On May 21, far away in France, the 43rd Cannes Film Festival officially ca to a close.
Simon did not go to Cannes this year. Only Ira Deutchman led the company team there.
Giuseppe Tornatore's second feature, A Family Journey, co-financed by Highgate Pictures and several European film companies, made it into the main competition. But compared to last year, when Simon's maneuvering helped Cinema Paradiso edge out Sex, Lies, and Videotape to win the Pal d'Or, A Family Journey ca away empty-handed this ti.
David Lynch's Wild at Heart won the Pal d'Or amid fierce controversy and sharply divided reactions.
In the original tiline, because of the controversy, Wild at Heart could not even find a distributor and the producers had to handle the theatrical release themselves.
Simon did not like Wild at Heart, but he did not stop Deutchman from buying its North Arican distribution rights. In his mory, despite all the criticism, it did fairly well at the box office.
Besides Wild at Heart, Deutchman also brought back another film from Cannes that was extrely niche for North Arica, called Ju Dou. The North Arican rights to this film should have belonged to Miramax, and it even received a Best Foreign Language Film nomination at the 1991 Oscars.
From Simon's earliest Run Lola Run, to this year's Oscar juggernaut Driving Miss Daisy, plus the comrcial success of films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and My Left Foot in between, Hollywood's art-house market had clearly seen a revival. Every major studio was pushing hard, and even the theatrical exhibition market had, in recent years, gradually developed more complete art-house circuits thanks to the steady run of art-film wins.
Once the giants stepped in, they naturally squeezed the independent distributors' survival space.
After getting under Miramax's nose on Cinema Paradiso, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and My Left Foot in succession, even though Daenerys Entertainnt only secured distribution on one of them, the Weinstein brothers were struggling more and more in Hollywood, just as Simon predicted. At this point, Miramax was almost at the end of its rope.
It was against that backdrop that Highgate Pictures managed to secure Ju Dou, and it planned to try buying and operating more Asian films in North Arica going forward.
After last year's trial by fire, Simon loosened the leash on Ira Deutchman. Over the next two years, he planned to raise Highgate's annual releases to more than ten films a year, taking the industry position Miramax held in the original tiline.
Co to think of it, it was not only Miramax. Daenerys Entertainnt's sudden rise was also squeezing another independent studio that should have risen this year, New Line.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally New Line Cinema's first film to break one hundred million in worldwide box office. That film established New Line's footing in Hollywood and eventually paved the way to the peak of The Lord of the Rings.
Now, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had long since beco a Daenerys Entertainnt project and was about to be released this sumr. The entire Tolkien library was also firmly in Simon's hands.
Daenerys Entertainnt's New World Pictures was also pushing into the horror field where New Line excelled. The success of the Scream series far outstripped New Line's pillar, the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. New World Pictures also successfully continued the Hellraiser and Children of the Corn series and other horror titles.
After Children of the Corn 2 opened on April 13 in the Easter season, with a production budget of three million dollars, its North Arican box office was already close to twenty-five million by the end of May.
After last year's Hellraiser 2, Hellraiser 3 would also be released at the end of the sumr season in August.
The Children of the Corn and Hellraiser franchises could not match the Scream series in box office returns, but they could bring New World Pictures very stable revenue and profit, which in turn could provide a steady stream of funding for New World to develop other projects.
And it was not just horror. Simon had also started guiding New World Pictures president Danny Morris toward another comrcial genre with huge box office potential: raunchy cody.
In the original tiline, the 1990s saw two major cody stars, Jim Carrey and Mike Myers, blow the raunchy cody market wide open. Jim Carrey's Dumb and Dumber and Mike Myers's Austin Powers both achieved outstanding results, breaking one hundred million in North Arica. Coincidentally, both stars rose with New Line's backing.
After finishing the job of cutting Miramax off, Simon's next target was New Line.
On the Friday after Cannes ended, May 25, Hollywood's 1990 sumr season officially began.
