the current meager crop of B-movies — a slasher flick about a semi-supernatural psycho terrorizing a sorority house, a derivative Vietnam movie, a gangster-y car chase flick about a trunk full of cocaine — held the promise of delivering a game-changing box-office smash.
By then, I knew to politely look past all that. But once his rote presentation was over, Stan asked him the big question.
“How is it that Trumbull called us asking that we step in and buy you?”
“The thing to understand,” said Grant, “is that our facility in Baton Rouge is state-of-the-art. We can carry 15 productions simultaneously.”
“Come again?” asked Gardocki.
Grant smiled.
“You heard me correctly. We have nine buildings, six of which can divide to provide two separate sound stages each. So theoretically we could carry 15 productions simultaneously on the property and between TV, film, commercials, and other video productions, we’ve done that at various times in the past.”
“So you rent out studio space?” Stan asked. “That’s part of how you guys make ends meet?”
“At times,” he said. “But we’ve had as many as 10 of our own projects going. In Louisiana, there’s a robust film tax credit program, so we’re usually fairly busy.”
“That’s something,” I said.
“Our main facility was in Malibu, but it’s gone in the fire. Truth is, we weren’t really using it much anymore. It’s just so expensive to shoot in California.”
“And the Chinese want you?” asked Gardocki.
“A lot of what we’ve done has been film properties for exclusively foreign release, and the Chinese market has been a big piece of that. But the concern we’ve done a lot of business with in the past…”
“Who’s this we’re talking about?” Stan asked.
“They’re called the Zhou Group. Very big company with a lot of different arms…”
“We know who they are,” I said.
“Anyway, Zhou has made an offer to Mr. Renzler, which he’s predisposed to accept, to buy us in total. Unless there’s a way to keep us American.”
“What’s the offer?” asked Stan.
“$30 million.”
“Seems high,” said Gardocki.
“Our production facilities alone are worth close to that.”
“All right,” I said, “but what else does Surge Vision have? No offense, but the stuff you just pitched us doesn’t move the needle much.”
“Look,” he said, “I get it. But here’s what you don’t know — there isn’t a studio in the world with a bigger catalog of scripts and film than Surge Vision.”
“I don’t understand,” said Gardocki.
“Mr. Renzler started the studio back in 1998. His family had owned a great deal of land in Southern California and made a lot of money as the area expanded after World War II, and his idea was that he’d make Surge Vision into a volume producer. So he bought everything he could from any of the other studios who’d sell it, and he’s been buying scripts for years — some to make, some to hold, and others to sell.”
“What for?” asked Stan.
“His thought was that if you owned the IP, you could produce and release it when it was hot. And early on, that paid off. We put out a number of movies capitalizing on trends from the big studios — I’m sure you remember Tidal Wave, Bootleg Nights, and Dead Planet; those all did pretty well.”
“Cult classics,” I said.
“They were just fun movies. Takeoffs of bigger films, sure, but they helped build us.”
“So you’ve got the crews to run a big volume of IP at a fast pace,” said Gardocki. “You don’t have a great track record of putting out particularly good IP.”
“Mr. Renzler’s philosophy was to release fast and cheap,” said Grant. “He built a pretty large distribution network around the world, and the foreign box office on Surge Vision films would surprise you, at least until the last few years when things have fallen off a bit.”
“Now I understand,” I said. “China wants you because if they control your IP, they can brand it as American to the rest of the world.”
“I’m sorry,” said Melissa, “I don’t understand.”
“Melissa, you remember back in 2021 or 2022 when we did that Holman Media podcast episode about how COVID spread from Wuhan to Milan?”
“Vaguely.”
“So China got Italy to join their Belt and Road initiative, and the upside was that China would bring a massive amount of foreign investment into the Belt and Road countries. But in Italy, one of the key manifestations of that was the Chinese came in and bought up a bunch of Italian companies in fashion and leather goods. They did it so they’d get the brand names, but once they bought them, they then imported tens of thousands of laborers to take over the production.”
“OK, this is starting to ring a bell.”
“And the deal was that most of the fashion industry in Italy is in Milan, so the Chinese were deluging that city with cheap labor from, of all places, Wuhan. There were three flights a day from Wuhan to Milan. And when COVID came out of that lab in Wuhan, they closed the airport to domestic travel but not the international flights. Next thing everybody knew, Milan was ground central for the virus to spread in Europe.”
