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For the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Jessica had aggressively played a specific role: the obedient, bashful, slightly tragic young girl who harbored a sweet, innocent crush on the brilliant young actor. It was a survival mechanism she had learned early in Hollywood to disarm powerful men.
But Marvin had seen through the fragile mask instantly. And once Jessica realized that the little man on the other end of the line possessed the terrifying, cynical intellect of a veteran studio head, the mask was discarded.
She dropped the sweet, bashful act entirely. She began speaking to him with the raw, uncensored, and highly ambitious reality of a teenager fighting for her life in the Hollywood meat grinder.
"Marvin, I am going to burn a building down," Jessica spat, her voice vibrating with genuine, furious frustration.
Amy, standing by the fax machine, paused and subtly rolled her eyes at the teenage melodrama, but she remained silent, organizing her files.
"I assume this is regarding the independent production team you were courting for the supporting role?" Marvin asked calmly, typing a sequence of commands into his trading software.
"Yes!" Jessica practically yelled into the receiver. "I had that role locked, Marvin. I nailed the audition. I had three scenes with actual, speaking lines. It wasn't just background extra work. And today? I get a call from my useless manager telling me some other girl with 'family connections' magically snatched it away at the last second."
Jessica let out a sharp, bitter laugh. "And I know exactly what kind of 'connections' she used. I heard from the wardrobe department that the little bitch did some things with the casting director in his trailer that she absolutely shouldn't have been doing at her age. That damn, backstabbing whore. She literally slept her way into a background role!"
"Jessica," Marvin's voice cut through her furious rant, cool and entirely devoid of pity. "Tears and moral outrage are a completely useless currency in this industry."
The line fell silent, save for Jessica's heavy, angry breathing.
If she were a truly innocent, bashful young girl, Marvin's words would have crushed her. But she wasn't. If she had been truly fragile, she would have been chewed up, taken advantage of, and eliminated from Hollywood years ago because she couldn't adapt.
"I know," Jessica muttered, her voice dropping the hysteria, returning to a hard, cynical edge. "I know it is. But it pisses me off. I am working twice as hard, and I am getting sidelined by sex."
"Hollywood is not a meritocracy. It is a casino run by wolves," Marvin stated flatly, minimizing his trading window and opening a blank digital document to begin outlining a new intellectual property. He seamlessly multitasked, building empires while dispensing psychological counseling. "The girl who took your role used the only leverage she possessed. It was cheap, it was pathetic, and it will ultimately destroy her reputation before she turns twenty. You do not need to mimic her methods, but you must understand them."
"So what am I supposed to do?" Jessica asked, the genuine desperation bleeding through. She was calling him because, despite his physical age, he was the only person she knew who actually understood the mechanics of power.
"Just keep auditioning for scraps?"
"No," Marvin replied, his charm vibrating through the speakerphone, wrapping around her bruised ego and feeding her ambition. "You use this anger. You let it calcify your spine. Stop chasing obscure, D-list independent productions that are cast in trailers. You are elevating your brand."
Amy walked over to the desk, sliding a stack of signature-required documents in front of Marvin. He signed them flawlessly without breaking his conversational cadence.
"I am currently reviewing casting logistics for a project that CAA is packaging for me," Marvin continued, deliberately feeding her a highly concentrated dose of hope. "When the time is right, I will ensure you are placed in a room where talent and true screen presence are the only metrics that matter. Until then, you will read the acting theory books I sent you. You will perfect your craft. And you will not let a pathetic casting director dictate your emotional state. Do you understand me, Jessica?"
A long, heavy exhale sounded over the line. The panic and fury had been entirely drained from her, replaced by a cold, fierce determination.
"I understand, Marvin," Jessica said softly, the affection in her voice raw and completely genuine. "Thank you. I... I'll let you get back to work."
"We will speak tonight," Marvin promised smoothly, severing the connection.
He set the phone down and continued signing the documents Amy had placed before him.
Amy gathered the signed papers, shaking her head slightly. "You realize, Boss, that you are currently managing the fragile egos of two middle school girls, a teenager actress?"
Marvin looked up at his Chief Operating Officer, his perfect features twisting into a slow, devastatingly handsome smirk.
"Multitasking is the hallmark of a healthy man, my beautiful Amy," Marvin purred, his soul thriving in the chaos of his own making. "Now, get Jeff Raymond on the line. I want an update on the Warner Brothers."
—
Matthew did not do things casually.
This was something people who had only seen him in passing — the sharp suit, the ready handshake, the way he moved through a room as though he had already mapped its exits and evaluated its occupants — sometimes mistook for ambition. It wasn't ambition, exactly. It was something more structural than that. It was the specific, unrelenting orientation of a man who had decided, some years ago, that the world was organized around access, and that access was organized around relationships, and that relationships were built in the margins of the moments that other people treated as incidental.
Other people went to industry events. Matthew went to industry events and remembered every name.
