Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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****

Jeff couldn’t hide the grin on his face. ”I’m serious.”

He tapped the release schedule. ”Harvey signed off. Cruise/Wagner is on board. Distribution’s locked. Marketing kicks off tomorrow.”

He pointed at Marvin. ”So congratulations. You’re officially back on the publicity circuit.”

Marvin leaned back in his chair. ”...This is insane.”

Marvin didn’t bother looking at the schedule. He already knew every date on it by mind. ”We only wrapped principal photography at the end of February.”

He looked back at Jeff. ”That’s barely over three months.”

He shook his head. ”This is Hollywood, Jeff—not Hong Kong. Movies aren’t supposed to move this fast.”

Jeff laughed. ”They usually don’t.” He spread his hands. ”But this wasn’t a usual production.”

”How so?”

”Because you planned the whole thing before the cameras ever rolled.” Jeff leaned forward. ”Your storyboards were ridiculously detailed. The editors weren’t trying to invent the movie in post—they were following a blueprint.”

He counted the reasons off on his fingers. ”Very few reshoots. Almost no wasted coverage. The score was finished before most productions even start temp music. And you, Nicole, and Lindsay came in prepared every single day. The actual film was drastically shortened.”

He smiled. ”When everyone already knows exactly what movie they’re making, post-production goes a lot faster.”

Marvin considered that for a moment before nodding. ”Fair enough.”

His surprise faded, replaced by calculation. Marvin quickly accepted the news, his mind already shifting gears to capitalize on the momentum. It was a good thing, after all. ”So when’s the exhibitors’ screening?”

Jeff glanced at his notebook. ”The day after tomorrow.”

Marvin stood without hesitation. ”Alright.” He picked up the release schedule. ”I’ll be there.” Then he paused. ”And bring Lindsay with me.”

Jeff nodded. ”I figured you would.”

Marvin set the release schedule aside, but before Jeff could launch into another stack of meetings and promotional appearances, another thought crossed his mind.

”Oh, one more thing.”

Jeff paused in the doorway.

”How’s the dragon skeleton coming along?”

Jeff immediately knew which project Marvin meant.

The grin returned to his face. ”Really well, actually.”

He walked back over to the desk and opened another folder, revealing several glossy production photographs.

”They’re making excellent progress.”

Marvin picked up the first photo.

An enormous rib cage dominated the workshop floor. Steel supports ran through each vertebra while technicians climbed scaffolding around it like construction workers restoring a cathedral.

”It’s already this far along?”

Jeff nodded. ”They’re ahead of schedule.”

He pointed at another photograph. ”The people over at Creature Effects, Inc. couldn’t stop talking about your design sketches. They said they’ve never received concept art this complete before. Usually a production gives them a rough painting and says, ’Figure it out.’”

Jeff chuckled. ”You gave them engineering drawings.”

Marvin flipped to the next photograph. Every bone carried measurements. Joint connections.

Stress points. Cross-sections.

Even weathering notes explaining where centuries of erosion should have eaten into the fossil.

”They told me,” Jeff continued, ”that whoever drew these either understands anatomy... or has somehow dissected a dragon. Or maybe both”

Marvin smiled. ”I’ll take that as a compliment.”

”They were especially impressed by the spine.” Jeff tapped the image. ”Apparently most fantasy skeletons don’t make anatomical sense. Yours actually distributes weight correctly. They said if dragons existed...” He laughed. ”...this is probably what their skeleton would look like.”

Marvin quietly studied the photographs. The dragon wasn’t simply a prop.

It would become the centerpiece of the film’s entire marketing campaign. The dragon wouldn’t stay locked away on a soundstage.

It would travel. Museum exhibitions. Red-carpet premieres. Fan conventions. Television appearances.

Children would stand beneath its massive skull with their mouths hanging open. Adults would stop in their tracks to take photographs. Unlike a digital effect that vanished when the credits rolled, this was something people could walk around, reach out and touch.

More importantly, it would tell a story before a single frame of the film ever played.

One glance at the colossal skeleton and audiences would understand that this world was far bigger than vampires hunting in the shadows. There had been dragons here once. Ancient monsters. Forgotten histories. Entire ages buried beneath the story they thought they were coming to see.

No exposition. No advertising slogan.

Just a single prop quietly telling people there was a much larger world waiting to be explored.

”When are they expecting to finish?”

Jeff checked the production notes. ”They’re estimating another five or six weeks.”

”So early August.”

”Assuming nothing unexpected happens.”

Marvin nodded. ”Good.”

Jeff noticed the thoughtful look on his face. ”You’ve already got another idea, don’t you?”

Marvin didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he turned another page.

The dragon’s skull occupied nearly the entire workshop.

Technicians looked like ants standing beneath its jaws.

Finally, he spoke.

”If the workmanship is as good as these photos suggest...”

He looked up.

”...I’d like to visit their workshop when I’m back from New York.”

Jeff smiled knowingly. ”I had a feeling you’d say that.”

”And if they deliver exactly what I asked for...”

Marvin gently placed the photographs back into the folder. ”...I may have more work for them.”

Jeff nodded. ”I’ll arrange the visit.”

Neither of them said what both were thinking. Marvin rarely visited a company twice unless he was considering a much larger investment.

”Hey, any news about the background actors?”

....

...

..

.

The very next day, Marvin was back in New York on a Tuesday.

The large, state-of-the-art conference room at Maratone was booked for Thursday.

By nine-fifteen Tuesday morning, the room was packed to capacity with the most powerful people in his music group.

