Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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It wasn’t as glamorous as casting actors or signing directors.

But Jeff knew something most people in Hollywood didn’t.

Studios weren’t built by stars. They were built by systems. And someone had to build those systems first.

Jeff paused, rolling his stiff shoulders, and took a long moment to look Jeff found himself looking around the office before he even realized he was doing it.

It didn’t resemble the executive suites he was used to walking into.

Most Hollywood offices in the 90s seemed determined to remind visitors how important their owners were. Oversized mahogany desks. Glass display cases filled with trophies. Framed one-sheets covering every available wall. Leather so polished it practically squeaked.

Marvin’s office was different.

Dark wood. Brushed metal. Clean lines. Floor-to-ceiling windows that flooded the room with afternoon light instead of hiding it behind heavy curtains. The walls were surprisingly bare, with only a handful of carefully chosen pieces breaking up the space.

There was nothing ostentatious about it.

Everything appeared to exist because it served a purpose.

Jeff couldn’t quite explain why, but the room made it easier to think.

It felt less like a Hollywood producer’s office than the workspace of someone who expected to spend his days making decisions rather than admiring yesterday’s successes.

For the first time, Marvin had an office that was unmistakably his. Not a borrowed room on a studio lot. Not a corner of his family home.

His.

The past two days had disappeared beneath contracts, conference calls, signatures, and lawyers who seemed capable of surviving entirely on coffee and four hours of sleep.

While Marvin attended only the meetings that required him personally, his legal teams had been racing from one deadline to the next—incorporating companies, transferring assets, finalizing registrations, and laying the legal foundation for what would become his own studio.

By the time the paperwork settled, *Meyers Studios* officially existed.

*Meyers Pictures* became its film-production arm, the first of what Marvin expected would eventually become an entire family of companies once he had the money for it.

Rather than squeeze into a rented executive suite on someone else’s lot, Marvin had leased an entire glass-and-steel office building in Burbank to serve as the company’s headquarters.

It wasn’t especially tall by Los Angeles standards, but twenty stories of polished glass standing only minutes from the Warner Bros. and Disney studio lots made its presence difficult to ignore.

To anyone passing by, especially the old guard in Hollywood, a fourteen-year-old leasing an entire twenty-story office building for an independent production company looked absurd.

At best, it was youthful arrogance.

At worst, it was the sort of spectacular overreach people would laugh about for years after it collapsed.

Marvin saw something entirely different.

Space.

Every major studio had grown into sprawling organizations because filmmaking demanded it. Writers, producers, accountants, lawyers, storyboard artists, editors, marketing teams, licensing specialists, production coordinators—the list only became longer with every successful film.

If he intended to finance, develop, produce, market, and eventually distribute his own pictures without relying on the traditional studio system, those people needed somewhere to work.

One floor would become home to development and story. Another to production. Others would gradually fill with legal, finance, licensing, marketing, music, animation, visual development, and every other department a modern studio eventually required.

It looked excessive only because most people judged the building by what it was today.

Marvin judged it by what it would need to hold three years from now.

Even then, he doubted it would be enough. The building wasn’t meant to be a permanent home.

It was a foundation.

This building wasn’t the destination. It was where he intended to wait.

Markets rose. Markets fell.

Fortunes changed hands with astonishing speed when people convinced themselves prosperity would last forever.

Marvin had no intention of missing the transfer. By the time the next cycle finished, he expected to be shopping for something considerably larger than an office building.

Entire studio lots weren’t immortal.

They simply had price tags.

Once his larger plans came together and he acquired a full-scale studio lot of his own, Meyers Studios would outgrow these offices naturally.

Until then, this was exactly what he needed:

A place where the company could grow without constantly wondering where to put the next department.

For now, the headquarters was still quiet. Only a dozen people occupied twenty floors of office space.

Marvin. Amy. And ten carefully chosen hires, each recruited away from comfortable positions at established legacy studios with salaries generous enough to make leaving worthwhile.

The emptiness didn’t bother Marvin. In fact, he preferred it. An organization wasn’t built by filling every chair on the first day. It was built by hiring the right people first and allowing everyone else to grow around them.

Every person currently in the building had been hired because they could eventually lead an entire department.

A veteran production executive who knew how to turn a script into a shooting schedule.

A finance controller accustomed to managing nine-figure production budgets.

An experienced legal counsel already buried beneath contracts, insurance policies, guild paperwork, and licensing agreements.

A business affairs executive negotiating rights acquisitions almost daily.

A production accountant. An office operations manager. An executive assistant coordinating meetings that seemed to multiply by the hour. A facilities manager overseeing the gradual transformation of empty floors into functioning workspaces.

Even the information technology department already consisted of two specialists wiring secure servers, configuring workstations, laying network cabling, and preparing digital storage systems long before most employees would ever arrive.

Every morning another delivery truck stopped outside.

Rows of desks. Ergonomic chairs still wrapped in plastic. Desktop computers running the latest Pentium III processors.

Laser printers. Photocopiers. Fax machines. Telephone switchboards. Conference tables. Metal filing cabinets. Shelves destined to hold decades’ worth of production binders.

Elsewhere, electricians installed additional power circuits while contractors converted entire floors into departments that, for the moment, contained little more than empty walls and handwritten signs taped to the doors.

Development. Production. Business Affairs.

Marketing. Theme Music. Most of those rooms echoed when someone walked through them.

That would change soon enough.

Amy had become the unofficial architect of the headquarters. She wasn’t drawing blueprints. She was building routines. Interview schedules filled her calendar.

Orientation packets covered her desk.

She knew which departments would need assistants first, which vendors delivered office supplies on time, and which cleaning company would inevitably be replaced after the first month.

Meanwhile, Marvin continued assembling the creative side of the company.

