Blockbusters: A Mike Holman Novel, Episode 5 | The American Spectator

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth of nine episodes of Scott McKay’s forthcoming novel Blockbusters, offered in serial form as an exclusive to The American Spectator readers in advance of its publication in October. Blockbusters is the third novel in the Mike Holman series; the first two, King of the Jungle and From Hellmarsh With Love, were also serialized at The American Spectator prior to book publication. 

Mike Holman, the protagonist in the series, is an independent journalist who’s been called The World’s Greatest Newsman. But in Blockbusters, he’s literally going Hollywood — choosing to head up a campaign chiefly funded by Pierce Polk, Mike’s long-time friend and one of the richest men in the world, to reform and save American and Western culture.

Starting with attempting to fix the film and TV business. 

In Episode 4, Mike has made his way to Hollywood looking for allies and finding few. But by Episode 5, he’s returned home with a deeper sense of purpose and a quest which has moved from the Hollywood screening room to the Wall Street boardroom as the Polk Global Freedom Initiative, or PGFI, has begun gobbling up component parts to its media empire.

---

Nashville, Tennessee – March 29, 2025

Flip dropped his expose of Barry Blondheim and the Boys’ Club in a 40-minute documentary film on YouTube and a 4,500-word post on the Holman Media site, and when I say it was a takedown for the ages, I’m not doing it justice.

All he left to the imagination was the hardcore sex stuff, and even that wasn’t particularly imaginary thanks to the partially blacked-out shots from the camera Georgia left in the VIP room at Blondheim’s party.

Billed as “The Awful Reality Behind Hollywood’s Immoral Rot,” it popped out on YouTube at a really strategic time – 9 p.m. Eastern time on a Thursday night, which was just three hours before the midnight premiere of Barry Blondheim’s prestige movie They Would Be King.

So you’ll know, this was not a movie the regular public was going to fall in love with anyway. I want to make that clear. They Would be King is set in the 16th century in some unnamed, fictional Mediterranean kingdom, and the lead character is a nonbinary fat female identifying as a queer male, with strangely advanced swordsmanship skills, who claims to be the firstborn son of the dying king and who fights her/his way to the throne so as to grant the peasants a very large confiscatory share of the commercial class’ revenues.

Nobody wants to see a movie like that.

But that didn’t stop the Hollywood press from screaming that it was a shoo-in for Best Picture even though production delays pushed it out of the 2025 window, and the advance notices for They Would Be King called it “revolutionary” and “transformative.”

It was none of those things. It was shit. Those reviews were a testament to Barry Blondheim’s stroke in Hollywood, and not much else.

And when the public got to have its say on They Would Be King, just hours after Flip’s expose of Blondheim, hilarity ensued.

In Charlotte, people threw Cokes at the screen. In Grand Junction, they threw batteries. In Huntsville, there were demonstrations outside the theaters and not a single soul bought a ticket in any of the town’s four theaters who’d booked screens for it to watch the show.

In several independent theaters across the country, the operators actually canceled the movie mid-showing and reimbursed their ticker-buyers. Nobody complained when they did.

It was one of the biggest PR disasters ever to hit a commercial film in the United States. And when it was all over, Blondheim’s signature production, which had been billed as his crowning prestige piece, made less than half a million dollars at the box office on its first weekend — on a $35 million budget.

We had won.

But what had we won?

As I said, Flip’s piece was a masterful execution of multimedia journalism. He had video and audio interviews, he had documentary evidence, he had financial receipts. Flip showed that there was a network, run by the two assholes who worked for Blondheim, who were actively selling girls to Saudi sheikhs, Mexican drug cartel bosses, and Chinese, Russian, and Kazakh oligarchs for various considerations — to include, of course, sizable investments in Hollywood films.

It was as though every far-out fantasy of the worst conspiracy theorists were being proven true in real time about who really controlled Hollywood.

Flip’s report was so comprehensive, he even had video of Raoul de la Cruz, the Blondheim lackey who along with his colleague Clark Kale was in charge of the Boys’ Club network of sex traffickers, confessing to the whole thing.

De la Cruz was wasted at some club, and someone from Sentinel Security working with Flip got the video of him saying that “there’s a surplus of hot p**sy out here, but not of the money to make the movies we make, because the f**king rednecks in Iowa and Mississippi won’t get with the 21st century. So we use what we have — we move the hot p**sy to the chinks and the sand-n***ers and the jefes who run the cartels, and they do what we ask. It works out well for everybody.”