Maratone’s New York facility occupied three prime floors of a building in Midtown that had been acquired, completely renovated, and equipped with a technological thoroughness that still occasionally shocked veteran executives encountering it for the first time. The conference room on the executive floor was massive, easily holding sixteen people comfortably, and had been designed with the understanding that the meetings held within these walls would not be the casual kind.

The table was a long, dark slab of polished stone. The sound insulation was military-grade.

The equipment for remote video conferencing—which was still not universal in 1999, and usually required a team of IT guys to set up—had been installed and tested.

Around the table, in person, sat the titans:

Max Martin, who had arrived early and was reviewing a set of pages he had prepared but wouldn’t need to refer to because he had already internalized the data.

Daniel Voss, Maratone’s department head, sat with a yellow legal pad in front of him and a pen he would use extensively.

James Hendricks, who ran the publishing division with the quiet authority of a man who understood that publishing was the actual engine of the music industry, preferred to let other people think record sales were the real prize.

Sarah Kwan, who handled international licensing, had flown in from London the previous day.

Three members of the Wolf Cousins A&R team appeared on the conference screen from Los Angeles—their audio was slightly delayed, which the engineer had apologized for, but no one was bothered by it. Björn and Per dialed in from Stockholm on a second screen, the pale Swedish morning visible as grey light behind them.

There were two additional people Marvin had brought in from outside the existing organizational structure. The first was a sharp woman named Patricia Moss. She had spent the previous decade at PolyGram in various high-level distribution and catalog management roles before PolyGram’s massive absorption into Universal earlier in the year had made her, as she had put it to Max during their initial poaching conversation, ”available, highly motivated, and very expensive.”

The second was a man named David Chung. He had been headhunted out of MTV’s business development division. He understood, with the exact expertise of someone who had watched the money move from the inside, precisely how the relationship between a music video, television rotation, and commercial impact on physical record sales actually worked.

Marvin arrived exactly at nine-twenty. He did not apologize for the five minutes. He wore a dark shirt and pants. He set a single, slim, unmarked folder on the table in front of them and sat down at the head. Amy sat beside him.

He looked at the room with a quality of attention that was entirely complete.

”Good morning,” he said. It was not a polite formality. It was a call to order. The room instantly settled into total silence.

Max Martin, who had been running through the logistics of the massive agenda in his head, allowed himself a moment to observe what he always observed when Marvin entered a professional space: the physical adjustment the room made. It wasn’t deference exactly—it wasn’t the theatrical, fake respect that corporate power sometimes extracted from people who didn’t want to give it. It was something far more structural, more primal. It was like watching a physical space reorganize itself around a new gravitational force.

The executives from London and Stockholm, who had only met Marvin a handful of times, were adjusting their posture, leaning forward, fully captivated by the aura radiating from the boy. Daniel Voss, who dealt with him regularly, had stopped doing it consciously and now simply operated in the adjusted state of heightened focus.

The two new additions—Patricia Moss and David Chung—were doing it in the fascinating way of people experiencing what he named as ”Marvin Effect” for the first time. You could see the slight, bewildered recalibration of whatever they had expected before walking in.

Marvin was just shy of fourteen years old. But the room had long since learned not to let biology create any false expectations about the intellect that would come out of his mouth. He had the kind of face that classical painters spent entire careers trying to render—features that existed in a register slightly outside the ordinary human baseline. It was the kind of impossible combination that made strangers double-take without knowing exactly why they were drawn to him.

But none of his physical beauty was what truly commanded the boardroom. What commanded the room was the effects of his aura control, the depth of his knowledge, and the unhurried certainty with which he held his positions.

”Let’s talk about where we are,” Marvin said, his voice smooth and authoritative, ”and then let’s talk about where we’re going. Those are two very different conversations, and I want to keep them separate.”

Max Martin, seated at the right hand of the head chair, offered a single, curt nod and officially opened the meeting.

Meyers Music Group, as of June 1999, was a corporate structure that looked deceptively modest to the outside financial press, yet was vast from the inside. It was a multi-headed leviathan building for market dominance.

The public-facing components were a segmented branding. There was Wolf Cousins, operating out of Los Angeles. It had been Marvin’s original vehicle and proudly retained its character as a boutique-scale label with razor-sharp A&R instincts for finding raw artists before the mainstream even knew to look for them.

Then there was Cheiron Studios. Anchored in Stockholm with a new London branch running at partial capacity, it had evolved from primarily a songwriting and production house into something with genuine, heavyweight label functions attached. Max Martin’s production work alone gave Cheiron a commercial credibility that legacy labels twice its size would have traded their entire executive boards for without hesitation.

Finally, there was Maratone Records. The newest, sleekest, and most deliberately structured of the three, it had been built from the ground up as the flagship.

But above all of them, entirely invisible in the public accounting but omnipresent in every contract, rights agreement, and distribution deal, sat the Meyers Music Group. It was the holding structure. It was the entity that owned the equity in the labels, the publishing arms, and the rapidly accumulating catalog rights with the quiet persistence of a thing that deeply understood the power of compound interest.

”Let’s look at the revenue picture,” Daniel Voss said, adjusting his glasses. He opened with the numbers because, in this room, the numbers were the foundation. Everything else was just paint on the walls.

Voss walked through the summary with the efficiency of a man who hadn’t needed to pad the figures to make them look healthy. They were bleedingly healthy. Not spectacular—the group was technically still in an aggressive investment phase, and investment phases were supposed to look like deliberate, controlled spending against a credible future return—but the upward trajectory was so steep it almost defied gravity.

*My Heart Will Go On* had performed vastly beyond the initial projection, which itself had not been a conservative estimate. The track had shipped globally on the back of *Titanic*’s extraordinary box office run.

****

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