He had met Tommy Mottola twice — once at a Columbia showcase in New York in the spring of 1996, where the handshake had been brief and the eye contact had been the professional kind that didn't mean anything yet, and once in the fall of that year when the Destiny's Child deal had brought him into Mottola's orbit properly for the first time. That meeting had lasted thirty minutes in a conference room on the forty-fourth floor of the Sony building on Madison Avenue, and Matthew had spent all thirty minutes being exactly who he was — direct, prepared, unsentimental — and Mottola, who had spent his career evaluating men who wanted things from him, had respected it.
Destiny's Child had signed with Columbia Records in 1996. Which meant Matthew Knowles and Mottola now had a professional relationship. Small, early, not yet tested by success or failure. But real.
And in the music industry, real was everything.
So when Matthew's assistant mentioned, in passing, during a Thursday morning briefing call, that Mottola had apparently personally signed a child prodigy to Columbia for a two-record deal — an eleven-year-old from Los Angeles, an author with a Disney film coming out in June, a kid whose name was apparently already circulating in certain circles as something to watch — Matthew had written the name down.
"Marvin Meyers."
He had then, with the methodical, unhurried thoroughness that characterized everything he did, gone and found a copy of *Kung Fu Panda*.
He hadn't expected to read more than the first chapter. He read all of it, that same evening, at the kitchen table after dinner, while the house settled around him.
He put the book down and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
Then he went upstairs and knocked on Bey's door.
She was at her desk finishing a lyric when her father knocked.
She looked up. Matthew was standing in the doorway holding his day planner — never a good sign at this hour, it meant his brain was still in work mode at nine in the evening — and he had an expression she recognized as the particular one he wore when he was about to say something he had already decided.
"Columbia called today," he said. "About the Mottola signing."
She waited.
"The boy," Matthew said. "Marvin Meyers. He's also on Columbia. Direct signing with Tommy. Two-record deal."
Bey set down her pen.
She knew the name. She had known the name since January, since the afternoon she'd found the book on the counter in the salon after rehearsal — LeToya's copy, left behind the way LeToya left everything, without ceremony or intention, because LeToya moved through the world in a beautiful, scattering cloud of her own belongings. Bey had picked it up because her hands needed something while her mind came down from five hours of choreography. She had put it down three hours later in a different state than she'd picked it up in.
She had bought her own copy the following week. She had read it twice. She had written three lines from it in her notebook — not as decoration, not as inspiration-board content, but as working material, the way she wrote down chord progressions and melodic fragments that she needed to return to and understand more completely.
*To make something special, you just have to believe it's special.*
She had been thinking about that line for six months.
"The premiere is in June," Matthew continued. "Los Angeles. TCL Chinese Theatre." He looked at her with the steady, assessing quality he brought to every conversation that mattered. "Mottola's office has a relationship with Disney's distribution team. We're on Columbia's roster now. There's a path to getting on the list if I make the right call."
Bey looked at her father.
"It would be an industry guest situation," he said. "Back entrance. No press. We'd be two names on a list that nobody is paying attention to."
"I know," she said.
"You want to go."
It wasn't a question. Matthew did not ask questions he already knew the answers to.
"He wrote that book at ten years old," she said quietly. "He's eleven now. Maybe twelve." She looked at the notebook on her desk — at the lines she'd written in December, still there, still circled. "He understood something that I'm still figuring out. I want to be in the same room as someone like that."
Matthew was quiet for a moment. He looked at his daughter — the good bones, the steady eyes, the complete, unself-conscious seriousness of her — and he thought, not for the first time, that the most important thing he had ever done in his professional life was recognize what she was before the world did.
"I'll make the call," he said.
---
Another night, another call.
The heavy oak clock in the corner of Marvin's bedroom at the Meyers Estate ticked softly, signaling the approach of midnight. The room was bathed in the warm, ambient glow of a brass desk lamp.
Marvin sat at his sprawling mahogany desk, his posture immaculate, the Montblanc fountain pen gliding effortlessly across the heavy parchment. He was meticulously drafting the final page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone—securing the copyright of a billion-dollar literary phenomenon months before a struggling British author could even bring it to press.
Beside the stack of completed manuscript pages, the secure landline phone sat on speaker.
"I just don't understand how they can look themselves in the mirror, Marvin," Jessica's voice crackled through the speaker, raw with the bitter, exhausted frustration of a actress navigating the Hollywood meat grinder.
Marvin didn't stop writing. His pen moved with flawless, algorithmic precision as he offered a few words of calculated comfort.
"Jessica, you and I both know that there are countless exchanges in this circle," Marvin murmured, his voice a smooth, resonant hum that actively soothed the spiking anxiety on the other end of the line. "But you must understand that some exchanges are strictly equal, and some are tragically unequal. It all depends entirely on how strong you are when you walk into the room."
He paused to dip his pen, his ocean-blue eyes reflecting the lamplight.
"Take Tom Hanks, for example," Marvin continued. "All he has to do is act. He walks onto a set, delivers his lines, and he gets the role. His talent and his box-office draw are his absolute currency. Now, look at Julia Roberts. The open secret in this town is that before she became America's sweetheart and a household name, the fresh-faced nineteen-year-old eagerly slept her way through the entire film crew — sucking cocks in trailers, bending over for producers in dingy hotel rooms, and spreading her legs for anyone with a clipboard or a credit card — just to land one lousy preliminary part and get her foot in the door.
*****
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