Flip focused the documentary on three girls who’d gone missing after clear interactions with the Boys’ Club, including cellphone geolocation proof that Shawna Doyle, Brittany Church and Erica Larson had each been in the proximity of Kale and de la Cruz on the night of their disappearances.

What Flip didn’t prove was where these girls went. But obviously they’d gone somewhere, and they hadn’t taken their cell phones with them, and there was no question about whether they’d run into Blondheim’s network.

And the piece masterfully demonstrated just how powerful the super-agent and producer was — there were interviews with directors and actors willing to show their faces on camera who said Blondheim had demanded various favors from them, some sexual and others not, but all quite unethical, in order that they might be permitted to further their careers.

As journalistic exposes go, this was a monster. As pieces at Holman Media went, it wasn’t the biggest — but it was certainly top 10, maybe even top 5.

By that Saturday morning, Blondheim’s publicist was telling people he had retreated to his hacienda in the hills above Cabo San Lucas. And nobody knew where de la Cruz had gone. There was a rumor which had it that he was back home in Seville with a new name and extensive plastic surgery, and there was also a rumor that he’d taken an involuntary boat ride to the bottom of the Pacific off Catalina Island. Either way, there was no longer a Raoul de la Cruz. And Clark Kale had lawyered up and wasn’t talking. Blondheim’s agency put out a statement saying he was “on sabbatical.”

The initial Rotten Tomatoes score for They Would Be King gave it an audience score of only 9 percent. That was conspicuously opposite the critic score of 94 percent, something which wasn’t altogether unforeseeable.

They’d withheld They Would Be King from Sundance and Cannes, ostensibly for strategic considerations but more realistically because they’d had trouble agreeing on a final cut to that piece of shit. So the critical reaction was even more obviously an example of obsequious fellatio to Blondheim.

That Flip had laid bare to absolutely everyone.

I had no choice but to concede my title of World’s Greatest Newsman to him. That was easy to do, especially since he still at least nominally worked for me.

And PJ and I flew up to Atlanta for Holman Media’s party celebrating the release of Flip’s piece. Given how awful the subject matter was, you might think that was a bit gratuitous, but we’d agreed years ago that conservative journalism would never get something like a Pulitzer Prize — that was reserved for assholes like Walter Duranty, who covered up the Holodomor in Ukraine while Stalin provided him with girls and boys and drugs for his hotel suite in Moscow on the New York Times’ nominal dime. So our triumphs, we’d have to celebrate ourselves.

We threw a very big party to premiere this thing. Breitbart did a live podcast. So did the Daily Wire. So did Salem and the Blaze. In our circle, it was a big deal.

But three weeks later, we had a Zoom call among the PGFI group, and I was more than a little dismayed when Bernie Numakin threw cold water all over Flip’s expose.

“Look,” he said, “this was one of the most convincing pieces of journalism I’ve ever seen. Really, it is. I’m blown away, and your guy proved the case. He exposed Blondheim as everything we’ve all known he was.”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming,” I said.

“Yeah, there is. As much as I want it not to be true, this is a fart in the wind. It will not matter.”

“It definitely f**ked up his movie premiere,” said Pierce, whose guys at Sentinel Security had done much of the grunt work in getting the dirt on Blondheim for Flip’s piece.

“Sure,” said Numakin. “But at the end of the day, that’s just a little blip on the screen. Barry Blondheim still runs that town.”

“Not if he goes on trial,” I said.

“Well, he sure as shit isn’t going up on state charges,” said Gardocki. “Gloria Tinsdale is the DA in Los Angeles, and she’s a political ally of Blondheim’s.”

“But the feds, that’s a different story,” said Stan.

“I’d like to believe that,” Numakin said. “Hopefully you’re right. But so you’ll know, even from prison this guy will still be the most influential figure in Hollywood.”

“That’s discouraging,” I said.

“How do we change it?” Pierce followed.

“Well, you have to make Hollywood irrelevant,” Numakin said. “This is all about what you said, Mike — we have to democratize the film and TV business, and more than that, we have to make the public recognize it’s been democratized.”

“Along those lines,” said Stan, “we should talk about Castcom.”

