Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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******

Jeff ran a shaky hand through his hair, laughing a watery laugh. ”Marvin... my god. I’ve seen Oscar winners. I’ve seen legends. But that? That wasn’t just music. That was a religious experience.”

Amy simply stood in the back of the room, clutching her clipboard to her chest, her eyes shining with devotion. ”It was flawless, Marvin. Just... flawless.”

”Hey, stop with the excessive praises, or I might actually blush,” Marvin purred, offering a handsome, dimpled smile that made Amy’s heart flutter wildly all over again.

As everyone laughed.

The emotional weight of the recording session had drained them. To celebrate surviving the two-day marathon, Marvin declared a temporary halt to production, and the four of them retreated to a quiet Italian restaurant nestled deep in the Hollywood Hills for a late lunch.

They sat in a private, curtained booth. As the waiter cleared their plates of artisan pasta and refilled their sparkling water, the conversation inevitably shifted from artistic triumph back to the cold mathematics of the music industry.

Marvin took a slow sip of his water, his eyes locking onto his agent across the table.

”Jeff,” Marvin began. ”When you deliver this music to James Horner and James Cameron on Monday, the legal architecture of the contract must be ironclad. I have specific demands regarding the publishing rights.”

Jeff pulled out a silver pen, ready to take notes on his napkin. ”Name them. After what you just recorded, we have leverage. They will agree to almost anything to get that track in the film.”

”The master recording and the underlying publishing rights for My Heart Will Go On will be held by Zenith Music,” he said calmly.

”Licensed—non-exclusively—to the studio and the label. Not owned.”

Jeff blinked. ”That’s not how this works. Your deal with Columbia Records—anything you write and record during the term—”

”I know exactly what it says,” Marvin cut in, his tone light, almost amused. ”Which is why this isn’t being delivered under my artist contract.”

Jeff frowned. ”Then under what?”

”Under a separate commissioning agreement,” Marvin replied. ”The composition and master are being created by Zenith Music as a pre-existing work-for-license. The complete intellectual property and publishing rights of this song went directly to the Zenith Trust—the holding company owned entirely by my grandfather in the Cayman Islands in name. It is a charitable, intra-family transfer executed before the song is officially registered for commercial release. My grandfather’s trust will then lease the song back to Fox for the film.”

Jeff stared at him, his mouth slightly open. He was floored by the corporate atrocity Marvin was casually proposing over lunch.

”You’re... you’re bypassing Columbia entirely through a loophole,” Jeff whispered, ”Even if the studio tries to lowball you on the upfront payment for the soundtrack... you want to retain one-hundred-percent ownership of the song because of the royalties.”

”Exactly,” Marvin nodded, his eyes gleaming with delight. ”This song is going to top the global charts. It will secure a Diamond certification, selling tens of millions of physical copies worldwide. I refuse to let Fox or Columbia skim the majority of the profits from my masterpiece. The Zenith Trust owns it. Period.”

Max, sitting next to Marvin, let out a nervous chuckle, shaking his head. ”Marvin... you are playing with fire. You have to be careful not to do this too many times. It’s basically pulling the tails of the major studio executives. The big labels do not like it when you use legal loopholes to lock them out of publishing money. They will blackball you.”

”I know exactly how the game is played, Max,” Marvin assured him, his voice a soothing, confident purr. ”That is why this is mostly a one-time maneuver for this film. The song is simply too massive to surrender. But more importantly, I wanted to share the mechanical royalty wealth directly with Wolf Cousins Music.”

Max choked on his sparkling water, coughing into his napkin. He stared at the boy in shock. ”Wait. You... you don’t mean...”

”Yes, Max,” Marvin smiled, an generous smile. ”Zenith Music will hold the copyright, but Wolf Cousins Music will be credited as the exclusive production house. You will be earning a massive percentage of the backend profit and building the independent distribution channels for the physical CD singles.”

Max was speechless. Having a certified, global hit song produced exclusively under the Wolf Cousins banner—without Universal or Columbia taking their standard ninety-percent cut—would transform their newly acquired, mid-tier studio into a stable powerhouse. It was the kind of industry leverage that took producers three decades to build. Marvin had just handed it to him over a plate of ravioli.

”We are building a monopoly, Max,” Marvin said softly, his eyes locking onto the Swedish producer. ”And a monopoly requires immense capital.”

As the lunch concluded, they all went their separate ways. The heavy lifting of the artistic creation was complete. Now, the fate of the project rested entirely on Max Martin’s shoulders. He had to retreat into the control room and mix the orchestral stems exactly according to the rigid parameters Marvin had written on the sheet music.

Jeff stood up, buttoning his suit jacket, his eyes burning with adrenaline and purpose.

”I’ll start drafting the Zenith Trust contracts with the legal team tonight,” Jeff declared, looking at the studio producer. ”Max, you have exactly two days to finalize that mix. We need to wrap this up and hand-deliver the CD to Cameron before Monday morning. We are going to make history.”

---

In the following days by the last week of July, the full infrastructure of the operation was in place.

It had taken three weeks to build, which was faster than it should have been and as fast as it needed to be, and the speed had been possible only because of the combination of Grandfather’s network, Father’s existing relationships, and the Zenith Trust administrative apparatus — whose director, a meticulous and unflappable man named Charles Whitfield who had been managing the Meyers family’s institutional trust relationships since the mid-1980s — had proved capable of processing the incoming capital transfers and establishing the required legal entities with an efficiency that reflected, Marvin suspected, a combination of professional competence and the particular motivated energy that comes from managing an account whose activity level has recently become significantly more interesting than most private trust accounts.