“Ahh, yeah,” she said. “Now I remember. And the point is that you might think of a handbag from China as not worth $100 or $200 or whatever, but you will buy one from Italy for that, or more.”
“And it’s the same damn handbag,” I said.
“So what we’re saying is that if Zhou buys Surge Vision, they’ll make ‘American’ movies that they dictate the content of, and they’ll export them across the world,” said Gardocki.
“And therefore they’ll present Chinese culture as American culture,” I said. “It’s pretty insidious.”
“This is why the president wants an American buyer for Surge,” said Grant. “Mr. Renzler has known Mr. Numakin for years and he reached out, so that’s how this came about.”
“Bernie didn’t tell us that part,” I muttered.
“He’s always working those strings,” said Stan.
“Anyway, we’ve got literally thousands of films that are either fully produced, produced but not released, partially produced, or we have the screenplays. It’s a catalog as big as most of the Big Five have. Maybe even bigger.”
“They’re just not marketable,” said Gardocki.
“Well, maybe not yet,” said Grant, “but with a different strategy and resource mix…”
Meanwhile, as they were talking, I’d texted Nachman and asked him what he thought of Surge Vision.
“That studio complex is gold,” he said. “And the catalog is like a thrift store. You can find some hidden gems in there amid the crap. Why? You thinking about buying it?”
“Maybe,” I texted back. “You know anything about Grant Paxton?”
“They say he’s a good kid and a hustler.”
“What about the foreign distribution?”
“They’ll outdraw Top Gun in Uganda and Nepal. Don’t ask me how.”
“Here’s the thing, Grant,” I said. “We’re not in this to just crank out volumes of shlock. What we want to do is elevate the film and TV industry with great stories and great production value. So if we were to take this over, there would be some big changes.”
“Speaking for myself,” he said, “that’s exactly what I’d hope for.”
“Go on,” said Stan.
“Mr. Renzler’s philosophy has always been that if you keep the costs down and the volume up, distribution is far more important than quality. I’m still relatively new to this business, but what I’m seeing is that you can’t get low-budget B-movies past the gatekeepers who run the movie channels and the theaters anymore, so for what we’re living on it’s all limited release or it’s straight to streaming with no support, and your domestic box office goes to nothing.
“In other words, I’ve really just seen the downside to that approach since I started working here. Obviously, it had to be easier before I joined the company. But 80 percent of what Surge Vision earns is overseas at this point, and the financing of our productions is, well…”
“Smells like laundry detergent,” said Gardocki.
“I don’t have any direct evidence of anything untoward,” said Grant. “But what I will say is that I’ve entertained some of our financial partners, and I’d prefer to have people a little more legitimate.”
“So this is a distressed asset in the purest terms,” I said.
“It’s a gold nugget in a mountain of dirt, Mr. Holman,” Grant said with a big grin.
I couldn’t help it. I liked this guy.
So I invited him to join PJ and me for dinner that night, and she really liked him too.
So did Robby. It turned out that Grant was a wizard when it came to puppies. A real dog whisperer. He was giving us tips on training a puppy that even I’d never heard, and I grew up with dogs.
And over a bottle of Angel’s Envy that night, after I’d invited him to stay over, Grant and I talked for hours after PJ went to bed. He was from Natchez, divorced parents, and he’d been an athlete in high school, including an all-state golfer. Walked on the golf team at Ole Miss and ended up lettering as a senior. But he’d paid for school with the Army ROTC program, and that meant he was off to Afghanistan after graduation. Hadn’t seen a ton of action until right at the end of his second tour when the Taliban were making their move.
“It was a stupid war by the time I got there,” he said, “but the pullout was… holy Jesus. Some of the sons of bitches in charge need to go up against a wall.”
“I made some trips out there,” I said. “I know.”
“I’d love to make a movie about that,” he said. “Not one of these anti-war lefty bullshit flicks. I mean something real, about how the guys in the shit were legitimately trying to do good and the brass and the politicians just fuck everything up.”
“Not to mention what it was you were supposed to defend,” I said.
“Oh, man. Those animals and the little boys they’d… I can’t even talk about it. One of my troopers in the unit I was the XO of is in Leavenworth because he caught one of these haji-laji motherfuckers with a kid and blew his head off.”