Castcom was yet another one of the Big Five media conglomerates, but it was a very different animal than Summit or Stine-Warmer. Those were essentially movie studios that owned broadcast and cable networks.

Castcom, on the other hand, was primarily a cable company. They owned the cable systems covering about a third of the country, making them the biggest of the cable operators, and they owned the National Television Company and its hardcore lefty cable news network, along with a bunch of other cable channels, not to mention Galactic Studios and the Galactic Experience theme parks.

It was a monster of a company. We’re talking about a huge, huge undertaking to get hold of it — and one that in our initial meeting Numakin would have cautioned against trying to take on.

But that was not his reaction when Stan brought up the possibility of making a play.

And it didn’t hurt that it was Galactic Studios who had just released They Would Be King.

“What do you have on Castcom, Stan?” he said.

Gardocki cut in.

“They’re going to report an utter catastrophe in Q1,” he said. “We’re talking about a nearly 18 percent loss in earnings year-over-year, and it’s systemic. Ten years ago Castcom had 25 million cable TV subscribers; this time last year, that number had fallen to 12 million. Now it’s 10 million.

“And that’s not all. They’re going to report a loss of almost 700,000 broadband internet subscribers, and they’re losing more than a billion bucks on their Yardbird streaming service over the past four quarters, almost half of which they’re going to report in Q1 alone.

“Not to mention Galactic Pictures is on a losing streak of monumental proportions — their last five releases have combined to lose more than $200 million at the box office. All in all, we’re looking at a drop, year-over-year, of operating margin from 13 percent to minus-two. And a total operating loss of $1.2 billion. When that number hits the Street, it’s going to be a zombie apocalypse for these guys.”

“I can confirm all of that,” Harrison said. “Can I cut in?”

“Of course, Harry,” I said.

As I’ve noted, Harrison was Pierce’s older brother. He was also the chief legal counsel for Mainsail Capital, which was a very fat hedge fund out of Connecticut. As it turned out, Mainsail had a massive position in Castcom — just under $7.5 billion, which was around 5 percent of Castcom’s total shares.

And as such, Harrison knew absolutely everything about Castcom.

Including the lawsuit.

“The problems over there are about to get a lot, lot worse,” he said. “Trumbull, on Monday, is filing a defamation lawsuit against NTC News for $10 billion over what Colin Krauss called him back in October.”

Krauss, who anchored NTC’s Sunday Exposure news show, was doing an interview with a congresswoman from Virginia and alleged that Trumbull had sexually assaulted a woman who’d filed a lawsuit against him a year earlier. But the lawsuit hadn’t alleged the sexual assault — she’d made that allegation on TV, and when Trumbull had denied it and called her a “crazy cat-lady” in response, she’d sued him for defamation and won a jury award in New York that was on appeal.

So there wasn’t actually any legal proof Trumbull had assaulted her. Nor was there any credible evidence it had happened, especially since her recounting of the supposed incident was identical to a scene in an episode of Season 2 of Sex And The City. Nobody thought wacko Carol Jeanne was credible outside of that stacked Manhattan jury.

So when Krauss let fly that bit of partisan stupidity, Trumbull couldn’t wait to drop his lawsuit. And what’s more, he was filing it in the Western District of Louisiana, which was about as friendly a venue as he could drop it in.

Harrison was plugged in enough that he had this information before almost anybody else.

“They’re going to have to settle this,” he said. “If it goes in front of Broussard or Pearson over there, there’s no limit to what Trumbull will get out of Castcom for this thing. And what they’re going to show in that Q1 earnings report is a $1.5 billion lawsuit reserve.”

“Oh, shit,” Stan chuckled. “That’ll get some attention.”

“So you’re saying that come Monday the stock is going to utterly tank,” said Stan.

“It’ll hit hard. Then you’ve got that earnings report that’ll hit in three weeks, and if the stock hangs on at anything higher than $20, it’ll be a miracle.”

“What is it now?” I asked.

“Right at $38,” said Gardocki.

“So you’re looking at a market cap drop on the order of the GDP of a not-terribly-small country,” said Numakin.

“We’re going in on Monday with $1.5 billion,” said Harrison. “Big buying spree.”

“At $38?” said Numakin. “What the hell for?”

