Editor’s Note: This is the second 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 attempting to fix the film and TV business. 

In Episode 1, Mike has begun conversations with key players, building the project they’re calling the Polk Global Freedom Initiative and spreading the word about the effort now underway. But in Episode 2, we start to understand the difficulty of what PGFI is planning.

—

Jupiter, Florida – December 22, 2024

I guess for those of you who aren’t up to speed, I should back up a bit.

PJ and I live in Jupiter, which is a little north of Palm Beach on the southeast Florida coast. We weren’t looking to live here, but Pierce basically made us do it.

And by “made us,” I mean he gave us this house as a wedding present back in August.

It’s an absolutely beautiful place. It’s in an exclusive area called Admiral’s Cove, which is a little maze of islands, peninsulas and rivers with a golf course and a marina and a clubhouse for each. Some of the houses here go for $15-20 million, and a lot of the people who live in them have names you know pretty well.

I’ve spent time in this place. It was one of Pierce’s first “extra” houses; he bought it back in 2001 or 2002 because he thought the dock in the back, which led out to Lake Worth Creek, would be a cool place to keep his boat. Except he soon bought a much larger boat, and that was too big for the dock behind the house; the new boat found a berth at the Club at Admiral’s Cove.

And soon, Pierce wasn’t spending as much time at the Jupiter house. He had houses everywhere where he spent time. And two soon-to-be ex-wives to occupy him.

But a couple of times a year, he’d have a bunch of us who’d gone to college with him at Vanderbilt down to the Jupiter house, and we’d do a guys’ weekend — sitting around the pool drinking, getting catered meals from chefs he’d fly in, going out fishing on the bigger boat, going to these big parties Pierce would throw at the club and playing golf, both at the Admiral’s Cove Golf Village course and at some of the other courses around town.

And that’s when I fell in love with the house.

It wasn’t one of Pierce’s biggest or swankiest places — of the eight he had, it was probably no better than sixth on the list, and in fact, that’s where it rated when Forbes published a piece back in 2019 ranking Pierce’s houses. But I didn’t care about that. I absolutely loved that place, and Pierce knew it.

Which is why he had a standing invitation that I could crash there any time I wanted, and he set me up with a guest membership at the club. He even gave me a set of keys to the place and told me that whenever I wanted to set up shop there, just to let him know so he could arrange for the concierge service — yeah, he had a service which would send a housekeeper and a chef in to take care of everything — to be ready when I showed up.

Pierce is a really good guy to have as a friend, as you might imagine. A guy who’s anywhere from the third to the seventh richest man in the world, who owns five separate Fortune 500 companies more or less lock, stock, and barrel and who is essentially the economic engine of the nation of Guyana, now the fastest-growing economy in the world, would tend to be in a position to be awfully generous toward his friends.

And I’ve been his friend since we were college roommates in the 1990s. It’s been a bit of a strange relationship, though, because Pierce is in charge of so damn many things, and he’s such a boundlessly energetic visionary who’s always rushing off to build some new marvel or revolutionize how some other thing is done, that it’s tough for him to really maintain the old friendships that I know he cherishes.

And to compensate for that, he showers his people with material things. Everything is first class, it’s grandiose, it’s over-the-top.

If you didn’t know him better, you’d say it was obnoxious.

For example, a couple of years ago, he had a bunch of us down to the Jupiter place. It was 11 of us, and we came in for a week. And the first day we’re there, Pierce had a guy take all of our measurements.

Didn’t say why. Just said, “Hey, go with it, all right?”

We’re all like, “whatever.”

He’s got all of us sipping glasses of Pappy Van Winkle and eating Wagyu carpaccio on toast, so we’re making a big joke out of Kevin Sessions’s disgusting beer gut and Phil Horowitz’s little-bitty inseam. It wasn’t creepy or anything; it was just a bunch of guys palling around.

The last night we were all there was this big party at the club. Black tie. Pierce didn’t tell us it was black tie, and we were all bitching at him because nobody brought a tux.

And this van pulls up, and out comes a rolling rack of Kiton tuxedos custom-tailored for each of us. That’s a $50,000 suit, so you’ll know. And Pierce is like, “Guys, my gift to you.”

What do you say to that? From that point, we started calling ourselves the Tuxedo Club.

Sure, it’s weird. For a long time, I looked at the circle of friends and Pierce’s inner circle of business associates and employees, like it were a cult. Not without reason. Be in an orbit of a guy like that, and it’s only natural, creepy as that may be.

But Pierce is worth several hundred billion dollars. Giving a friend a $50,000 suit is nothing to him. He’d be offended at the idea that was inappropriate; he wanted to do something nice for us, because we’d known him and been his boys before he took off like a Saturn rocket, so he did it.

The effect this had on me was a little off, I’ll admit. Because while the other guys in Pierce’s inner circle were around, at least to an extent, I remained really close with him. Like talking or texting every day. And he was the biggest fan Holman Media had. I’d do a podcast interview with Lindsey Graham, and 45 minutes after it went live on the site, Pierce would text me a list of five things the SOB said which he could prove were lies.

That kind of thing.

So for Pierce, showering me with stuff was like a love language. He was always basically demanding that I let him throw money at me.

And I had a problem with that, because it made me feel like a lackey, and I really, really didn’t want to be that guy.

Especially after I’d lost that show on ANN because of the stupid fight with Logan Rudolph, the idiot son of Irving Rudolph, who owned the network. For almost 20 years, I’d been fighting my way back to relevance as an independent media guy, and if I’d just let Pierce stake me, I felt like I’d be a sellout. So I couldn’t do it — until finally, with the walls closing in last spring, I did.

And as soon as I did, everything took off.

Pierce had a genius plan for doing it, of course. He came to me and essentially demanded that I write a biography of him. I’d written three books, all of which I thought were really good, two of which were published by decent-sized publishers and one I’d self-published as an experiment. They’d all sold an OK number of copies, making me just enough money to keep from having to tap into my savings to float Holman Media for a while, but none of them were monster bestsellers.

He knew I was perfect for the job of writing that biography. I knew him as well as he knew himself. And he knew I couldn’t turn him down, because that book would sell like crazy. Everything Pierce Polk sells like crazy. He also knew that the $250,000 check he’d written me to get things started was like oxygen to a drowning man.