“Boy, that’s a story Hollywood wouldn’t make.”
“Ha! I wouldn’t think so. Renzler sure as fuck wouldn’t make it. But Dan Butcher’s been writing a book about the whole experience while he’s in there. I’d love to put it on film someday.”
Like I said, I really liked Grant. He reminded me of Santiago, at least in the sense that he had an utterly anti-Hollywood mentality. Grant might have given us the obligatory sales routine about Surge Vision’s trash offerings, but once he’d done that duty, I could see he was a truth-teller. He shot straight. And despite what he’d seen, he was still confident and optimistic.
He was the kind of guy I would have loved to have with us at Holman Media.
I asked him if he wouldn’t just rather have a job at PGFI.
“The thing is,” he said, “I love it in Baton Rouge. And I love the folks I work with. What I want is the chance to lead them into making IP we can actually be proud of. And there’s so much in our vault that, with some resources applied, could become great films or TV shows.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I’m not sure why.”
He laughed.
“I’m sure you’ve heard this exact story a hundred times.”
“A thousand. But you’re convincing me anyway.”
And the next day, we were playing a round at the Golf Village at Admiral’s Cove and haggling over whether PGFI had to exactly meet Zhou’s bid to acquire Surge Vision. Grant kept pushing me to match Zhou’s offer so he could go home and tell Renzler he’d closed the deal. I got the sense this was less about whether it made sense at $30 million; it did, but I had it in my head that we ought to be able to get it for less when Trumbull had already intervened to keep Surge American.
I told him I wasn’t sure I could justify going above $27 million. He gave me a worried expression and warned me there was no way he could sell that to his boss, and if he went home without a deal, Renzler would sell the thing to Zhou, and he’d have to quit because he wasn’t going to work for a Chinese company.
So I invited Grant to fly down with us to Liberty Point.
Before we left, I had to do a remote interview with Anderson Cooper about the fact that we were 0-for-3 in trying to get control of one of the Big Five. He made a big deal about how our inability to land any of those tenders put our project in jeopardy.
“Anderson, that’s not how we see this at all,” I said. “You guys are understandably focusing on that aspect of this project, but the things we’ve been accomplishing while you’re all trashing me as a failed Gordon Gekko are really a lot more important.”
“How so?” he asked me.
“Well, we just came to a deal to acquire the Flying Saucer Network, and part of that means we’ve got a cellular network and a TV platform. We aren’t a cable provider per se, but we now have the same sort of offerings. And we’ve got a film production company up and running with four projects moving forward. Not to mention a record label, and a theater chain we’re modernizing and generating an enormous consumer response for.”
“But those are sort of nibbling around the edges…”
“No. That’s wrong. The thing you’re missing, and if I were getting paid $18 million a year to do a cable TV show, I’d probably miss it too, is that we as a society are moving past the cable TV model of media. That’s a model which began coming into being around 1980; by that benchmark, it’s now 45 years old. Consider that in 1980, something 45 years old would have come into existence in 1935. And NBC was the first to begin broadcasting on an experimental basis in 1936. If you’re Gen X or above, you might still think of cable TV as a new innovation, but the fact is it’s as old now as broadcast TV was when cable came along.”
“Yes, but it’s what there is now.”
“From an investment standpoint, that doesn’t mean a lot, Anderson. When you invest in something, what you’re buying is its future. And what I’m saying is it would be foolish to believe that this current formulation, this paradigm that doesn’t really work when people are cutting the cord and no longer arranging their schedules around when a particular show comes on TV, is going to last much longer.”
“OK, but you did bid on Summit, Stine-Warmer, and Castcom, so it’s not like you aren’t trying to fit into the current reality.”
“Yes, but why?” I said. “Our interest in those systems is that they’ve got very good capabilities to produce intellectual property, and they hold giant IP catalogs that include some of the best-loved franchises out there. Which they’re systematically ruining with awful remakes and sequels in too many cases, I might add.”
“So you don’t want the channels.”
“I’m not saying that altogether, but even there it’s the IP. Own a channel, and really what you own, sort of, is an audience and more importantly, you’ve got a contract to distribute the shows that channel puts on the air. So the important thing is whether you have a platform to distribute a show and the rights to execute that distribution. It doesn’t really matter all that much if you’ve got a place on a dial and a schedule to fit it in. At least, not anymore.”
