Exactly one week had passed since the physical altercation. The old desk had been polished to a mirror-like shine. No evidence remained.
Duke sat comfortably in his leather chair, a steaming cup of black coffee in his right hand.
He took a slow breath, appreciating the tranquility.
A week had passed. And from Marlon Brando's camp? Silence.
No press conferences. No TV interviews denouncing the studio. No process servers at the gates with lawsuits. Brando had simply vanished back into his house.
Duke smirked, twirling a silver pen between his fingers.
Of course, Hollywood ran on whispers. And the rumors of the fight had spread through restaurants, country clubs, and agency boardrooms already.
Nothing was officially confirmed.
Robert Evans had made sure the security guards were compensated for their silence.
The story had already morphed into myths.
Some said Duke had thrown Brando through a glass table. Others whispered he'd held the actor out a eleven-story window, which is a building that isnt even available on the Paramount Lot.
Duke didn't bother correcting any of them.
The immediate casualty was Brando's career.
Just a week ago, he'd been riding the wave of The Godfather, in path to demand bigger salaries and creative control.
Now? The scripts that were supposed to arrive at his estate by couriers simply stopped coming. Duke hadn't even needed to issue a blacklist.
He'd merely made it known over a few lunches that anyone who hired Brando would find themselves at the bottom of Paramount's priority list for distribution, colaboration and financing.
In an industry built on access and relationships, that implied threat was enough, Brando was radioactive.
A sharp knock on the door broke his thoughs. Barry Diller stepped inside, clutching a thick stack of financial printouts and tracking reports.
"Good morning, Duke." Diller practically sang as he crossed the room and laid the papers on the desk. "The finalized numbers for the first seven days are in. I had accounting run them three times, just to be absolutely sure we weren't looking at a clerical error."
Duke leaned forward, eyes locking onto the top sheet.
"Walk me through it, Barry." Duke smiled.
"Annie Hall is an unprecedented success." Diller pointed at the highlighted columns. "In its first week of domestic release, it stands at around 3.6 million dollars."
"Exhibitors are already asking us for more prints to expand into secondary markets by the weekend."
Duke leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. "3.8 million in seven days." He savored the words. "And the critics? I assume they aren't butchering us for breaking the rules of the romantic comedy genre?"
He already knew the answer, having skimmed the early reviews. But he wanted to hear Diller say it.
Diller laughed, pulling clipped newspaper articles from the stack. "The New York Times called it a 'revolutionary masterpiece of modern cinema.'"
"The Los Angeles Times praised the non-linear narrative, saying it completely redefines how audiences will expect romance to be portrayed on screen."
"Gene Wilder and Diane Keaton are already being short-listed for awards, and your direction is being compared to the French New Wave."
"Make sure marketing capitalizes on those quotes. I want full-page spreads in the trades by the end of the week. Oh and remember to speak with Aubrey from MGM for the deal."
"Already on it." Diller nodded, gathering the reports. "I'll coordinate with regional advertising buyers this afternoon. Oh, and Eisner is waiting outside. He said you requested a comprehensive deep dive into the the toy manufacturing sector?"
"Send him in. And excellent work on the theatrical rollout. Keep the pressure on the exhibitors."
Michael Eisner walked in carrying a leather briefcase.
"Morning, Duke." Eisner sat and unlatched his briefcase. "I brought the dossiers you requested on the major players in toy manufacturing, with a detailed focus on Mattel."
"Perfect. Let's get right into it." Duke leaned forward.
Eisner nodded, pulling a financial report and sliding it across the desk. "Licensing seems like renting out our own success. If we want the true value, we need vertical integration."
"Factories, supply chains, retail distribution networks we need to own them in the long term. And that brings us directly to Mattel, they're a wounded animal right now."
Duke opened the report, scanning the executive summary, before realizing he didn't know how to read this, "Explain their current state."
"They're in the shitter." Eisner leaned forward, "Mattel is a textbook example of a company that fundamentally misunderstands the difference between top-line revenue and bottom-line profit. They're generating massive revenue, selling a large volume of toys."
"The 'Pulse' line is flying off shelves. The gross cash coming through the front door is astronomical. But their profit margins are absolutely atrocious. Bordering on nonexistent."