So after years of my rebuffing Pierce’s attempts to help me, I was all of a sudden part of his gang — and frankly, I never felt a thing. I thought I’d feel like a sellout, but it was more like I’d made an arm’s-length transaction and I was getting paid well to fulfill my end of the bargain.

And when Pierce hired Holman Media to help him with his PR, it was the same thing. He actually did need our help, and we earned everything we got from him.

Which was a lot.

And it turned out that with a little bit of capital and the resources that afforded us, Tom and Colby were able to launch Holman Media into something I’d always dreamed it might one day be. In a matter of months, as it happened.

The war in Guyana, which Pierce was at the center of, and the dramatic way that turned out, which we were singularly positioned to cover, had a lot to do with it.

So there was a lot of synergy between Pierce, and his need for friendly media when the legacy corporate press was essentially libeling him as an outlaw and a drug dealer and a climate rapist and whatever other moronic narratives the Joe Deadhorse administration was cooking up about him, and my operation and our need for resources and events we could put our arms around for exclusive coverage of.

By the end of the summer, when PJ had saved Trumbull’s life in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, and Pierce’s guys had ended the war by turning over the Madiera government in Venezuela, Holman Media was hot shit.

And he gave PJ and me the Jupiter house as a wedding present.

I should have been embarrassed, but I wasn’t. Pierce didn’t ask me, but if he had, this would have been the one thing of his that I’d have chosen. I guess he knew that, so it was easy for him.

Especially since the feds had actually seized the house as part of this stupid investigation they were doing into Sentinel Ports Management’s supposed facilitation of the international drug trade. Pierce got wind of the seizure, and he managed to evacuate everything from the place before the FBI got there. And instead, they were greeted, upon their entry, with thousands and thousands of little ceramic frogs, like the ones you buy at Walmart for $2.99, arranged in patterns that sent a not-altogether-family-friendly message.

And that was, naturally, made fully available to the public via Pierce’s X account the day of the raid. As in, the very minute it happened. He had his surveillance cameras going, because of course he did, and the quality of the video was utterly cinematic.

Which led to a viral video that embarrassed the administration so profoundly it might have actually influenced Deadhorse’s party to dump him from their ticket, which they later did after that, er, incident at the debate with Trumbull.

There was never a stitch of evidence behind any of these investigations, of course, and Pierce’s lawyers ultimately made all of it go away. And when Trumbull beat Deadhorse’s idiot vice president Pamela Farris in the election after they dumped him off the ticket, all of the lawfare the former administration was pushing on Pierce just melted.

By then, though, he’d planted his flag down in Liberty Point, the little city he’d built in the jungle in Guyana, and he didn’t really need eight houses across the U.S., so we got Jupiter.

And that guest membership at the club turned into a full membership.

Which was awesome.

But then we went to London on our honeymoon, and the next thing I knew, I was stuck in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of doing a podcast interview with Robby Thomason, the pro-English activist the Stormer government didn’t like.

And for a month, I was a not-so-well-treated guest of His Majesty’s Government.

Until Pierce had his guys break me out.

Meaning that PJ and I were late getting situated in Jupiter, and by the time Christmas came around, we’d just started getting to know the neighbors.

That club membership was pretty helpful.

One of the people I met more or less straight away was a guy named Stanton Lynch.

Lynch was a Wall Street guy. I’d never heard of him, but it turned out that was more due to my ignorance of financial markets than his lack of notoriety. He had a hedge fund, Valkyrie Capital, that boasted about $8 billion in assets under management. But he’d bailed out of his position with the fund and gotten the hell out of New York when the COVID panic turned that place into something out of a Joe Stalin wet dream. Ever since then, he’d mostly spent his days playing golf and tennis at the club, motoring around on his yacht, and following his twin teenage boys around as they did travel ball, trying to get set to pitch in the majors.

Stan was a couple of years older than me. He was a cool guy. And he said he didn’t miss the Wall Street game at all. Which I wasn’t sure I believed.

“I did my bit and I got out with more than enough of a stash,” he told me. “Here and there I’ll do some investing just to stay sharp, but my time is mine and that’s how I want it.”

Trina, his wife, agreed. “He’s a lot nicer now that we got him away from Wall Street,” she said. “And I will never live in Manhattan again.”

“That seems to be a common sentiment,” I said.

Anyway, PJ and I went to dinner at the club one night — it was two days after Pierce and the Tuxedo Club had finished our semi-annual Jupiter Week thing, which this year had mercifully been held not at our house but at the Jupiter Beach Resort — and we ended up sharing a table with Stan and Trina after they chatted us up in the bar.

And I told Stan about the Polk Global Freedom Initiative, and my meeting with Numakin.

“No shit,” he said. “You’re with Bernie on this? Guy’s a fuckin’ legend.”

“Stan!” Trina hissed. “Quit it with the language.”

“I’m trying with Mike, too,” PJ said. “I don’t know if it’s even possible.”

The wives laughed, Stan and I rolled our eyes, and for the whole dinner, he and I brainstormed about how it was possible to leverage Pierce’s money into saving Western civilization by turning around our cultural decline.

“I think you’re definitely correct that it’s corporate media making this mess,” Stan said. “The fun thing is that all of these media companies are essentially dogs with fleas from a stock evaluation perspective. They’re built on media models that probably won’t exist a generation from now, and they’re sustaining themselves on prestige the public doesn’t even believe in.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Bernie and I can’t really decide whether we should make a play for one of the Big Five, or whether we should just put something together for ourselves.”

“See,” Stan said, “I’d do both. What you want to do here is think of this as a war. And to win a war, you need to wipe out the enemy. Kill his soldiers. Occupy his lands. Take his stuff away. Your enemy here is this group of people who’ve perverted the institutions that control the culture, and while ultimately you’re going to have to break into education…”

“That’s a whole other phase of the plan,” I said.

“Right. I imagine so. But what you’re gonna need to do is to destroy the whole media sector and replace it with something else.”

“To me, if I can just democratize it so it’s a whole host of talented people doing their thing rather than a small group of gatekeepers controlling it, the rest might take care of itself,” I said. “I see it happening in journalism now.”

“Yeah, for sure. Trina and I listen to you and Carlson and Rogan and Tim Pool. I can’t remember the last minute I wasted on Jim Acosta or Rachel Maddow or any of those freaks. Independents is where it’s at.”

“I think if we get there with movies and TV and music, and maybe art, maybe books, you’ll see a big difference.”