“There is some of that,” he said, “but isn’t it easier to reach people through mass media?”
“You’re probably going to get irritated at me saying this, but should we go and ask Rogan about this? Or Tucker? Megyn Kelly? Tim Pool? Those guys all have a bigger audience than you do. My old podcast, which Colby Igboizwe is crushing right now, does as well.”
“You’re right. That is irritating.”
“Listen, I’m not throwing insults. What I’m saying is that this format has had its run, and it’s sort of hanging on until something else shows up to put it out of its misery. And what we’re working on, and will likely debut in the coming weeks and months, is that something.
“So it doesn’t actually matter how many cable channels we have. What matters is the IP, and building something that connects it with a maximum number of people at a price they don’t mind paying. There’s a reason we came up short on those three companies — there was a ceiling above which it was not worth it to us to continue bidding.”
“This is a new statement by you.”
“Anderson, in all three of those cases, your winner was somebody who was willing to lose money to preserve a dying system. Now, there are assets within those companies that will certainly survive into the next era of media, just like there were assets from the Golden Age of Radio that still survive today. But the system? Nah.”
The interview ended a little while later, and Grant, who’d been watching off to the side, gave an amused sigh as I signed off Skype.
“You’re a pro at this,” he said.
“Anderson has never liked me,” I said. “And he really doesn’t like me now that he can see I’m the future and he’s barely still the present. But hey, I can’t blame him for that. You know they did the math, and he costs those people $27 per viewer just in his salary alone?”
“That’s absurd.”
“Tell me about it.”
PJ’s friend Martha came and picked up Robby, and then the Uber came to bring us to the North Palm Beach airport, where Pierce’s jet waited.
Then we were off to Liberty Point, and we landed around sundown in a blinding rainstorm. It was a little scary, but even amid the monsoon, nobody got wet thanks to the indoor hangar.
It’s always fun to watch the reactions of first-time visitors to Pierce’s little Shangri-La down in the jungle, because even though there have been a few TV segments about Liberty Point and the YouTubes of the place have billions of combined views, it still isn’t a place people have a full understanding of. Plus, they’re always building new stuff.
For example, the road from Connor Polk International Airport was getting an expansion; it was turning into a four-lane divided highway. And they were building an interchange with an overpass south of the city.
“What’s this?” I asked our driver, a very funny middle-aged Guyanese lady named Bertha, who said she was from Kurukukari, which is a little town up the Essequibo River from Liberty Point.
“Oh, that,” she said, as we passed it. “That’s where the road to the bridge is going in.”
“You’re building a bridge? Over the Essequibo?”
“They’ll put in Polkton first,” she said. “It’s going to be a little neighborhood overlooking the river. But the bridge will run past it and go across the river, and then that road will eventually run all the way to the capital.”
“There’s no road to the capital from here?” Grant asked.
I looked at him and shook my head.
“Boats and planes,” I said. “That’s it. You’re in one of the most isolated places in the world, though you’d never know it.”
Grant’s reaction as the road took us into Liberty Point was priceless.
“I mean, I’ve seen pictures,” he said, “but this place is beautiful. It’s like a…”
“Mediterranean,” said PJ.
“Yeah! Like it’s been here for a long time, but it’s still new. And like it belongs here.”
“Don’t tell that to the environmentalists,” Melissa snarked. “They think this is a hate crime. They’ve never shut up about how he cut down the precious rain forest to build it.”
“It ain’t a crime,” said Grant as he gawked at the fountain in the middle of the traffic circle on the corner of Prosperity Boulevard and Rand Street. “If you can’t appreciate this place, you’ve just been touched by the angels.”
This time, we were deposited at the Grand Waica Hotel, because what we were there for was an informal conference about Western culture, which was more or less a front for a strategy session for PGFI. Pierce had a bunch of Big Media people coming in to be schmoozed by Mark Green and the Sentinel Telecom folks, he had some European culture ministers in, along with their counterparts from Argentina, Venezuela and Chile, plus a goodly number of artists, musicians, TV celebrities and others and the goal was to play up the importance of a healthy culture to a good business and political climate.