Universal's Back to the Future Part III and Paramount's Fire Birds beca the opening films of the season.
After the steep drop of Back to the Future Part II relative to the first film last winter, Universal clearly did not have high confidence in Back to the Future Part III. That was why they rushed the final installnt out before the sumr competition fully ignited.
Still, the Back to the Future franchise was doing reasonably well.
Paramount, however, had even less confidence in Fire Birds, and that had everything to do with the two projects Paramount had "stolen" from Daenerys Entertainnt last year: The Rocketeer and Fire Birds.
In the sa holiday season last year, Paramount had pinned huge hopes on the comic-adaptation sci-fi film The Rocketeer, starring Tom Cruise and g Ryan. But because of the film itself and the impact of Batman, after a forty-five-million-dollar production budget and a twenty-million-dollar marketing spend, it only earned a bit over forty-three million at the box office, far below Paramount's expectations.
The inside story of the Rocketeer project was no secret in Hollywood. Daenerys Entertainnt even took the opportunity to push a ssage: projects it had chosen might not succeed in soone else's hands. That idea made Daenerys Entertainnt's later battles for script rights noticeably easier.
Also, to clear a release slot for The Rocketeer, Paramount had moved Oliver Stone's film, which should have been very successful, Born on the Fourth of July, into this year's Easter season. The film opened on April 20.
However, without the montum of awards-season nominations and trophies, even though it received unanimous praise from critics, by May 25 it had only taken thirty-three million after five weeks in theaters. With its strong word of mouth, Born on the Fourth of July might still ultimately reach more than fifty million in North Arica on a solid long-run curve, but that result was still far below the seventy-plus million dostic total in the original tiline.
Oliver Stone had already been unhappy that Paramount dumped his film into the Easter slot. After the critical and box office performance beca clear, the hot director of recent years publicly criticized Paramount in the dia for severe marketing blunders, saying the film should have perford far better.
Then, once Fire Birds opened, reviews were overwhelmingly negative. This military film about U.S. Apache helicopter units not only failed to challenge the record set a few years ago by Top Gun, it did not even co close to Back to the Future Part III in the sa period.
You could say Paramount had "ssed up" three projects in a row.
Even though back in March, Paramount released The Hunt for Red October, the second breakout hit of 1990 after the Valentine-season fairy tale Pretty Woman, Simon knew the deep foundation Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg had built for Paramount was already crumbling away. In the original tiline, Martin Davis, the chairman of Paramount Communications, eventually paid the price for pushing out those top executives, any one of whom could have supported a major studio on their own. In the end, he had to sell Paramount to Viacom's Sumner Redstone.
Palo Alto, near San Francisco.
The date was May 26. While juggling the DC film universe and Daenerys Entertainnt's other business, Simon had also been flying to Silicon Valley frequently lately. He rarely stayed for a full week like last ti, usually returning the sa day.
Today was Saturday. Simon flew up to San Francisco to inspect the internet cafe project led by Arica Online.
Before this, Westeros had finished reshaping its holdings in Cisco, Arica Online, and Ygritte.
The capital injection into Arica Online was fully completed, and Westeros's stake rose to 75%.
At the sa ti, Westeros completed the purchase of a combined 42.5% stake from several other Cisco shareholders at a three-hundred-million-dollar valuation. After the transaction, Westeros paid $127.5 million to raise its Cisco stake to 57.5%.
As for Ygritte, after a year of operations, Simon's initial funding had been used up, and Ygritte clearly still had not generated revenue sufficient to maintain daily operations.
Westeros reinvested into Ygritte at a twenty-million-dollar valuation, and the amount was also twenty million.
Simon had originally given Tim Berners-Lee 10% of Ygritte. In this round, Simon did not deliberately try to squeeze Tim's holdings. He even proposed lending Tim money at zero interest so he could maintain his stake.