“You know what I’d do?” said Stan, as Trina tilted her head and started listening. “I’d make a plan on dating.”

“Dating, like…”

“Like matchmaking,” said PJ. “Like getting men and women together so they’ll get married.”

“Well, part of the vision statement that I wrote up for Pierce talked about family formation, and how the decline of that and the birth rate, and the kids without fathers, are all just catastrophic for the culture,” I said.

“Figure out how to include that as part of what we do and you’ll end up fixing this quicker than you ever thought,” said Stan.

“Totally agree,” Trina said as she sipped from her glass of Malbec.

“OK, how?”

“Hell, I dunno,” Stan said.

I’m not sure how we got from that part of the conversation to what resulted, but later that night, back at the house, PJ and I ended up in the first big fight of our whole relationship.

I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow of it. But the thing was, and I didn’t see it coming at all, that PJ had a visceral, and I thought irrational, aversion to Hollywood.

How could that be the case? It was crazy. The girl had gone to UCLA, for crying out loud.

But after Stan and I had spent two hours solving the country’s cultural problems, I was all torqued up and I was babbling on about how I wanted to get out to L.A. to scope out the lay of the land, and wouldn’t it be cool if she came with me and we did the Hollywood life for a while.

And she just made a face.

“Come on,” I said. “You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be fun. You and me! Butch and Sundance! This’ll be awesome!”

She didn’t think it was awesome. She said she didn’t want any part of Hollywood.

And she didn’t want to talk about why.

I’m Mike Holman, you understand. My whole life, what I’ve been good at is extracting information from people. They actually called me the World’s Greatest Newsman at the end of the time I was doing the podcast. And my own wife was clamming up on me.

I’ll admit, it pissed me off. And what made it worse was this: from as far back as I can remember, my passion has been movies.

I’m from a generation that absolutely defines itself in film. Gen X’ers can recite you every line from Animal House, or Stripes, or Porky’s, or Ghostbusters. Ask us what those five tones in Close Encounters of the Third Kind were, and we’ll pop them out before you finish the sentence. We can tell you Clemenza was a good guy and Sollozzo was a sonofabitch. Yell “You’re all gonna die in there!” to us and we’ll immediately conjure up that shriveled, creepy bastard from Poltergeist in our minds.

We know who Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger are. And if you tell us “Bust a deal and face the wheel” or “Nuke the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure,” we will immediately recognize where those references come from.

I’m a movie nut, and I’m not alone in that among my age cohort. There was a time in my life when I considered it an honest possibility that I’d seen every single major film ever made. The snob in me still holds that to be true, though I know it’s not. And the single fondest memory from my childhood was when my Dad took me to some stupid Star Trek fan convention back home in Cincinnati and I had my picture taken with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

Well, that and the free throw I hit, which won the Cincinnati Recreation Commission 10 and under championship. I still have that trophy. Mom insisted on bringing it down and putting it on the shelf behind my desk in the office, which PJ thought was cute as hell. The pic of me with Kirk and Spock, she got less of a kick out of.

I’m not a dork, OK? I’m just a movie guy. Storytelling is something I’ve always had a passion for. It’s partially how I didn’t lose it in Belmarsh — I had PJ bringing me Rudyard Kipling and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and I’d just read until my eyes gave out while I was stuck in that cell. Put that great stuff on a screen so I can watch instead of read, and I’m in heaven.

Bridge Over The River Kwai? Empire Of The Sun? The Chronicles Of Narnia? Chariots Of Fire? The Green Berets? A Bronx Tale? Dances With Wolves? All of it. I can’t get enough. To me, this is the lifeblood of what it means to be an American, or even a Westerner. Our ancient ancestors painted on cave walls, and then they carved into stone tablets, and then they scribbled into books, and now they’re imprinting into film — or onto a hard drive — the great stories that define us and tell us who we are and where we come from.

Laugh if you want, but I see this as sacred stuff. I actually struggle with how casually people take these things.

Now you understand why, when Pierce and I got to talking about how to fix the culture, the first thing in my head was that people who care about saving Western civilization, if you’ll permit me to come off as so pompous, need to be the ones telling the stories that shape how we see the world. And for somebody from Gen X, that’s movies and TV.

I don’t think I’m wrong about that.

But here’s the interesting thing.

I’m older than PJ. She’s actually from a different generation. And PJ, as a late millennial, is not into film like I am. She’s not really into it at all. She’s perfectly good listening to some true crime podcast or watching a reality show. She confessed that she loved my podcast, and she told me she likes how Colby does it now that he’s taken over. But the point is that defining your life by the stories you’re told, for her, looks a lot different than it does for my crowd.

I’d been forcing her to watch all those classics from the 1970s and 1980s, and her reaction was interesting. First was a so-so level of enthusiasm. Second was this: “None of the new stuff is as funny or as compelling as what you’re making me watch.”

When I wondered aloud whether her lack of passion for film, something I was worried might ultimately drive a wedge between us, had to do with the quality of the stuff she’d been exposed to in her formative years, she made that face she makes and said, “Maybe so.”

PJ’s version of that face is adorable, but you know it. It’s the face that says, “You’re exactly right, but I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of admitting it.”

I mean, it’s sort of a shameful thing. I had to make that face when my Dad and I would fight over music, because let’s face it — the one thing the Boomers had on us was that their rock and roll was better than ours. I grew up on AC/DC, the Police and U2 and INXS and Pearl Jam, and Metallica, and I’m not apologizing for any of that stuff.

But against Zeppelin? Clapton? The Who? Jimi Hendrix? I’m overmatched.

So I think some of this, and I actually saw validation for the PGFI project Pierce and I were working on, is that great art can affect a culture, and we’re looking at maybe two whole generations who haven’t experienced a whole lot of it.

They get fed absolutely shit music, they’re given woke, vapid, horrid storytelling which doesn’t give them anything true to hold on to culturally, they aren’t allowed to laugh, they’re told to cry, not as an expression of emotion but as a means of getting what they want. That’s how you go from Rooster Cogburn to Carol Danvers in 50 years.

Who’s Carol Danvers? That’s Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel character. Everybody hates her. And they should. She’s the antithesis of real storytelling — she’s got no character arc, no weaknesses that need to be overcome, there’s no sweetness or humanity to her. A culture based on the Carol Danverses of the world is a culture of soulless monsters.

So for PJ, film and TV are not the source of fulfillment, or character development, or life references. She has to find that elsewhere.

