Connor "Duke" Hauser sat behind the mahogany desk that had come with the house, which he'd bought from Tony Curtis a month ago for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Twelve thousand six hundred square feet of Tuscan-style architecture, with a large garden. Tony Curtis had thrown parties here that became legends. Duke intended to throw some parties here too.
But that was for the night.
Right now, in the gray half-light of the last morning of 1971, the house was quiet.
The caterers wouldn't arrive until noon. The florists were already working in the garden.
The only sound in the study was Stanley Jaffe's chair as he shifted his weight, flipping through a leather-bound ledger.
"Final numbers," Jaffe said, not looking up. He licked his thumb and turned another page.
Duke found this habit mildly disgusting but had never mentioned it. You pick your battles.
"Theatrical revenue for the fiscal year, we're up forty-one percent over 1970. Television licensing is up twenty. Merchandising-"
He paused, raising an eyebrow. "Merchandising is up forty-three percent, which I'll be honest, Duke, I didn't see coming."
"Nobody ever sees merchandising coming," Duke said. He was standing at the window with a mug of black coffee. "That's because nobody in this industry respects it. They think it's beneath them."
Jaffe turned another page.
"Let's talk about the big ones," Duke said, turning from the window. He sat down across from Jaffe, setting his mug on a coaster that Barbara had placed on the desk specifically because she'd caught him leaving ring stains on the mahogany.
"The Godfather," Jaffe said, "Post-production is on schedule. Coppola is well, Coppola is Coppola. He's fighting with everyone about everything. We're looking at a March release. The early internal screenings have been..." He searched for the word.
"Amazing?" Duke offered.
"I was going to say 'promising,' but sure. Amazing works too." Jaffe closed the ledger and leaned back.
Duke nodded.
He'd known since before the cameras rolled, since before Coppola had been hired, since before the book had been published.
The Godfather was going to be the biggest picture of 1972, possibly the biggest picture of the decade, and it was going to do something that no film had done in a generation.
Make Paramount the most important studio in Hollywood. Not the richest. Not the flashiest. The most important.
"Dirty Harry," Duke said, moving down the list.
"Still cleaning up," Jaffe said. "Box office... honestly, the numbers are almost embarrassing. For an R-rated action picture with reviews that make it sound like a recruitment film for a police state, it's performing like a family comedy at Christmas. Eastwood is a machine."
"The reviews help, not hurt. Every time some critic in New York calls it fascist, ten thousand people in the Midwest buy tickets."
"Shaft," Jaffe continued. "Solid. Not spectacular, but solid. It's opened a door that we need to walk through carefully. The Blaxploitation market is real, but it's going to burn hot and burn fast if we don't manage it. We need quality, not volume."
Duke had mentioned the term Blaxploitation and every executive in the company had started to repeat it as an informal way of referring to low budget urban 'black' films.
"Agreed. What about The French Connection?"
"it's doing great, later tonight i will try to convince some Academy Members to vote for it." Jaffe tapped the ledger. "Between the theatrical slate, television licensing, and Atari, we're in a position I genuinely did not think was possible twelve months ago."
"Speaking of Atari," Duke said, "that brings us to the debt."
"The Lehman loan," Jaffe said, shaking his head slowly. "Duke, when you took the original loan, I thought you were insane. I thought you were a lunatic who was going to leverage this studio into the ground."
"I know. You told me. Multiple times. Often loudly."
"And I was wrong. At current revenue projections and these are conservative projections, Duke, I'm not being optimistic, I'm being careful we could pay off the principal by mid-72. June, maybe July."
"And still have enough liquidity to fund the entire 1972 slate without external financing." He paused for effect, which was unusual for Jaffe, who generally considered dramatic pauses a waste of billable time. "We could buy an island."
Duke frowned, in his mind it was not good to be a billionare with an island.
"I already have a house I haven't finished decorating."
"Then maybe we take a day off."
Duke looked at him. Jaffe looked back and then, they both laughed.
Jaffe decided to continue. "Oh you asked me to investigate expansion avenues for entertaiment. What about an Skying resort?"
"Let's not think about that yet, so you know how 1971 was about content," Duke said, writing the number 1972 at the top of a paper and underlining it twice. "1972 will be about hardware and movement."
He wrote three items on the pad, each one a bullet point.
Home Pong.
The transition from the arcade to the living room. Bushnell's team was already finishing on a home console final product. Duke remembered he had some prototypes laying somewhere in the house.
The idea was simple, take the most popular arcade game in the country and put it in a box that plugged into the television set that already sat in every American home.
The technology was crude, the graphics were primitive, and by Christmas 1972, he wanted Home Pong on shelves.
The Animation Pipeline.
Getting the MadHouse partnership in shape and maybe expand the series on Japan.
Duke had been shocked to see that Star Trek animated series was going to cost almost triple per episode than Blue Beetle with worse animation quality if made in America.
Althoug he was an american patriot, as a Pure Breed Capitalist he must have no loyalty nor nationality. It was better to create series to serve the American Market from Japan.
The VCR.
This was the big one. The one that made Jaffe slightly nervous every time Duke mentioned it, which was frequently.
Duke had been awaiting a prototype from both Ampex and Panasonic about a home video cassette recorder, a device that would allow consumers to record television programs and, eventually, to purchase and play pre-recorded content in their homes. Whenever they wanted.