And that weekend, Pierce gave a pretty stemwinding speech on that subject. I’m not exactly objective about that seeing as though I wrote it for him. It was all about a lot of what I’d said in the Anderson Cooper interview, but what Pierce said was that there had been two different media revolutions in the past century, and a third one was upon us. The first was mass media, first with radio and then with TV, and Pierce equated that to the Russian revolution — in that mass media was a very top-down, orderly and nearly Soviet-style enterprise with a small group of very homogenous people, from the standpoint of a worldview, serving as gatekeepers holding not just the means of production but controlling the minds of their subjects.
And then there was the social media revolution, he said, which was more like the French revolution — it was supposed to deliver liberty, equality, and fraternity, and delivered none of those. Pierce called out Mark Zuckerberg and the idiots at Twitter as modern-day Robespierres who embraced and enforced radical nonsense, and he said it was an abject waste of an opportunity that those were the people who came into control of social media.
But what was lacking, he said, was an American revolution in media, one in which ordinary folks got to set the rules and in which a true meritocracy might arise.
“I’ve hopefully got a lot of time left before I go,” he said. “I’ve done a lot already, had a lot of success, and built a bit of power along the way. But this is my great passion project. I want to use the resources I’ve amassed to democratize media the way social media was supposed to do before it was hijacked, and in doing so, to democratize culture.”
“Pretty good freakin’ speech,” Numakin, who was sitting next to me, said under his breath as Pierce was then launching into the part of the speech he’d written, about how Skynet was poised to dominate the next revolution from space.
“I could have given it better,” I shrugged, which earned me a poke in the ribs from PJ.
Later, there was a meeting up in Pierce’s penthouse conference room.
And there, Numakin announced to the gathering of a couple of dozen people what our next move would be.
“We’re going to take down XYZ Sidney,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter whether we control it at the end or not. When we’re done, they’ll be selling off parts as fast as they can just to survive.”
Hank, who was sitting next to me, was looking at his phone.
“Holy shit,” he hissed.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
Then he showed me an email he’d gotten. It was a press release announcing that Chang Pan-Pacific had merged with the Zhou Group, and the resulting entity, Dragon Harvest America, was entering the media space as part of their efforts to “unite China and America, the world’s two superpowers, in an exchange of culture as well as goods and services.”
Peter Chang was announced as the CEO of that new entity.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana – May 16, 2025
After the plane brought us home from Liberty Point, Grant flew home to Baton Rouge. Then he got on a plane to Corpus, where he met with Nachman and Santiago and the Belmarsh IT team, which was how I was referring to Vinesh and the CASTR guys.
And I got on the phone with Paul Renzler, who owned Surge Vision.
“I want to buy your studio,” I said. “And I want to make the deal now. I’ll get on a plane to L.A. and sign it with you; in fact, I’ve got a jet waiting to bring me out there right now.”
“Dragon Harvest America is offering me $32 million,” he said. “I would auction this thing off to the highest bidder, but I’m not that mercenary. Match that number and it’s yours.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, because it told me I was wrong about my initial thought about Surge Vision, and I didn’t like the idea that I was wrong.
But before I left Liberty Point, Pierce and I had a conversation. After he’d agreed that Grant was a guy worth working with, he gave me a serious look and told me that under no circumstances could we lose that company to the People’s Liberation Army, who he’d had to fight a literal war against, when the Chinese had sent a naval flotilla to help Venezuela invade Guyana, a little less than a year before.
So I was done haggling price with Paul Renzler. Whether I liked it or not.
“For $32 million, we get everything,” I told him. “All the real estate, all the IP, all the contracts, even all the debt.”
“There is no debt. And for $32 million, you even get our data center.”
“You have a data center?”
“We have a piece of one. We’ve got a contract with the Hike Eight data center, which opens in St. Francisville later this year.”
He explained to me that Surge Vision had 200 rack units of servers at Hike Eight locked in at a brand new facility being built up the river from Baton Rouge. That meant they’d have access to five hundred terabytes of storage, expandable up to a petabyte.
I had a vague understanding of what that meant. But I knew that a petabyte of data storage put Surge Vision well within Big Five territory.
“Then that’s it,” I said. “Sold for $32 million. I will bring you a check and a contract.”