And that’s a failure.

But PJ hears me telling her that if we increase the quality of the intellectual property entertainment media is turning out, we can start to turn society around, and she’s like, “I dunno. Maybe.”

And what she’s utterly opposed to is the idea that I’d go to Hollywood and convince all or part of it to come along with me.

“You shouldn’t go there,” she said. “It’s a waste of time and you’ll do more harm than good.”

But she wouldn’t say why, and thus came the fight. Which expanded beyond me flying to L.A. and into all kinds of things that, I’ve got to admit, we might have wanted to hash out before we got married.

It lasted a couple of days’ worth of shitty looks and mean things being said, and my discovery that the mattress in the first guest bedroom was absolutely more comfortable than the one in the master bedroom, but then, on Christmas Eve, we had to put it to bed.

Because the Changs were coming to celebrate Christmas with us.

Not all of them, mind you. Because PJ’s mom and dad were dealing with… things, and lots of them, her brother Hank and her mom were coming to visit us. The rest of the crew was staying in San Francisco to do Christmas with The Great Peter Chang, as PJ called him.

Mary, PJ’s mom, is a favorite of mine. She’s a little older than me, but only by a few years, and honestly, if she and I were both single, we’d have hit it off. She actually told me that she was a massive fan of my old ANN show, which I got a massive kick out of. So she flew in and we picked her up at the airport in West Palm Beach. She was flying in from Liberty Point, by the way; she’d been there for a month or so just hanging out, and PJ had told me she had a thing — Friends with benefits? An intellectual connection? — with Hal Gibson, who was the famous Marine general Pierce had hired to win that war down there for him.

And Mary got in that car and immediately demanded to know what the problem was with us.

I told her it was because PJ didn’t want me to go and take meetings in Hollywood. I said I had to, and PJ vehemently disagreed.

Mary agreed with me. Which didn’t piss PJ off. She just kind of shrugged her shoulders, like she wasn’t going to do this when her mom was around. It was like a cotton-candy solution — tastes great, but there’s no substance to it.

But the neat part about it was having Mary around. She’s a big-time international trade lawyer, at least when she wants to be, but what Mary Smithson Chang is especially good at is making people get along. That woman is a world-class peacemaker. And within 30 minutes of her arrival at our house, there was no more conflict between PJ and me.

Then Hank, her youngest brother, showed up in an Uber about five hours before he was scheduled to.

“I caught a Netjets ride from a friend who has a place down here,” he said. “Tech guy in Austin. Which reminds me — we really ought to talk about this project I’m thinking about getting involved in.”

Over dinner — I insisted on grilling ribeyes from this rib roast we’d picked up at the Publix down the street, and let me tell you, they were damn good — Hank started bubbling over about this crazy app that some guys he knew had built. It re-made movies, he was saying, but the cool part wasn’t that it would colorize an old black-and-white film perfectly but that you could actually change the cast of a film and the AI would put whoever you wanted in whatever roles you wanted.

He even brought a Blu-Ray, Technicolor copy of It’s A Wonderful Life, obviously because it was Christmas, but instead of Jimmy Stewart, it was Tom Hanks in the lead role as George, and Nicole Kidman was Mary. We sat there and watched it, and it was very much like somebody had put a $25 million production together to make it.

“And this is all AI?” I asked him.

“You plug in your casting information, and the app already has the voice, the face, the physique, and the movements based on crawling everything the actor in question has been in, interviews they’ve done, the whole bit. So yeah. We’d need the rights in order to commercialize it, but from a tech standpoint, we’re rolling already.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s really cool, Hank,” said Mary, and you could tell she meant it — but what else was she going to say? She was his mom.

I looked at PJ.

“This is one reason you don’t need to go to Hollywood,” she said.

“What else can this app do?” I asked Hank.

“Meaning what?”

“Can I feed it a script and it’ll produce a movie from that just using AI?”

“I mean, you’ll need a lot more than a script. But they’re working on an interface that’ll let you block a scene, add theme music and sound effects, customize visuals, and so on, so you can tweak it scene by scene.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“They’ll absolutely never let you bring that app to market,” said PJ.

“You don’t think so?” I asked her.

“I would think this would scare the film industry to death,” said Mary. “Getting the rights to anybody who’s a member of SAG-AFTRA is going to be just about impossible. And the MPA will go to war over this. They’ll do whatever they can to kill it.”

“How can they kill it?” Hank scoffed.

“They’ll go to Congress and make it illegal,” I said. Mary nodded.

“You’re telling me I can’t show it around. You’re telling me that if the word gets out we have this, somebody will bring a bill to make it a crime to make a movie this way.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “An app like this explodes that industry.”

“It ought to do exactly what you’re saying needs to be done.”

“Look,” I said, “have you ever seen Tucker: The Man and His Dream? It’s about an actual guy who was in the auto business in the 1940s, and he was so far ahead of everybody else in terms of the engineering and quality control of making a car; it wasn’t funny.”

“Never heard of him,” said Hank.

“That’s because the Big Three carmakers got one look at this guy and the cars he was making, and they moved every mountain in D.C. to crush him. And they did. But his cars were better than theirs, and some of them are even today still on the road.”

“The point being that I’m the Tucker of the film business?”

“Maybe. But here’s the thought I have, and it’s also kind of a scary problem that goes with it. So they crushed this guy who had innovations that would have disrupted their industry, and that worked for them for, whatever, 25 years.”

“But not forever,” Mary said.

“Exactly. Because by the time the 1980s came along, car buyers were embracing Japanese cars on the bottom end and German cars on the top end, because the Big Three were fat and lazy and had forgotten how to serve the market.”

“So you think the Big Five, or whatever, in Hollywood are like the Big Three in the car business?” Hank asked.

“I think there’s something to that,” I said. “I think it’s a matter of time, if Americans can’t tell good stories or make great art anymore, before somebody else overtakes us. And then it’s their culture which inspires people.”

“Like China,” said PJ.

“Maybe,” I said. “But it could be anybody. Go on Netflix, and there is stuff from literally everywhere. The Norwegians, for some reason, manage to put out some great stuff. But India has Bollywood, the Koreans crank out film and TV like crazy, the French always have stuff, the British… basically every country where the people aren’t starving is making IP. And they’re catching up to us.”

“I see where you’re going with this,” said Mary. “If we’re consuming somebody else’s stories, we’re consuming their culture, and maybe it becomes ours.”

