The California sun beat down on the towering glass of the ABC entertainment offices.
Duke Hauser stepped out of the elevator on the executive floor.
He walked past a secretary who was juggling several phone calls at once. She didn't stop him.
People rarely stopped Duke these days, he moved with the specific aura of someone who owned.
From down the hall, a voice was rising in anger.
"I don't care what the affiliates think, Jerry! If they want safe, they can watch Bonanza! I'm selling the Movie of the Week! Do not dilute my third act!"
Duke smiled. He had found the room he was looking for.
Barry Diller's office was a chaos. The walls were covered in magnetic scheduling boards, ratings charts, and stacks of scripts that threatened to topple over from the desk.
Diller himself was behind his desk, a phone receiver pressed to his ear like a weapon. He slammed the phone down as Duke entered, not missing a beat.
"If you're looking for the programming meeting, it's down the hall," Diller snapped, grabbing a red marker and slashing a line through a show on the board behind him. "If you're looking for a job, I'm not hiring."
"I'm not looking for a job, Mr. Diller, Jaffe send me," Duke said, closing the door behind him.
Diller stopped. He turned slowly, ending the call. "Connor Hauser. The boy wonder of Paramount. Rumor has it you're rebuilding Paramount after the G+W fiasco."
"I'm building a conglomerate," Duke corrected. "And right now, it's missing something."
Diller laughed, a short, sharp one. He sat on the edge of his desk, crossing his arms.
"I have a good seat here, Duke. ABC is the hungry network. We're eating NBC's lunch. Why would I leave here to go work for a studio that hasn't had a hit TV show in years?"
Duke walked over to the window, looking out at the sprawling sprawl of Los Angeles. "You're fighting for a time slot. You get ninety minutes on a Tuesday night to make your mark. If the ratings dip, the network pulls the plug."
He turned back to face Diller.
"I'm offering you control. I want you to come to Paramount. Not as a producer. Not as a VP. I want you to be the President of Paramount Television. Total autonomy."
"You greenlight the shows, you pick the talent, you set the tone."
Duke tossed a copy of PULSE Weekly onto Diller's desk. It landed with a heavy thud.
"That's our comic book," Duke said. "500,000 kids buy that comic every Friday. Soon they'll trust the brand and when we launch a show, they will watch it."
Diller picked up the magazine. He looked at the "Ajax" logo on the border. He was a man who understood leverage better than anyone in Hollywood, and he saw the potential immediately.
"You're talking about vertical integration," Diller murmured. "Owning the IP, the production, and the marketing loop."
"I'm talking about a monopoly of attention," Duke said. "But I can't run everything, Barry. I have a movie studio to handle. I need someone who knows the small screen."
Diller was silent for a long moment. He looked at his scheduling board, then back at Duke.
"If I come," Diller said, his voice dropping to a negotiator's cadence, "I don't just want TV. I want the whole thing. I want to control Animation. I want the Made-for-TV movies. I want syndication rights."
"You can have some," Duke agreed. "TV, and Syndication. You answer only to me. But the theatrical films, and animation stay on my desk. I'm the Head of Production for Paramount."
Diller nodded slowly. "Fair. But I can't do it alone. The volume you're talking about... it's a war. I need some associates."
"Bring them," Duke said instantly. "I know who you work with. Michael Eisner? Jeffrey Katzenberg? Bring them all."
Diller finally smiled, a genuine, wolfish grin. He extended his hand.
"You know, Duke," Diller said as they shook. "People say you're a gambler. Let's hope this one pays off."
___
Two weeks later, the atmosphere on the Paramount lot had shifted.
The arrival of the "Diller Team" had sent a jolt of nervousness through the television division, but in the bungalows of the lot, a different kind of energy was brewing.
It was dark inside Bungalow 14. The blinds were drawn against the February afternoon, and the only light came from a table lamp illuminating a scatter of storyboards.
Duke sat on a folding chair, studying a sketch of a large, Victorian house covered in snow. Across from him sat Steven Spielberg.
"The house needs to feel like a character, Steven," Duke said, his voice low. "Not a haunted house. It needs to feel like it's watching them."
"I'm thinking about the angles," Spielberg said, tracing a line on the paper. "Wide shots for the exterior to show the isolation. But inside... inside, I want to use the Panaglide."
"Yes," Duke leaned forward. "The camera need to be the killer, Like in Hitchcock 'Psycho'."
Duke stood up and walked to the corner of the room, acting out the movement.
"Imagine the opening scene," Duke said, "We don't see the killer's face. We are the killer. We're climbing. We're looking through the frosted glass of the attic window. We see the girl inside brushing her hair, totally unaware."
Spielberg watched him, "Subjective camera. We make the audience the monster."
"Exactly," Duke said. "And the sound... we need silence, the sound of the wind against the glass, the creak of the floorboards. And the phone calls..."
Duke paused. "The phone calls are the weapon. When he calls, it should sound obscene, nonsensical, whispering."