The prototype needed to exist by the end of 1972/1973. Not for sale, the technology wasn't ready for mass market, and the price point would need to come down dramatically but as a working proof of concept that they could show to investors or retailers.
Jaffe looked at the list. He said nothing for a long time. Then he stood up, tucked the ledger under his arm, and walked out the door.
___
By eight o'clock that evening, his newly bought Owlwood state didn't look like a private residence anymore.
The ballroom was draped in gold and ivory, with crystal chandeliers throwing fractured light across the room.
The gardens were even more spectacular. Someone had strung thousands of small white lights through the Italian cypresses and along the stone pathways, creating the effect of walking through a field of earthbound stars.
A Jazz band played on a raised platform near the fountain.
Duke stood near the entrance to the ballroom in a midnight-blue tuxedo that had been tailored greeting arrivals pretending to be more social than he actually was.
Barbara stood beside him, in emerald green, her hand resting lightly on his arm.
"Here comes trouble," she murmured, her lips barely moving, her smile never wavering.
Duke followed her gaze to the entrance, where Henry Fonda was stepping out of a car. Behind him came Peter, long-haired and slightly stoned-looking and behind Peter came Jane.
Jane Fonda. Hanoi Jane. The most controversial woman in America, or the most courageous, depending on which channel you watched and which newspaper you read.
She was thirty-four, fierce-eyed, and walked into Owlwood with the energy of someone who expected a fight. Duke stared at her and realized she was kind of attractive.
Duke did none of the things she hoped he would do. He didn't stiffen. He didn't signal displeasure. He didn't dispatch someone to redirect the Fondas to a different section of the party.
Instead, he walked forward with the stride he used for everyone, extended his hand to Henry Fonda first and said, "Mr. Fonda. It's a genuine honor. Thank you for coming."
Henry Fonda shook his hand with a grip that was still surprisingly strong. "Pleasure's mine, son. Hell of a house."
"It was Tony's. I just changed the locks."
Fonda laughed and Duke felt the tension in the room decrease by several degrees. He had always remembered how Henry Fonda called to apologize for his daughter attempt to picket line, Hacksaw Ridge.
Peter was next, an easy handshake, and he drifted toward the bar that surprised absolutely no one. And then Jane.
She stood in front of him, chin slightly raised.
"Miss Fonda," he said. "Welcome to Owlwood, I hope you enjoy the evening."
She stared at his face for a beat longer than was comfortable, and then she nodded. "Thank you, Mr. Hauser."
"Duke."
"Duke." A pause. "Your garden is beautiful."
"Barbara's doing. I'd have paved it and put in a helipad."
Jane Fonda moved into the party, the rest of the evening unfolded calmly.
Robert Redford arrived, shaking Duke's hand with a firm grip, a smile, and a joke about the Butch Cassidy production and was immediately being surrounded by a group of admirers.
Johnny Carson, the late night host appeared, cracking jokes with anyone within earshot and making even the studio executives laugh.
Jack Nicholson came at some point, nobody was quite sure when, wearing sunglasses indoors, carrying a grin, and holding a drink.
But beneath the spectacle was the real party, he meet some of the Old Guard, the directors and producers and studio hands who had been in the business since the golden age.
By one in the morning, the party had entered its late, golden phase, the phase where the people who were there to be seen had gone home and the people who were there to have a good time had loosened their ties.
Duke found them in the smoking lounge near the pool, which was technically an enclosed patio with leather furniture and a ventilation system.
The pool itself glowed turquoise beyond the glass doors, and the distant sound of a new band, now playing for people who refused to let the night end.
Mel Brooks was holding court. This was not surprising. Mel Brooks was always holding court.
He was sprawled in an armchair with a glass of bourbon balanced on his knee, gesturing expansively with his free hand while delivering a monologue about the Dirty Harry reviews that had Marty Feldman crying with laughter.
"-so Pauline Kael, bless her little heart, she writes and I'm paraphrasing, but barely, she writes that the film represents 'the deepest kind of American moral cowardice.' About a movie about a man who runs toward the danger!"
Feldman was bent double in his chair, his famously bulging eyes wider than ever, which Duke hadn't thought was physically possible, for some reason finding Mel complaining extremely funny.
"The best part," Brooks continued, riding the wave, "the absolute best part, is that Kael has probably never held a gun, I know her and she doesnt even rides the New York subway."
Eastwood sat in the corner, cigar in one hand, scotch in the other, he also was laughing but barley.
"She's good for business," Eastwood said. "I'll give her that."
Duke stepped into the lounge, and he reached up, loosened his tie pulling the knot down to his sternum, and dropped into the empty chair between Brooks and Feldman.
"What are we drinking?" he asked.
"Bourbon," Brooks said. "The expensive kind. I checked the label."
"Was this in the kitchen? Is that my bourbon?"
"Exactly. The expensive kind."
Duke poured himself a glass from the bottle on the side table and settled back into the leather. It was almost 12 pm. The year was dying and the party was winding down.
The distant sound of fireworks crackled across the Los Angeles sky, not from the estate, but from somewhere in the hills.
The four men fell silent, listening.
Then Brooks raised his glass. "To 1972," he said. "May it be as profitable as 1971 and considerably less stressful."
"To 1972," Feldman echoed.
Eastwood lifted his scotch without a word, which was his version of a toast.
Duke raised his bourbon. "To 1972," Duke said, and drank.
____
How you doing?