“Well, OK,” I said. “So I can throw The Squid Game at you and you’d be like, ‘yeah, that’s a wild show.’ But you’re not going to think much of anything about it. You could, because there’s actually some social messaging in there. But then if I throw Parasite, which is also a Korean show, into the mix, now it’s different.”

“Parasite was a pretty hard-core leftist thing,” said Hank.

“Which is why it won Best Picture,” I said.

“Never saw it,” said PJ with a shrug.

Mary just nodded at me.

“I see where you’re going with this,” she said. “You’re saying we’d better get back to making ’57 Chevys and Cadillac El Dorados, or else it’s going to be Honda Accords and Volkswagen Beetles that dominate our culture.”

“I imagine I could be wrong,” I said, “but the thing is I don’t think we should find out. Not when we have the resources to prevent it.”

“So can I get you involved in this app?” Hank asked. “My guys need some capital to take it to the next level, and we’ll see how it goes from there. I have a prospectus I can get you.”

“It’s worth keeping in mind,” I said, “but I’ve got to think through whether going your route doesn’t close off others I might want to move in.”

He didn’t like that answer, but what else was I going to tell him? I wasn’t going to just crank out AI movies as a half-assed way of accomplishing the project Pierce and I set out.

On Christmas Day, we had one more guest.

Melissa had found a condo on the beach, and she’d moved in a couple of days before. I promised her I’d help get her set up, and so had PJ, but she just did it all on her own.

And then she showed up for Christmas dinner wearing this flowy linen dress, with her hair down, and neither of us could recognize her. The joke around the Holman Media office was that we’d call Melissa Velma, the girl from the Scooby Doo cartoons, because she was always wearing turtlenecks and thick glasses. But all of a sudden, she looked almost…

Glamorous. Florida Melissa was glamorous.

When I mentioned that to her, she said she’d gone fully keto and she’d lost 25 pounds of baby fat from college, and that her first PGFI paycheck with the fresh raise had gone straight into Lasik surgery so she didn’t need those Coke-bottle glasses anymore.

“You look stunning, girl,” PJ said. Which Melissa really liked.

And it was funny, because Hank — and let’s face it, Hank was about as eligible a bachelor as you’ll find — was super-friendly with Melissa. It was hilarious; he practically begged me to let him carve the turkey, and he was following Melissa around to top off her margarita glass.

And she played him off like she was Bette Freaking Davis. Poor Hank got no play. So much so that PJ actually ripped him for it. Playfully, of course, the way brothers and sisters will do, and everybody was laughing. Even Hank.

Melissa didn’t have a boyfriend. At least, not that I knew of. She was just completely in charge of her scene, and no guy, or at least no Hank, was going to change that.

Anyway, she told me she’d found us an office for PGFI. It was a floor of a building on Highway 1 about 10 minutes from the house and with a view of the beach. She just needed me to sign the lease and she’d get everything set up for the official launch of the project in January.

It was then that I realized this was actually happening.

I’d been bullshitting people about this project for weeks. But now it was real.

And it struck me that I didn’t have the first damn clue what I was doing.

Beverly Hills, California – January 4, 2025

The fight between PJ and me, which I thought had died off before Christmas, blew up a second time on New Year’s Eve.

We were in Atlanta because I’d come in to do the New Year’s Eve live podcast Holman Media was putting on, and PJ had come with me. When it was over, we ended up back in the hotel, and I thought we were going to have a nice, quiet late-night Happy New Year celebration — and instead, she lit me up over my plan to fly out to L.A. a couple of days later.

I didn’t get it. Why was she so pissed off about me going out there? And why couldn’t I get her to leave it alone?

This time the complaint was over the itinerary, because Morris, my attorney for years, was setting me up with his cousin Eliezar, who was a minor player in Hollywood; he’d earned executive producer credits on lots of film titles, but what Eliezar actually did well out there was to introduce people to each other and then pick up finder’s fees when his introductions resulted in something.

“I won’t bullshit you,” Morris said. “Eliezar is Fredo. He’s good at being Fredo. Don’t ask him to do anything else, and it’ll be fine.”

Based on that, Eliezar had sent me a list of people he’d set me up with while I was out there, and honestly, I was pretty freaking impressed. Studio execs, big-name actors and directors, a couple of writers everybody in Hollywood was trying to hire.

And I showed that list to PJ, and she read through it and screwed up her face. Then she looked at me and said, “I don’t want you to go.”

“What’s up with this?” I asked her, irritated because she’d already said that and she knew I was going. “It’s not like I’m going to North Korea. It’s Los Angeles, for crying out loud.”

“Because you don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“Then tell me. What am I getting into? Because I’m going out there looking for people I can work with to produce great art that inspires people.”

“And you think that’s what they do in Hollywood.”

“Not often enough, sure.”

She just gave me this pissed-off look and shook her head.

“Fine, PJ. You went to college in the same media market as Hollywood. Please, give me the inside scoop on what they actually do in Hollywood instead of making American culture.”

“Asshole!” was her response.

“All right, OK. Too strong. I get it. But I’m trying to understand where you’re coming from, and you haven’t given me a clue yet.”

“Mike, I didn’t marry some Hollywood prick. I married the world’s greatest newsman.”

“God, I love it when you call me that.”

“Yeah, so much that you threw it away to do this… whatever the fuck it is.”

PJ didn’t curse. She rode my ass when I did it. So for her to drop an F-bomb on me got my attention.

“I know it’s a new experience,” I said. “And if it doesn’t work out, I could certainly go back to doing the podcast and running the site, though they don’t need me for that anymore. But do you hate the idea of me working on this project so much that you really can’t support it?”

“Mike,” she said, and then just stopped.

“What?”

“You don’t know about that place. You don’t know what they’re like!”

“Then tell me, for Chrissake. You obviously have something up your ass about this, but if you won’t say anything, I have nothing to think about.”

She just stared at me.

“PJ. Communicate! Jesus!”

That made her even madder. And let’s remember, we were both a little wasted.

But she took a deep breath, and then she pushed me down on the hotel bed. Which I found very interesting. Especially when she climbed on top of me.

Except that she rested her knees on my wrists as they lay by my sides, which would have really hurt if it hadn’t been for my semi-inebriated state.