“Well, you have yourself a deal. But don’t fly to L.A. I’m actually in Baton Rouge this week.”
“Even better.”
So I got back on the plane with Melissa and flew to Louisiana. I knew better than to ask PJ to come with; she’d done all the traveling she was interested in doing for the time being.
And when we got out of the Uber at Surge Vision’s studio complex, which was on a large tract of land sandwiched between a big apartment complex and a Costco, and we walked through the front door, it was kind of like a surprise party.
They had a brass band, and everybody had Mardi Gras beads on. And Renzler introduced me to Louis Trosclair, the Lieutenant Governor, a pot-bellied Cajun from Thibodaux.
“That’s by the Gulf, right?” I asked him.
“Actually, cher, it’s a lot closa to da bayou.”
Renzler informed me that Trosclair was in charge of the state’s culture and tourism office, and because of that, he’d worked closely with him on locations and tax credits, and so forth.
“We got all kindsa tools we can bring to help you get some projects off da ground,” said Trosclair, who insisted on my calling him Big Lou. And then he insisted that I introduce him to Melissa.
“Dis ya wife, or ya assistant?”
“Melissa’s my assistant. My wife is taller and meaner and half-Chinese.”
“That’s right!” said Renzler. “She’s Peter Chang’s daughter, isn’t she? And there’s history of sorts with her time in the… Secret Service, I believe?”
“That’s correct,” I said. “So I’m very, very happy to be concluding this deal with you.”
The employees, and I guess there were a bunch of Trosclair’s people, too, started following the brass band down the hall in a second line, and a porky middle-aged lady in a pantsuit reached up and dropped a couple of strands of beads over my neck while a tall twentysomething black guy in a Jayden Daniels LSU football jersey handed me a bright red drink.
“This is a hurricane,” I said. “I know that. But you aren’t Jayden Daniels by any chance, are you?”
He laughed. “Nah, bruh. I’m Jeff. I do camera work.”
Then Renzler and Big Lou led us behind the second line to do a tour of the place.
I’d already agreed to buy it, but it was fun catching the VIP treatment anyway, even if Big Lou was pouring on the Cajun charm a little thick. And he was pouring it on Melissa, who some sort of way, was not grossed out.
At least I was somewhat convinced that this time I wasn’t getting roofied by somebody in the movie business.
We’d gone through the spec sheets of Surge Vision’s facility, and so I knew what they had. And as Renzler took Melissa and me through the place, I texted Grant and told me I was surveying his kingdom.
“It’s bigger than what Belmarsh will have,” I said.
“I know,” he texted back, “but I’m gonna need a few of these digital greenscreens like the one you’ve got here in Corpus. Holy shit, this thing is amazing.”
“They’re using it right now? You’re seeing it in action?”
“They’re filming the Battle of Derna as I’m texting. But I don’t understand what Santiago is doing. He’s shooting like one or two takes and then moving on.”
“So you haven’t talked to him about his process.”
“Not really.”
“Well, before you leave there, make him explain it to you and then get with Vinesh and Billy and those guys, and they’ll tell you how it works.”
“OK. I’ve really just talked with Nachman and that guy Derrick, and then I met that girl who’s going to do the Roman movie. Georgia? Holy shit is she hot.”
I sent him an LOL and then I looked up and Melissa was giving me a scowly face.
“You’re zoned out,” she said.
“I excused myself to text with Grant.”
“I know, but it’s still rude.”
I rolled my eyes at her and then apologized to Renzler. “I was texting with your executive director,” I said. “He’s on a fact-finding trip at our other production facility in Texas.”
“So I understand,” he said. “I hope it’s your plan to keep Grant on.”
“Absolutely. He’s a good guy. We haven’t discussed a role for you, though.”
“No need. I’m selling, and I’m out. My plan is to retire to our place outside of Santa Fe and live out my days in the mountain air.”
“Then it’s a nice, clean sale,” I said.
After we went through the building containing the vault, which had racks and racks of binders and film canisters, something that looked like a movie set in its own right, like it would be a scene of some government archive where ugly secrets were stored, the tour concluded with Surge Vision’s post-production facility.
And that was something.
It looked like a cross between a recording studio, a network control room, and the NORAD command center from War Games, with massive screens along the walls and computer terminals lined up in rows. They were digitally editing the cocaine car chase movie, and I was a little surprised to see that it was filmed in an old Panavision format, like it was shot in the early 1970s.