The capital structure, as it stood on July 28, 1997:

Irving had transferred, in three tranches as agreed, a total of fifty-nine million, three hundred and twenty thousand dollars into the Zenith Trust master account. The documentation characterised the transfer as a structured inter-trust movement within the Meyers family beneficial ownership structure, an instrument that Gerald Ashford had prepared with sufficient technical precision to satisfy the relevant reporting requirements while accurately representing the transaction’s true character.

The remaining fourty-one million Irving had indicated he was continuing to work toward, through a combination of additional liquidity mobilisation from the family portfolio and a scheduled maturity of a short-term Treasury position that would free up approximately twenty million in mid-August.

The total capitalisation available to Marvin’s program as of July 28 was seventy-one million, four hundred thousand dollars, of which approximately fifty-three million was available for active deployment and the remainder was being held in reserve against potential margin calls and operational requirements.

The team assembled around the account had grown from Andrew’s single-broker relationship into something considerably more substantial.

Grant Meyers had taken the operational title of Senior Investment Banker for the program, a designation that was functionally accurate — he was structuring the cross-border entity relationships and managing the Korean and Japanese market access — and that also served the practical purpose of providing a senior, credentialed adult name for the various counterparty relationships that would have been more complicated to establish in the name of an eleven-year-old in Los Angeles.

Grant was operating from a temporary base in the building offices of a law firm that did significant work for the Meyers family, and he was on the telephone to Asia for three to five hours each day, building and confirming the relationships that the August entries would require.

The forex trading team consisted of five specialists recruited through Zenith Trust’s institutional network: Elena Marchetti, formerly of Deutsche Bank’s London FX desk, who was lead on the rupiah and ringgit positions; David Kim, a Korean-American with twelve years of currency trading experience and deep personal knowledge of the Bank of Korea’s intervention patterns, who was lead on the won; Patrick Yuen, a Hong Kong-based specialist in ASEAN currency markets who had been brought in to manage the Philippine peso and Thai baht positions that would be entered for opportunistic reasons rather than as primary thesis plays; and two junior analysts, Sophie Chen and Marcus Webb, who handled data position monitoring, and the continuous reporting that the program required to function at the information velocity Marvin was expecting.

The legal and compliance architecture was managed by a team of three attorneys — two from a New York firm with specialised expertise in cross-border securities law, and one from a Singapore-based firm that Grant had retained specifically for the ASEAN regulatory dimension — coordinated through Hoffman’s office in Los Angeles, which served as the central compliance clearinghouse for the program.

The twenty additional analysts and research specialists that Irving had committed — ten focused on Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea as instructed, with an additional contingent covering Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines — were in position across the region by July 24. They were intelligence gatherers: people embedded in the local financial communities of the major Asian capitals who could access information about market conditions, government policy intentions, corporate stress levels, and banking system health in ways that a team operating exclusively from Los Angeles could not.

Their reports came in on a schedule that Marvin had designed — morning local time reports covering overnight developments, evening local time reports covering the day’s market activity and whatever intelligence had been gathered through conversations with local market participants — and they were processed by Sophie Chen into a consolidated daily briefing that was on Marvin’s desk by seven in the morning.

The briefing for July 28, 1997, was forty-one pages long.

Marvin read every page of it.

---

The macroeconomic picture, as of the last week of July:

Thailand was in the process of requesting assistance from the International Monetary Fund. The negotiations were not public — they would not be formally announced until early August — but the intelligence flowing through the regional network was clear: the Thai government, its reserves depleted by the failed defence of the baht, its current account in acute deficit, and its banking system holding a volume of non-performing loans that the official figures dramatically understated, had no viable option other than an IMF program.

The Fund’s standard conditions — fiscal austerity, monetary tightening, structural reforms to the financial sector — would impose additional near-term economic pain on an economy already experiencing significant contraction. The baht would stabilise, eventually, but not before it fell further. The regional markets were reading the IMF involvement as confirmation of the severity of the crisis rather than as a source of confidence, which was the opposite of the IMF’s intended effect and entirely predictable.

Indonesia was the most immediately pressing case. President Suharto’s government had maintained, with considerable vigour, the position that Indonesia’s economic fundamentals were sound and that the rupiah’s recent weakness was a temporary phenomenon unrelated to any structural vulnerabilities in the Indonesian economy.

This position was incorrect on all counts. The Indonesian banking system was holding an extraordinary volume of related-party loans — credit extended by banks to businesses owned by shareholders in those same banks, or by the Suharto family’s extensive business interests — that were non-performing in any meaningful analysis but had not been classified as such.

The corporate sector was carrying foreign currency debt that had been contracted on the implicit assumption that the rupiah would maintain its managed float within the Bank Indonesia target band. And the government itself had committed to infrastructure projects whose financing structures were, in several cases, structured so as to obscure the full extent of the contingent liabilities they created.

Marvin’s team in Jakarta — three people, all with local banking backgrounds — had spent the past three weeks building as complete a picture as they could of the Bank Indonesia reserve position and the extent of the central bank’s forward currency commitments. The conclusions were stark. Bank Indonesia’s usable reserves — net of the forward commitments it had entered into in its efforts to defend the rupiah — were considerably lower than the headline figures suggested.

The published reserve number as of late July was approximately twenty billion dollars. The net usable figure, accounting for the estimated forward commitments, was closer to twelve to fourteen billion. Against a short-term corporate foreign currency debt burden that Marvin’s team estimated at between sixty and seventy billion dollars across the Indonesian corporate sector, twelve billion in usable reserves was inadequate to manage a serious speculative attack on the rupiah.

The hyenas were coming. They were already underway in its preliminary phase. The question was the magnitude and the timing.

*****

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