But Tim Berners-Lee, conservative by temperant, did not want to suddenly take on two million dollars in debt, so his stake was diluted down to 5%. [TL/N: STUPID MF!]
Westeros's stake in Ygritte therefore rose to 95%.
On the personnel side.
John Chambers, previously at IBM, officially joined Cisco at Simon's invitation, temporarily taking the role of company president. Simon planned for Chambers to take over once Cisco's current CEO, John Morgridge, reached the end of his contract at the end of next year.
Carol Bartz from SUN, and Jeff Bezos, whom Simon had pulled early from Wall Street into the internet industry, quickly stepped into their roles and had already begun taking control of Ygritte's daily operations.
As for Arica Online, its managent team remained unchanged for now.
However, over the past month, thanks to steadily rising exposure, aggressive marketing, and the official launch of Ygritte's graphical browser and portal business, Arica Online's performance saw a small surge.
In just one month, Arica Online added 38,000 users, pushing its total past 100,000.
In reality, this was also the result of the accumulated base of Arican PC users since the seventies. The foundation had already been there.
In Simon's mory, once the internet industry truly exploded, Arica Online's user base jumped from a few hundred thousand in 1993 to ten million by 1996 in only three years.
While bringing in new users, Steve Case also efficiently upgraded Arica Online's existing users for free. Keeping so of the original online ga functions, Arica Online reinstalled modems and the IE browser better suited for accessing the Web.
The next goal for Tim Berners-Lee's technical team was to further improve IE's dynamic pages and graphics display so that Arica Online's existing online ga functions could be integrated into IE.
To achieve that goal, Simon had already recruited another computer language developnt team from SUN before he even brought in Carol Bartz.
In the original tiline, this previously obscure team under SUN would, in the following years, release the more powerful Java language, and then go on to release JavaScript, a scripting language that dramatically improved web page display.
To secure the team, Simon made an agreent with SUN. The team's expenses would be covered by Ygritte. The patent rights for Java, as originally planned, would still belong to SUN, but the patent rights for the web-embedded scripting language JavaScript would belong to Ygritte.
Although JavaScript would still need about a year to be fully refined, with support from the IE team, many functions had already been realized ahead of ti.
The Ygritte portal site, which seed to appear almost overnight, and its features such as online news, email, personal hopages, and forums, had been drawing more and more attention from the dia and the public.
Inside a storefront on a comrcial street near Ygritte.
Simon, Tim Berners-Lee, Carol Bartz, John Chambers, Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, and a whole crowd of others gathered there.
If soone could have taken a photo at this mont, they would discover a few years later just how formidable this lineup truly was.
This storefront was the model location for the internet cafe concept led by Arica Online, the result of nearly a month of nonstop work after the AOL team moved into Silicon Valley.
Compared to the smoky, dim internet cafes Simon rembered, this place could actually be called a "bar."
Simon's internet cafe plan was not ant to make money. It was ant to promote the products of Arica Online, Ygritte, and even Cisco. So the cafe used a relaxed layout closer to a traditional coffee shop.
This model location was a 50 square ter space with only twenty brand-new IBM desktop computers installed with Windows 3.0. So were arranged in paired seats for couples, so were tucked into small private spaces divided by partitions, and so were lined up in a row that encouraged conversation.
It was not just for going online. The cafe also offered drinks and snacks, doing its best to create a relaxing, comfortable atmosphere.
As for pricing, Simon would have liked to run it as a subsidized operation, purely as brand promotion.
But since Arica Online had registered a dedicated subsidiary brand, Internet Bar, and also brought in IBM as a 40% equity investor, they still had to consider revenue and profit. So the internet price was set at three dollars per hour for now, with drinks and snacks charged separately.
Arican movie tickets had only recently pushed past four dollars. Given that Arica Online's cafes were more comfortable than a theater, three dollars per hour was still on the low side. The cafes would likely end up relying on drinks and snacks, the add-ons, for profit, much like many theaters did.
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