“I had a friend in college,” she said. “She was a film major. She wanted to be a director, and while she was in school, she had a job at one of the big studios doing all kinds of, y’know, gopher jobs. And she started dating this guy — he was older, and he was a studio suit. Armani three-piece, slicked-back hair, Bruno Maglis, you know.”

“And I’m gonna be that guy?” I said.

“Please, just shut up for a minute and let me talk.”

“Fine. OK.”

“They dated for, I don’t know, six months. Then they broke up, and for a week she wouldn’t hardly come out of her room in the apartment. Finally, we found her. She’d taken pills, and she went into a coma. She died.”

“That’s awful, PJ.”

“Mike, what did it to her we found out later. It was the pictures.”

“What, the movies?”

“No. He’d gotten her to take all kinds of pictures. Weird stuff.”

“Like sexual things?”

“You can’t even imagine.”

“Kinky shit?”

“Not even that. Just sick shit. The kind of stuff you wouldn’t even have nightmares about. And he’d shared it with everybody in that studio, and lots of the other ones. It ended her, Mike. She couldn’t work in that business ever again, do you understand?”

“That’s fucked up.”

“It’s what Hollywood is. You’re going over there and you have no idea what you’re walking into.”

“Honestly, I’m a little insulted that you don’t think I can smell out this kind of thing. Before I met you, people thought of me as a cynic, you know.”

“But you’re obsessed with these people! You’re like a little kid with starry eyes who thinks Hollywood is larger than life, and you won’t even see it coming because you’re a fanboy who wants an autograph. Everything for you is a movie reference.”

“OK, whatever,” I said, “Get off me.”

It wasn’t so much that I was offended. I was, but the big thing was that she’d cut off circulation to my hands. But of course, I didn’t express that, and naturally PJ was furious that I was blowing her off.

So she got off me, and she started yelling at me about how I didn’t give a shit about her opinion, and she wouldn’t listen to me telling her that wasn’t it.

And it never really simmered down, which led to me going downstairs to the front desk and getting another room, the last one they had, which was the worst $400-a-night hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, that ridiculous place in Berlin notwithstanding (that’s a story for another time). And when I went back to make peace with PJ the next morning, she was OK with it, but it wasn’t like we really resolved anything.

And on the flight back home to West Palm Beach, I kept saying that I understood her point of view and I’d keep it in mind, and that this whole project was about making great art not corrupted by the horrible people she’d experienced, and that she could trust me.

PJ was just like, “Fine, OK. I hope so.”

Totally unconvinced.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I got it. She had concerns, but I didn’t know what she expected me to do other than to take them under consideration.

And when we got home, she said she had a list of house stuff we needed and she had to go to Cosco. So I got abandoned, and I ended up at the club.

Where I ran into Stan.

“Are you ready for your trip out there?” he said.

“Yeah. I have a whole schedule of meetings they set up for me.” And I told him with whom.

“That’s so fuckin’ awesome,” he said. “Are you gonna meet Jon Voight? What about Mark Wahlberg?”

“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Clint Eastwood, dude. Go meet him.”

“He’s in Carmel, I think. You won’t find him in L.A. Plus, he’s like 94.”

“Whatever. Anyway, find the people out there who aren’t fucked in the head and make yourself the one who finances all their films.”

“That’s part of what I’d like to do. I had Morris do up the papers for a production company that we’d finance some stuff through, and so I have a vehicle to do that with.”

“You have a production company?”

“I have an LLC. I don’t have a company until I hire people to work in it.”

“Right, OK. What are you calling it?”

“Belmarsh Entertainment.”

“That’s freakin’ awesome.” Stan knew I’d spent a month in Belmarsh Prison in London until Pierce’s guys busted me out. “You should use it to make a flick about Oliver Cromwell or something.”

“Shit, who knows?” I said.

“You seem like you aren’t excited about this deal.”

“I am. I’m ecstatic about it. But I’m utterly at a loss to explain why my wife is completely opposed to my doing any of it.”

He gave me a confused look, and I summarized the fight with PJ.

“It’s a chick,” he said with a shrug. “They thrive on drama, and everything with you is going too well. She needs a crisis to feel alive.”

“That would be too easy,” I said. “She was out there, and she had bad experiences. I’m not going to disregard all of that. I’m sure there are lots of scumbags out there.”

“Psh,” he said. “Go out there and find some people who need cash to make great movies. And buy up a production company or two, so you get a foot in the door. I’ll come in for, whatever, 30 percent.”

“Seriously?”

“Fuck yeah. It’s the movies! If Numakin can do it, why can’t I?”

So we did a couple of shots of Patron to that. And when I got back to the house, PJ had made it home with her brand-new Volkswagen Atlas packed full of shit from Cosco that she made me unload and put away.

And the next morning, Melissa picked me up and drove me to Palm Beach International in her Honda CRX. PJ gave me a rather indifferent fish-kiss when I left and made me promise to check in twice a day while I was out there, which irritated the shit out of me, but of course I promised her I would.

And then I got on a commercial flight to LAX.

“OK,” he said, as he met me at the gate, “I can see I’m working with a real rookie here. So I’ll go easy on you. But honestly, flying business class? They’ll never take you seriously. Let’s not do that again.”

“Eliezar, what? Why wouldn’t I fly commercial?”

“Because it’s not done. How are you gonna make the right people get the right impression if you show up here with a carpet bag like a schmuck?”

“So I have to fly to L.A. in a private jet or else I’m a nobody?”

“Let’s just say it helps. If you want people to think you’re a player.”

“OK, well, maybe I’m helping to take care of the climate. Save carbon and so on.”

“Oh, that’s good. We can use that. Really smart thinking! I like it.”

And he shuffled me to baggage claim, where he gave me a disapproving look about the old Samsonite bag I’d checked on the plane.

Then we caught an Uber to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“Get freshened up,” said Eliezar, “and then we’ll meet at Musso and Franks at 6:30 with Billy Victorious.”

“That’s a dumb alias,” I said. “What’s this guy’s real name?”

“You don’t ask in this town. If he says it’s Billy Victorious, that’s what it is. He’s the hottest young director in the biz. You see his latest, Chillin’ With My Twizz? What a breakout! So don’t act like you disrespect him, or we’ll get off to a rough start.”

“Right, gotcha,” I said.

And a couple of hours later, I was watching Victorious slurp down the fettucine noodles at Musso and Frank’s while Eliezar was polishing off his steak and chops, and the two of them were prattling on about shit I knew nothing about.