“This is like a Tarantino style?” I said. “You shot it with film and scanned it in?”
“Oh, no,” said Renzler. “The Panavision is an AI filter.”
“Ahhh,” I said. “It’s kind of a neat effect.”
“The Trunk is going to be a nice win for you. I’m sure Grant filled you in.”
I nodded.
Then I thought, maybe it would be. I hadn’t read the script, but there was a certain Steve McQueen-Sam Peckinpah thing that film had going in the scenes I saw the Surge Vision crew working on. I wasn’t sure I bought Corey Feldman as the Steve McQueen character, though.
“You didn’t tell me the cocaine-in-the-trunk movie had Corey Feldman in the lead,” I texted Grant.
“Yeah, well, I was trying to sell you the studio,” he texted back, with a laugh emoji.
“I admire your tactics. Maybe not your honesty.”
“He’s actually not that bad,” came the response. “You’d be surprised. And that movie is more than you think it is.”
“We’ll discuss it.”
“By the way, I’m sitting with Vinesh now,” Grant texted back. “I understand why they’re shooting with so few takes. This app you’ve got is absolutely blowing my mind.”
“Uh huh.”
“Oh, shit. And you have that whole fucking library of ours now to run through that app.”
“Yep.”
“Dude, for $32 million? You’re like that Dutch guy who bought Manhattan Island for a few beads. You’re a god.”
“I’m not a god,” I texted back.
And Melissa was giving me a scowly face again.
“What? Nobody’s talking to me.”
“I don’t think you should be on your phone.”
I just pointed at Renzler. He was on his phone.
Then my phone buzzed again. This time it was Frank Taylor, who said he had Merle Haggard’s family asking if we’d be interested in doing a biopic of the famous country singer and Sunshine Records artist, if Walton Goggins had agreed to play Haggard.
“Do we have a script?” I texted back.
“Well, no. But we’ll come up with one.”
I texted him Bradley Crain’s contact card.
Then I looked up at Melissa and she was staring laser beams through my face.
“Frank Taylor wants to make a Merle Haggard movie,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea.”
“Wow,” said Renzler. “That would be an interesting film.”
Melissa rolled her eyes at me and asked me if I wanted a bottle of water from the cooler along the back wall.
“Sure,” I said. “Paul, this place is really terrific.”
“We’re very proud of it,” he said. “You’ll find that you’re always going to have a clientele to keep your sound stages working. Everything from feature films to TV commercials, they’ll line up for the space. It’s a good group in here.”
That night, Renzler and a couple of the other Surge Vision execs took us to dinner at the Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in town, and halfway through the main course, a slight little guy rolled through the dining room and everybody paid him attention. For some reason, he made a detour for our table.
“Governor,” said Renzler. “I’d like you to meet Mike Holman and his assistant Melissa Swindell.”
“Yeah!” said Jed Guidry. “I know who you are. We met, I dunno, like a dozen years ago when I was in Congress.”
“I remember,” I said. “I was interviewing Mike Rogers for the podcast, and you were walking by as we left his office, and you wanted me to interview you.”
“You turned me down, too, cher.”
“I know. I guess I missed out.”
“You could make up for that now, though.”
I laughed.
“I’m out of the game, sorry. But you’ll like this — we bought Surge Vision, and we’ll be making a whole lot of movies and TV shows in your state, so there’s that.”
“Well, all right then,” he said. And then he told me that I should go with him to the College World Series in Omaha the next month, because LSU would be there. And that in September, he was hosting his annual gator hunt, and I should come to that.
I could just picture PJ in a canoe surrounded by dead alligators. PJ was tough, but not that tough.
And then I looked at Melissa, who was turning purple over the idea of the gator hunt. And it was all I could do not to burst out laughing.
“Maybe so, Governor. Maybe so.”
Back home in Jupiter a couple of days later, and still a little hungover from the Cinco de Mayo tequila-fest at the Admiral’s Cove Club that Stan had put on, which was his big annual thing, and everybody in town would come to it, I was a little surprised when Numakin stopped by the PGFI office unannounced. Stan, Gardocki, and I were going through some projections on film productions over a lunch they’d brought in from the Buffalo Wild Wings up the road.