Spielberg was scribbling furiously now. "It's... it's invasive. These girls are in their sanctuary. And we're violating it."
"And that's why the girls have to feel real," Duke insisted. "This is the most important part, Steven."
Spielberg stopped writing for a moment, he looked up at Duke.t.
"You have a very specific vision for this, Duke."
Duke smiled, "I've seen enough horror to know what works, Steven. People aren't scared of monsters anymore. They're scared of what they can't see."
"We'll need a special rig for the POV shots," Spielberg mused, his mind already solving the technical puzzle. "Something that can climb but stay smooth. I can get the guys in the machine shop to build a counter-weighted harness."
"Do it," Duke said. "We aim for a Christmas 1973 release. We call it Black Christmas, this will be you film debut.
___
Three thousand miles away, in the wood-paneled boardroom of Warner Communications in New York, the mood was decidedly less creative.
Steve Ross sat at the head of the table. He was usually the calmest man in the city, a charming mogul who had risen to head a large comglomerate.
But today, his tie was loosened, and there was a tightness around his eyes that his executives hadn't seen before.
"Explain it to me again," Ross said, his voice deceptively quiet. "Slowly."
His chief counsel, a man named Weiss, cleared his throat.
"The Superman rights are... in issues, Steve. The Siegel and Shuster lawsuit isn't just a nuisance suit. It's a full-scale copyright reclamation. They have funding. Significant, anonymous funding."
"They've filed injunctions against any derivative works. If we try to put a Superman movie into production now, we could be sued before the cameras even roll. The judge could freeze the asset for years."
Ross tapped his gold pen against the mahogany table.
"Duke," Ross whispered. "It's Hauser. He's funding the creators to spite me."
"It gets worse," the Head of Consumer Products chimed in, looking like he wished he were anywhere else. "The PULSE numbers. They're killing us in the aisle. DC sales are down 14% in the metro areas where PULSE is distributed via the 7-Eleven network."
"The distributors are complaining. They say the kids don't want to wait a month for Batman when they can get Ben 10 every week."
Ross stood up and walked to serve himself some whisky.
"And what about the machines?" Ross asked, not turning around. "The arcade business?"
"We can't get around the patents, Steve," the Head of R&D admitted. "Atari's filing for the Motion Circuits and the Coin-Op Logic is airtight. If we launch a clone, they'll sue us for infringement. And given Hauser's appetite for litigation..."
"He'll sue us without hesitation," Ross finished the sentence.
He turned back to the room. The charm was gone.
"Can we buy him?" Ross asked. "Not his company, I know they are private. The debt. Can we buy the paper on the Paramount deal and squeeze him?"
"We looked into it," the CFO said. "He's advocating to refinance still but Lehman Brother doesnt seem to want to sell the debt."
Ross sat back down. He felt a grudging respect welling up inside him. Duke Hauser had fortified his position before doing anything at least.
"So what do we do?" Weiss asked. "Do we sue him? Do we try a new offer?"
"No," Ross said, smoothing his tie.
He looked at his team.
"Get me a meeting. A real one. No lawyers. Just me and him. If I can't buy him, and I can't beat him... I need to find out what he wants. Maybe we'll reach an understanding."
___
That same night, on the Hollywood Hills, the clock on his bedside table read 3:14 AM..
But inside Duke Hauser's penthouse apartment, the rhythmic sound of a typewriter echoed.
Duke sat at his desk. He was wearing a bathrobe, his hair messy, a cup of cold coffee sitting forgotten by his side.
He pulled a page from the roller and threw it onto a growing stack.
MISERY
He was writing it fast. The words were pouring out of him because he didn't have to create them, he just had to remember them.
He remembered both loving the movie adaptation and the book in his past life so it wasnt difficult to describe things.
He was writing the scene where Annie Wilkes discovers that Paul Sheldon has left his room.
Duke paused, pulled some gum to chew. He looked at the manuscript. He felt Misery was the perfect book for 1971 since it was so dark.
He pushed the Misery stack aside and pulled a notebook toward him. This one was different.
It was filled with diagrams, character sketches, and notes on the Lore.
Project STAR WARS.
This was the harder task. He wasn't writing a script, he was writing the novel that would come out before the movie.
Duke stared at the page. He closed his eyes and summoned the sound. The hum of the lightsaber. The breathing of Vader.
How do you describe a sound that no one has ever heard?
He wrote. "The blade ignited and oyt came a bar of pure, humming plasma that casted a blue shadow across the dusty floor of the cantina."
Duke rubbed his temples. It was exhausting to plan so much specially since he never read any Star Wars novels in his past life, with the exception of the Darth Maul one of course.
No wonder the A Song of Ice And Fire author would idle so much, planning so much stuff was stressing.
He looked at the two piles. Misery and Star Wars.
"One for the nightmares, one for the dreams," Duke whispered to himself.
He rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter. The clack of the keys started up again, a lonely, defiant sound in the quiet night.
___
Sort of chill chapter, i got a headache