I decided within two minutes of meeting that kid that we weren’t going to do anything with him. Maybe I’m too old, and maybe I’m not cool enough. But it irritates the shit out of me to see a girl with a nose ring. A guy with one? It was all I could do not to rip that fucking thing off this guy’s head.

And when he said he hoped I wasn’t some shitkicker from flyover territory, as he looked at my Johnston and Murphy oxfords, it was all I could do not to tell him where he could get off.

Eliezar had jumped in, desperately searching for some reason why Victorious and I might work together. He said his next production was going to be a remake of A Fistful of Dollars, and he’d attached Lizzo to the project.

“As what?” I said.

“The Man With No Name!” he screeched at me. “Elie, is this guy an idiot, or what?”

Eliezar just looked at me like I was stupid, and I did what I could not to bitch-slap this little punk — not for his disrespect of me, but for the atrocity he proposed to commit to a cinematic classic.

I stayed quiet, and I smiled and paid the check, and I kept my mouth shut when Victorious told me he’d have his people call me about the Lizzo flick. Eliezar kept nodding like a bobblehead, and then Victorious left and he looked at me.

“You’re going to have to engage a little,” he said.

“Give me something to engage in, Elie. Jesus. Lizzo as Clint Eastwood? This is not what I’m out here for.”

“But it’s what the audiences want! You have to be realistic.”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said, “and it’s an honest question, because I don’t know. This kid, Victorious — has he ever made a movie that actually made money?”

“That isn’t really the question. He’s gotten nominated twice, once for Black Panther Vampire and once for Butch Ballerina. There’s no doubt of his talent.”

“Tell that to the investors.”

Eliezar looked at me like I’d just torn out a piece of the Torah and started to eat it.

The next morning was more of a treat, or at least I thought it would be. Eliezar had set up a meeting at the Polo Lounge with Benny Lifson, the Executive VP of Griffon Pictures — a production company that was under Summit Entertainment’s umbrella. Benny’s mom was Belle Lifson, who, when I was a kid, was far and away the hottest woman in Hollywood. She’d been in half the biggest flicks of the 1980s before deciding she’d had enough of the business and moved out to the desert in Nevada. That’s where Benny had grown up, he said; just he and his mom living in a trailer east of Reno. He’d gone to the local public school, done all the ordinary things a working-class kid would do while his mom sold charcoal drawings out of a Ford Econoline van she parked on the roadside off I-80, and then when he graduated high school and went off to USC, his trust fund had kicked in and he went from nobody to somebody overnight.

Benny didn’t know who his dad was. The common thought was it was either Dolph Lundgren or Michael Biehn. But he was barely 5’10”, and considering his mom was at least that tall, I’m guessing Ivan Drago was out.

Anyway, Elie did his usual thing of trying to chat Benny up, and I just listened for a while. And eventually Benny looked at me, and the bullshit conversation between the two of them petered out.

“So what are you doing here?” he said. “Some expose, or whatever?”

I looked at Elie for a minute, as if to let him know what an asshole he was for not actually telling these people why I was out there.

“I have a billion dollars a year to invest in movies,” I said.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m serious. But we’re actually trying to save the culture rather than ruin it, which we think you people are doing.”

“Definitely get the fuck out of here.”

I just looked at him.

And then he got up and left. Didn’t even finish the Dutch apple pancakes, which… I’ve got to say, regardless of how pissed off you might be, it’s inexcusable not to eat those damn things.

I looked at Elie again.

“Who are these assholes?” I asked him.

“Hey,” he said, “Don’t look at me — you’re the one pissing these guys off.”

“I’m pissing them off? I’m the guy with the money! They’re pissing me off.”

“You have to understand, these are artists.”

“Artists? This guy’s mom was an artist. He’s a fucking bureaucrat. Come on, Elie.”

He just shrugged. And then he took me to meet Sam Gargalis.

Gargalis is Hollywood royalty, but the fact is, he’s really a name more than he’s a player anymore. I knew that already, as did everybody else after the Academy had given him one of those shitty gold-watch lifetime awards, and I wasn’t really disappointed in our meeting.

We went to his house, and the old man came out with his walker to meet us. He immediately introduced me to Clara, who he said was his housekeeper.

Clara was a lot more than his housekeeper. That was obvious.

We sat down, and for probably an hour I listened to Gargalis tell me stories of the film projects he’d worked on. Blue Dusk, The Fourth Of July, D-Day, The Sunrise Temple, Sink the Bismarck, St. Francis of Assisi… Gargalis had produced, written, or directed some of the most amazing movies ever made.

I asked him if he thought Hollywood had lost its way, and I could see Elie shifting uncomfortably in his seat at the question.

“It’s fucked!” said the old man. “Let me tell you why.

“It used to be that you made movies trying to get inside people’s heads and make them feel something. And when I say that, what I mean is that you’re telling them something they already know but they’ve forgotten. Like how much they love their mom. Or what it feels like to get screwed over by the utility company. Or how terrified they are of that bump they hear in the night. Right? You start with those things and you build out a story from there.”

“I get that 100 percent,” I said. Elie nodded as enthusiastically as he could.

“These assholes,” Gargalis continued, “they don’t do that. They start with what they want you to feel, or think. Then they build a story which tries to get you there. That’s why it doesn’t resonate anymore.”

“This is why I’m out here,” I said. “The group I’m heading up is trying to save the culture by telling the exact stories you’re talking about.”

“The old stuff,” he said.

“Exactly. My theory is that bringing it back would actually make money rather than losing it.”

“I’m not gonna tell you that you’re wrong.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“But I am gonna tell you you’re wasting your time here.”

“In L.A.?”

“If I were you, I’d get on a plane to Budapest. Do movies there. It’s cheaper, and everybody already agrees with you.”

“Well, except we’re trying to fix American culture first.”

Gargalis scoffed.

“You’re a sweet kid, Holman,” he said. “I wish you the best of luck. But it’s fucked. And so is your project.”

And then Clara came and shooed us out, informing Elie that it was time for the old man’s midday constitutional.

“What’s next?” I asked him as the iron gate closed behind us. “At some point, I’m going to need to meet with somebody I can actually do business with.”

“Well, we have that five o’clock with Pierre Morel, but nothing until then. How about a late lunch? We could hit Massimo Bottura’s place if you want.”

I looked at him with an expression of utter ignorance, and he laughed derisively.