“Bernie, what are you doing here?” I asked him, laughing. I had a face full of buffalo sauce, and I was in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sneakers.
Bernie had a suit on. Bernie always had a suit on.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m down here on a fundraising trip for… a couple of things.”
“The sovereign wealth fund?” asked Stan.
“That’s one. The other is my XYZ Sidney plan.”
“You want some chicken?” I said. “It’s not Tavern on the Green, but it’ll fill you up.”
“I don’t mind if I do,” he said, hitting the boxes lined up on the conference table. I noticed he was grabbing dry-rub wings, though. Probably a good thought not to get sauce all over his Zenya tie.
“Bernie,” Gardocki said as he sat down, “I do have a question for you. Why are you pushing a short on XYZ Sidney?”
“The thing is,” Stan said, agreeing with Gardocki, “we really don’t need it. Between what we’ve set up with Flying Saucer and Skynet…”
“Shining Star,” I corrected him. “We are not calling it Skynet for one more day. I finally convinced Pierce to get off Skynet, and we are moving on.”
“Fine. Shining Star. We’ve got that and Fling TV, and we’re going to have production and distribution at scale; we don’t have the prestige yet, but in every other respect, we don’t need any of the Big Five.”
“Well,” I said, “I still want the catalogs. I want the ability to run all that IP through our app and have unlimited remakes of those movies and TV shows for essentially nothing but the cost of server space.”
“Right, I get that,” said Stan, “but in time it’s likely that we can negotiate deals to get those rights.”
“They’ll undoubtedly copy CASTR,” said Numakin. “This is 1946, and the Russians don’t have the bomb yet. Act accordingly.”
“Right, but why tie up so much money in XYZ Sidney?” said Gardocki. “They’re an abject disaster from a production standpoint. They’ve utterly destroyed Sky Wars, what they’ve done to Illinois Smith is a crime, they make nothing but groomer trash with their animated films now… hell, they’ve even made college sports unwatchable with all the woke shit.”
“That’s part of it,” said Numakin. “They need to be destroyed for that alone.”
“This is about you and Rod Igor, isn’t it?” I asked him.
Numakin and Igor had come to blows some 15 years before, when Igor was a newly minted CEO at Sidney and Numakin was running White Sands. Igor had spiked the production of an action movie White Sands had sold the studio, that Numakin had put together mostly by the sweat of his own brow, when Igor’s predecessor, Lee Vailes, had been in charge of the company.
It wasn’t just a business transaction. The star of the film, Tanner Osborne, was the son of Numakin’s personal chef. Osborne had supporting roles in a couple of films by then, and he was a big-time talent — he was physical, and he was funny, and he was an Adonis that women couldn’t get enough of. But he had a problem with depression and substance abuse, and when War Birds got thrown on the bonfire as one of Igor’s first decisions, Tanner went into a funk, took a bunch of barbiturates, and ended up in a coma. He was still around, but he’d permanently damaged himself, and he was in a nursing home outside Gatlinburg.
“I won’t deny that’s part of it,” Numakin said. “But there’s a lot more.”
“Like what?” asked Stan.
“It’s what Trent said,” said Numakin. “You want to reform the culture, and you want to get the poison out of it. Well, nobody is injecting more poison into the culture than Sidney is. They’re poisoning sports with a woke filter. They’ve poisoned kids’ programming. They’ve allowed woke considerations to ruin both drama and comedy. The news division is the worst kind of politicized journalism. It’s all hideously corrupt and it’s utterly septic from a profit-and-loss standpoint.”
“They need to be destroyed, so you want to destroy them,” I mused.
“I didn’t get the reputation on Wall Street that I have without earning it,” he said. “Destroying a bad business makes room for good businesses to flourish. And besides, if Sidney goes down, someone else will control its assets, and that’s an opportunity for rebirth.”
“So what’s the plan?” I asked. “This is a whole lot bigger deal than any of the three other ones. Sidney is what? A $200 billion company?”
“You’ve done your homework,” he said, smiling as he chewed on a drumstick.
“It seems expensive.”
“Again,” he said, “this isn’t about a takeover, though it might end up as one. This is a short.”
“So we’re going to wreck the stock?”
“Ultimately,” said Numakin, “we’re going to wreck all of them.”
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