“Well, first, we want to get to five percent. We get above five percent, six percent in all likelihood and maybe more when Castcom’s management panics and buys back a bunch of the stock, which they will do, and that triggers an SEC 13D filing. Which we want.”

“Ahh,” said Stan. “So you guys are going in.”

“Damn right we are,” said Harrison. “We file the 13D, now we’re in position to lead the takeover bid. You guys come in and back the play, and we’ll jump in on X and lead the barbarians to the gates. We’ll crowd-fund this motherf**ker.”

“Well, damn,” said Numakin. “Coming off the Trumbull lawsuit and Blondheim’s sex scandal, that actually is a good play.”

“How big a bid is this?” I asked.

“It depends on how far Castcom’s stock drops,” said Harrison. “Mainsail’s stake alone could be $10 billion, could be $20 billion. Your group might have to go as high as 40 to 60, though I think you could crowdfund most of that with a popular revolt once this takes off. But yeah. This is a bigger play than you’ve been in before.”

“It’ll entail making some decisions on strategy,” said Stan. “Like maybe we spin off that cable company and recoup the spend.”

“Harrison,” said Pierce, “signal your play first thing Monday if you want, for sure. But we should go behind this buying all the way down with an offshore account.”

“A little dark pool trading never hurt anybody,” said Gardocki with a smirk. “Or if it did, they were all bad guys anyway.”

I barely understood this, but it occurred to me that Pierce was talking about the brand-new Exchange of the Americas they’d just launched in Liberty Point, and there had been a network arrangement cut with the New York Stock Exchange whereby EXAM and NYSE trading would be synchronized. I had no idea how that worked; all I understood was the Polks were plotting a massive, and potentially very consequential, head-fake on a nearly $100 billion company.

Which if it worked would conceivably put me… in charge of it?

I shook my head a little, which Gardocki caught on the Zoom.

“Breathe, boss,” he texted me.

“It’s just now hitting me how big all this is,” I texted back.

“So what we need,” said Stan, “is some air support. Mike, can you get somebody at Holman Media to drop a story about the Trumbull lawsuit and the Blondheim mess both hitting Castcom in advance of a disastrous earnings report next month?”

“I can send you talking points,” said Harrison. “In fact, I’ll hook you up with a source inside the boardroom on both the lawsuit and the earnings report.”

“Will do,” I said. “And I’ll share it on X when it pops.”

“Throw in a hashtag,” said Gardocki. “Something like #CastcomCollapse.”

“Exactly,” said Stan. “At that point it’s got an external source and the play is legitimate.”

“Bernie,” I said, “where are you on this?”

“The leak is a little hot,” he said, “and you know my position on Blondheim and how hard this will actually hit him. That said, I think this is as strong a play as we’ve made. And if we could get Castcom at $20 or $22 it’s absolutely a win. I love Mainsail as a partner on this.”

Numakin and Todd McIntyre, who was the founder and CEO of Mainsail, were friends. They’d been part of a consortium that had made a bid to buy the Washington Redskins a few years back, but the NFL had rebuffed them over McIntyre’s public refusal to consider a name change.

“I’ve got something else,” I said. “So you guys know, in case you don’t recognize my background on this call…”

“I recognize it,” said Pierce with a smile. “Where’s Frank, anyway?”

“Getting donuts with the kids,” I said. “I’m in his office, since he’s now going to operate out of the big one from now on.”

Everybody on the call except Pierce gave me a confused look.

“The short version.” I said, “is that this week we bought Sunshine Records.”

“No shit?” asked Gardocki. “That is pretty freakin’ cool.”

“So Frank got to you?” Pierce chuckled.

“It wasn’t really a case of him getting to me,” I said. “I’d been thinking about this from the start. In fact, I actually called him.”

The Frank we were talking about was Frank Taylor, who’d been a friend of mine in college at Vanderbilt. He wasn’t one of the Tuxedo Club; he and Pierce had never been close, as they were not exactly compatible in terms of personalities or lifestyles – but given my bar-hopping proclivities, Taylor and me had gotten along just fine.

Frank was into music. So much so that he’d come up with a nice little business while we were in college — namely, that Frank positioned himself as the guy your fraternity, sorority, social club, or whatever would call and he’d book you the perfect band to play whatever party it was that you were looking to get live music for.

He didn’t make a killing with that business. He sold it just before it popped national.