The next thing I knew, we were on the rooftop of the Gucci store on Rodeo Drive, and I was looking at a menu the maître d’ had given us that purported to charge me $48 for a hamburger. And then I looked up and saw something that was almost precisely what I’d conjure in my head if you’d said the word “movie star” to me.

She was about 25 years old. She stood probably 5’9” or 5’10”. Perfect figure. Amazing ass, which you could tell from the tight black pants she wore. Drop-dead gorgeous blue eyes, beach blond hair, tits that Venus de Milo would kill for.

And she was waiting on us.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Georgia. What can I get for you?”

“Just an iced tea, doll,” Eliezar said, without even looking up from the menu.

“Georgia?” I said. “Are you from Georgia?”

“Ohio,” she responded, poker face in tow.

“You gotta be kidding me. Where?”

“Akron.”

“Cincinnati,” I said.

She just nodded. It was an I-don’t-give-a-shit nod, and I gave her a shrug.

She was right. Who cares? Neither of us still lived in Ohio.

“OK, Georgia,” I said, “I’m looking at this menu, and I’m trying to figure out what on here is good enough to justify what you’re charging.”

“Don’t tell me you can’t afford it,” she said. “Am I gonna get stiffed on a tip, or what?”

Elie looked up from his menu at me.

“Do I look like I stiff people on tips?” I said.

“Wait. You’re… somebody.”

“He’s Mike Holman,” said Elie.

“The podcast guy! You were in jail in Paris!”

“London,” I said, “But yeah.”

“Oh, wow. Wow! You’re, like, a big deal!”

“I would think you get people who are a lot bigger deal than me in here all the time.”

“Pfff,” she said, with a dismissive wave.

“So the question stands — what should I get that’s worth it?”

“Get the tortellini,” she said. “And then you have to take a picture with me.”

We ended up at that place for a couple of hours, most of which I spent talking to Georgia.

Not because Georgia was movie star hot — she was certainly that, don’t get me wrong — but because it turned out she was an actress.

She had a SAG card and she’d had a bit part in three different movies and had appeared in a couple of episodes of “All Rise” on OWN as a high-class call girl who’d been unjustly busted. And some TV commercials and a handful of music videos.

“How are you not a star, though?” I said. “Not trying to sound like Harvey Weinstein or something, but you absolutely have the looks for it.”

“Yeah, whatever. Me, and ten thousand other girls out here.”

“Mmmm, I don’t think so. There aren’t ten thousand girls on the planet who look like you. You’re telling me that you want to be an actress, and you’ve been out here seven…”

“Eight. Eight years.”

“Bullshit. I don’t believe it. Why aren’t you a superstar by now?”

“OK, look, you’re very sweet, all right? But if you think I haven’t heard this line a thousand times, I mean…give me a break.”

“Fine, I get it. And I’m not… I actually just got married a few months ago, and she is the absolute light of my life, so believe me, I am not hitting on you. I’m serious — I’m out here with a practically unlimited amount of money to do pictures, and I’m trying to meet people I can partner with to do them, and I look at you and you tell me you’re an actress and it just doesn’t compute.”

She just stared at me.

“I am not trying to scam you,” I said.

“Ohhhkay,” she said, a look of resignation across her face. “So you really want to make movies?”

“Trying to.”

“What you should do,” she said, “is an exposé.”

“On what?”

She scoffed.

“Everything,” she said. “Everything here.”

And she wrote down a phone number on the bill, which was $210 between Elie and me.

I tipped her another $100. She looked like she needed it. I just gave thanks for the PGFI expense account that I was rapidly exercising until it was sore.

Our meeting with Morel got pushed back to a different day, so I ended up back in the room at the Beverly Hills Hotel with nothing to do that night. I called home.

“Checking in,” I said when PJ answered.

“How is it?”

“Kind of unproductive,” I said, telling her about Victorious and Lifson and Gargalis.

“Right,” she said.

“Anyway, tomorrow looks like it might be more of the same. I feel like I need to sort of do my own work out here rather than just sit in these meetings with Cousin Fredo’s people.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Pierce called. He told me to tell you to call him. He wants advice on how to approach Trumbull about retaking the Panama Canal from the Chinese.”

“As if I know how to do that.”

“Well, he thinks you know Trumbull better than he does.”

“I’ll call him back. How are you?”

“I’m good. I spent the day at the pool, and then I was at the club playing pickleball with Trina, and then I went for a run on the beach.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“I would guess you are pretty good. That sounds like a vacation.”

“Yeah, great. Except my husband is three thousand miles away, having meetings with assholes.”

“Oh, here we go again.”

“Yeah, OK, right. I’m whining. You could do Zoom calls with these people, but you’re out there, and here I am, alone, again.”

She was referring to the month-long incarceration in Belmarsh that our honeymoon devolved into, and I didn’t have a great comeback in mind. Other than to tell her she could have come with me, but I knew that wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

“Yes, dear, I understand,” I said, “and I do not mean to minimize your separation anxiety.”

“Separation anxiety? What am I, a Weimaraner?”

I sighed.

“I’m striking out across the board with you right now. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Come home,” she said. “That would be a start.”

“I would,” I said, “but I just got here.”

“Right.”

“Did you talk to Melissa?”

“We’re going out tomorrow night. Girls’ night in Palm Beach.”

“That sounds fun.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll miss it.”

And a few minutes later, the conversation ended.

So I pulled the receipt from the Gucci restaurant out of my wallet; the one with Georgia’s number on it. And with a fuck-it shrug, I called the number.

“Who’s this?” came the irritated voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m Mike Holman,” I said. “The guy from the restaurant.”

“Oh, right,” she said, suddenly friendlier. “What can I help you with?”

“I don’t actually know. You gave me your number, my schedule is clear for the night, and I’m…sort of without a way to do anything productive tonight.”

“Productive?”

“Look,” I said, “for some reason I have lost my ability to talk to women without coming off like a moron. I’m sorry.”

“Shit, you’re serious. You really are a newlywed.”

“So it would appear.”

“Fine. What do you want, Mike?”

“Well, it’s like I said — I’m here looking to do film projects that would actually help save the culture. My guy, who’s introducing me around, is basically wasting my time. I need, I dunno, some sort of way to break out. You seem like you might have a different perspective on the business.”

I could hear her give a little grunt, or squeak, or something.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Meet us at The Bayou on Venice. I’ll introduce you to some people who might be useful to you, or maybe you to them.”