Duke nodded slowly, turning a page. "High revenue is meaningless if it doesn't cover operating costs. So where's the bleed? Where's all that money going before it hits the bottom line?"
"Everywhere." Eisner ticked off points on his fingers. "First, their manufacturing processes are outdated. Supply chain bottlenecks, they overpay for raw materials like plastic and steel, and incur shipping penalties because they can't manage inventory cycles."
"Second, their corporate overhead is bloated. Layers of middle management drawing exorbitant salaries without contributing to the product pipeline."
"Third, and most importantly, they're terribly mismanaged at the board level. They've made disastrous acquisitions outside their core business which have saddled them with massive, high-interest debt. So Mattel as a corporate entity is struggling to service its debt. They're cash-poor. Their stock price is depressed and their shareholders are miserable."
A slow smile spread across Duke's face. A distressed company with strong underlying assets and a depressed stock price was a generational opportunity.
A perfectly constructed target for a hostile takeover.
"They're weak. And they're holding the exact manufacturing infrastructure we need to build our consumer products."
"Duke, buying Mattel outright would be an undertaking to difficult for us. Even with their depressed stock price, the market capitalization is massive."
"Paramount has excellent cash flow right now, but a straight cash acquisition of that size would drain our reserves completely."
"We aren't using our cash, Michael." Duke leaned in, "We're going to execute a Leveraged Buyout. An LBO. We're going to force Mattel to pay for its own acquisition."
An LBO, just like Duke acquired Paramount, riddled a company with debt and then improve it to pay it off.
Eisner pulled a legal pad toward him. "Walk me through the mechanics."
"In a standard acquisition, a company buys another company using its own money or stock. In a leveraged buyout, we use debt to finance the vast majority of the purchase price. We borrow the money from a consortium of investment banks."
"But here's the best part, we don't use Paramount's assets as collateral. We use Mattel's assets. We secure the loan against Mattel's own factories, their real estate, their inventory, and the intellectual property rights to their toy lines."
Duke stood up, "We put down a tiny fraction of the purchase price in actual cash, maybe ten or fifteen percent. The banks provide the other eighty-five percent in high-yield debt."
"Once we complete the hostile takeover and take control of the board, we transfer that massive debt directly onto Mattel's balance sheet. They become responsible for paying off the loan we used to buy them."
Eisner tracked the logic perfectly. "But if Mattel is already struggling with cash flow, how do they service this new debt without declaring bankruptcy?"
"Because the moment we take control, we execute a brutal restructuring."
"We fire the entire bloated executive team on day one. We liquidate the non-core assets and use that immediate cash injection to pay down a chunk of the principal debt."
"We streamline manufacturing, negotiate better rates with plastics suppliers using Paramount's broader corporate leverage, and slash overhead. We take a company operating at two percent profit margin and force it up to ten or fifteen percent through sheer operational discipline. That massive increase in free cash flow pays off the remaining debt."
"And once that debt is paid down, what do we have? Total ownership of a multi-billion-dollar toy manufacturer, acquired for pennies on the dollar."
"It's a good plan," Eisner admitted, a smile forming. "But to pull off a hostile LBO, we can't announce our intentions to the market. The moment Mattel realizes Paramount is trying to buy them, their board will implement poison pill defenses, and the stock price will skyrocket, ruining the economics."
"Exactly." Duke sat back down, "Which is why we start quietly. I want you to set up anonymous shell companies incorporated in Delaware with enough cash to begin quietly purchasing Mattel shares on the open market. Buy slowly, never triggering the five percent threshold that requires SEC disclosure."
Eisner wrote on his legal pad. "We gather enough shares to demand seats on the board, then launch the leveraged buyout offer from a position of strength. Force a proxy fight if they resist. With their stock performance doing so bad, institutional shareholders will jump at our premium offer to cash out."
"Precisely." Duke smiled, "The shareholders only care about one thing, return on investment. Right now, Mattel management is failing them."
As Eisner left, Duke took a final sip of his coffee as he gazed out of his window, while humming SOS by ABBA
____
Duke will act in the spring of 1973 on Texas Chainsaw Man(as Leatherface) and in 1974 on Young Frankenstein as Frankenstein
I reccomend both films
Young Frankestein is a comedy film that i love
Short chapter since im sick