Which cost him what could have been a monster payday.

Frank invested the money from the sale of his band-booking business into his own startup record label. And that was less than successful.

It’s not that he wasn’t good at a lot of aspects of running a label. Frank had a great ear for musical talent, largely because he was a musician himself — he was a damn good guitar player, and he could hold his own on both a banjo and a mandolin. He couldn’t sing to save his ass, which is why he was never a pro on the stage, but he knew music inside and out. Frank found a ton of Southern fried rock n’ roll bands and put out some terrific stuff, but he ran into real problems getting airplay and record distribution, and those great acts he found just kept bolting on him before he could get any of them big enough to properly pay the bills.

There are lots of songs on those Southern rock channels on Sirius that Frank produced on his old label 30 years ago. It’s a shame that business didn’t work out for him.

But it wasn’t all bad that Taylor Records didn’t make it. Because when it took its last breath, Frank caught on with Sunshine Records.

Sunshine was a prestigious old Nashville institution. They’d started back in the 1940s cranking out bluegrass records, and then when those old country legends like Hank Senior, Ernie Tubbs and Katie Walls started cranking out hit records after the war, Sunshine turned into the label everybody in Nashville wanted to record with.

They’d kept that designation for decades, until well after Billy Dean, who founded the label, finally died in 2004. It was Billy, who’d been known as Mr. Nashville, who hired Frank as a record producer after Taylor Records died,

And Frank loved Mr. Billy like he was a father. So much so that when Mr. Billy told Frank to “please don’t leave the label; it needs you” when the old man was on his deathbed, Frank swore he wouldn’t.

But that was a problem, because Mr. Billy’s daughter Frieda was… not Billy Dean.

Frieda was an unreconstructed hippie who had run away from home at 15 so she could go to Woodstock, And she decided that Sunshine Records needed to embrace modernity, which entailed an attempt to break country music out of its traditional box.

Frank was the VP of the company by that point. He should have left. He didn’t. Instead, he worked his ass off keeping the place alive as Frieda threw Sunshine’s money away signing militant lesbian folk singers and trying to brand them as country stars. The great acts that Frank and Mr. Billy had found, who’d made Sunshine an authentic independent country label with maybe the best catalog in all of the music industry, started leaving.

And they were all telling Frank they didn’t want to. But they could smell a sinking ship, and this was one.

By 2024, Sunshine was down to a handful of acts anybody had heard of, none of which were making anything anybody wanted to listen to, and with virtually no resources to sign anybody good. Frank was still hustling, but the rest of Nashville were just waiting around to see who he was discovering and then they’d outbid him for them.

And of course Frieda wouldn’t turn loose anything from the Sunshine family fortune to remedy the situation.

I’d kept up with Frank and he’d given me updates on how all this was going. And after I got back from Hollywood, I’d called him and asked him how much Frieda wanted for the label.

“You want to buy Sunshine?” he asked me.

“I think it would be fun to see what you could do with Mr. Billy’s legacy,” I said. “You’ve never had the resources to properly do what you’re doing. What if we changed that?”

A week later, he had a number for me. Lock, stock, and barrel, Sunshine Records was ours for $44 million.

The catalog was worth four times that amount. The current crop of acts, next to nothing. But that classic Nashville name? Practically priceless.

I didn’t even tell Stan or Gardocki. I had the PGFI Equity Fund checkbook, so I flew to Nashville with Morris, and on a Thursday and Friday we closed the deal with Frieda.

She was desperate to sell. She knew what a mess she’d made of the place and all she wanted to do was get in her Escalade and drive out to her place in Taos with Miriam.

Miriam was her “life partner.” Miriam was also one of the folk singers who’d trashed Sunshine’s commercial viability, before she decided she didn’t want to record or perform anymore. Nobody missed her.

So I was doing the Zoom from Frank’s office on the second floor of Sunshine’s building on the corner of Broadway and 3rd Avenue, surrounded by gold and platinum records on the walls and inhaling that old Lysol smell those mid-century office buildings seem to have.

And I told the group what I’d done.

“Shit, you got us Sunshine Records?” said Stan. “My Dad was the biggest Hank Senior fan who ever lived, even though we grew up in Boston. That’s amazing.”

“How much?” Gardocki asked.

“$44 million.”

“And who are they producing now?”