Directors. Screenwriters. Actors. Department heads. One film at a time.

Marvin reached for the nearest folder and began leafing through its contents. As he skimmed through the folders with astonishing speed, and Jeff barely gave it a second thought anymore.

Months ago, Jeff might have stared. Now?

He simply waited. Representing Marvin had permanently recalibrated his sense of what was normal.

Reading an entire feature screenplay in under an hour. Remembering every page.

Quoting dialogue back word for word days later.

It was just... Marvin.

Jeff folded his hands and studied the boy across the desk.

Officially, Marvin wasn’t even his most lucrative client. Not directly.

His representation agreement was surprisingly modest by Hollywood standards. Marvin had never agreed to surrender percentages of everything he touched, nor had he handed over a producer’s participation that would have turned Jeff into an overnight millionaire. The commissions were excellent—far better than most agents ever saw—but they weren’t the sort of numbers that made legends inside Creative Artists Agency.

On paper, Jeff’s contract with Marvin was brutally simple: a flat fee of a few million dollars a year. No backend points, no equity, no shares in Marvin’s sprawling, multi-industry career. To a short-sighted outsider, it looked like Jeff was getting fleeced, locked out of the real billions.

But Jeff wasn’t playing for pocket change. He was playing the board.

The real money came from everything surrounding Marvin.

Every film Marvin greenlit created dozens of opportunities.

A director. A cinematographer. Production designers. Editors. Composers. Casting directors. Leading actors. Supporting actors. Entire departments.

One decision from Marvin could generate work for twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty CAA clients before cameras even started rolling.

The real money in Hollywood wasn’t just in traditional ten-percent commissions; it was in the packaging. The industry was locked in a bloodbath between the Big Three agencies—CAA, WME, and UTA. They were the dominant, undisputed forces that controlled the town, and they didn’t just submit actors for auditions anymore. They controlled the entire assembly line.

Marvin was Jeff’s ultimate trump card. When Marvin greenlit and fully financed a movie, he didn’t just write a check. He created a multi-million dollar ecosystem, and Jeff was the one who controlled the borders.

The agency collected massive packaging fees from the production budget, Jeff took his commission from the talent, and his political leverage within the walls of CAA became absolutely untouchable.

It was the exact playbook he had used to staff *Let the Right One In*. Marvin had the creative vision, but Jeff orchestrated the machinery. Jeff had spent the last year acting as a spider, carefully watching the girls who drifted into Marvin’s orbit. If Marvin liked them, Jeff signed them. He had swooped in and locked Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johansson into ironclad CAA representation contracts. Just last week, he had quietly poached Lindsay Lohan, signing her the moment he realized she had appearing and more of Marvin’s projects.

Jeff didn’t care about their current box office draw. He cared that they had Marvin’s attention, which meant they were guaranteed to be cast in projects that printed money. He was already drafting a pitch to bring Paris Hilton onto the CAA roster after Marvin’s recommendations. Where Marvin went, the spotlight followed, and Jeff made sure he owned the toll booth.

And then there was Peter Jackson.

Jeff had aggressively recruited and signed the eccentric New Zealand director to CAA just two weeks prior, anticipating this exact scenario. He knew Peter had a massive, unfilmable fantasy script that every major studio in town had already rejected as a logistical nightmare. But Jeff also knew Marvin didn’t care about studio logic.

It had given CAA exclusive representation over the filmmaker who was now preparing what could become the largest fantasy production in modern cinema.

If *The Lord of the Rings* succeeded... ...every major studio in town would spend the next decade trying to find its own Peter Jackson.

Several young actresses whose careers were only beginning had quietly expressed interest in meeting the agency.

Hollywood noticed patterns. People noticed who worked with Marvin.

Actors wanted to be represented by the agency that could put them in one of his films.

Directors wanted the same advantage. Even producers had started calling. Representing Marvin wasn’t just producing commissions.

It was quietly turning Jeff into one of the agency’s most valuable deal makers. His promotion wasn’t a question of if anymore.

Only when.

Jeff cleared his throat. ”How about it, Marvin?” Jeff asked, his voice even. ”Do you think it works?”

Marvin closed the screenplay, resting one hand on the cover.

A slow smile spread across his face. ”It’s better than good.”

Jeff leaned forward.

Marvin tapped the script once with his fingertips. ”It’s great.”

A beat passed. ”Tell Peter the money’s approved.”

Jeff blinked. ”All of it?”

”All of it.” Marvin didn’t hesitate. ”He asked for 120 million dollars to begin production.” He slid the files across the desk. ”Give it to him.” Another smile. ”And tell him we aren’t doing this piece by piece. Let’s shoot the entire trilogy back-to-back.”

....

...

..

.

The conversation about The Lord of the Rings ended almost as quietly as it had begun.

After nearly fifteen minutes discussing the movies, Marvin reached a decision.

That was the end of it. Jeff stepped into the hallway and pulled out his phone.

Peter Jackson answered on the second ring.

”Peter?”

A brief pause.

”Congratulations.”

Another.

”Marvin’s approved it.” Jeff couldn’t help smiling. ”Yes. All of it.”

A muffled reply came through the receiver.

Jeff waited until Peter finished before delivering the part he knew mattered most.

”All three films.”

Nothing.

For several seconds, the line was completely silent.

Jeff frowned and glanced at the screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.

Then Peter finally spoke again, his voice quieter than before.

Jeff listened, nodded once to himself, and said, ”The contracts are already being prepared. Half the money will be wired within the next two days, so you can begin assembling the production.”

Another long pause.

”Congratulations, Peter.”

When the call ended, Jeff slipped the phone back into his pocket and returned to the office.

Marvin had already moved on. Another document lay open in front of him.

****

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