“The Wilderbeasts. Loretta Blaine. The Poison Blood. A few others not so well known.”

“That’s it?” said Stan.

“Guys,” I said. “It’ll be OK. The new CEO has my unalloyed trust. He’ll turn the thing around in no time flat.”

“Agree completely,” said Pierce.

“And what’s more, we’re going to pair Sunshine with Movie King and set up a streaming concert series to cross-promote it. Harnett is working on a plan that he’ll get to us next week.”

“It’s interesting,” said Numakin. “This is going to stay a country label?”

“That’ll be its core,” I said, “but we’ll also branch out into rock and R&B.”

“No rap,” said Pierce. “Please, no rap.”

“Trust me,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.”

At least, I hoped I did.

 

Corpus Christi, Texas – April 2, 2025

“OK,” PJ said as we walked through the terminal on our way to baggage claim, “who are these people we’re going to dinner with tonight?”

“Honey, I told you already,” I said. “Ted Mirabellas and his wife Stella. He’s one of the best people I’ve ever known.”

If you’ve heard of Mirabellas, what you probably know about him is utterly wrong. That isn’t your fault, of course – you almost certainly are going of what the legacy corporate media has said about him.

If you don’t know who Ted is, here’s the skinny on him: Ted Mirabellas was one of the conservative radio hosts who began to rise up in the 1990s in the slipstream of Rush Limbaugh’s incredible ascension to a level of talk radio dominance nobody previously thought possible.

Mirabellas came out of California like Limbaugh did, but while Limbaugh’s breakout came from Sacramento, for Mirabellas it was San Diego. And while he never quite made it national the way Rush did, he had affiliates for his syndicated show in most of the country; I think they topped out over 200.

Then Mirabellas fell from grace. Why? He had the temerity to tell the truth.

It was just after 9/11, and the country was in a frenzy to do something about the fact that militant Islam had declared unrestricted war on America, and of course we went into Afghanistan and after that, Iraq.

Mirabellas was one of the few people right at the outset who had the temerity to ask what the purpose of the Iraq War was.

It wasn’t really that impolite a question. He never came out against the war. He simply asked what the argument was for the proposition that going into Iraq was in America’s interests.

For that they vilified him, and he went from 200 affiliates to a couple of dozen, despite no particular loss of audience on the stations that carried him. And then he got hit with a federal tax charge based on some discrepancy of an audit they’d put him through, and the PR hit he took turned him radioactive. Ted lost everything.

He barely managed to stay out of jail. A jury acquitted him of tax fraud. But it destroyed his career as a syndicated radio host.

And that was before Barry Omobba got elected in 2008.

Ted was one of the people who made a largescale stink over Omobba’s lineage. He didn’t claim, like many others had, that Omobba had been born in Tanzania and was therefore ineligible to be president; there was a lot of that. No, Ted instead had written a book claiming that Omobba’s father was David Patton Franklin, who at one time had been perhaps the most prominent voice in the Communist Party USA while he was plowing his way through as many white girls in Southern California as he could.

Including, Mirabellas had proven pretty conclusively, Omobba’s mom.

I don’t really want to go through all of that. We did a lot of it at Holman Media at the time, much of which went viral and not a small amount of it involved Mirabellas’ research. I’d known him before then, but he and I got to be good friends based on having him on the podcast to talk about Omobba and the truth about where he came from.

Mirabellas was the guy you weren’t allowed to listen to. But people did listen to him.

He wrote six books and made three documentary films, starting in Omobba’s first term and continuing to the present. With zero corporate support his stuff still managed to make a pretty good amount of money. And Ted Mirabellas was perhaps the single best example of somebody who proved you can’t get canceled if you don’t consent to it.

The anchor of Ted’s little media empire, the mouse that kept on roaring even during the eight years Omobba was president, was a radio show he kept alive on KEYS-AM in Corpus Christi, Texas.

When everybody else abandoned him, that station in Corpus didn’t. They were tiny, only 1,000 watts, but the owners were a big conservative family and they induced Ted to move there and become the face of the station.

So he did. And for 20 years Ted Mirabellas was the morning and afternoon drive guy on KEYS in Corpus Christi, from which he’d built a Rumble podcast that had gone increasingly viral.

And Ted and his wife settled in Portland, which was across the bridge over Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. Stella was a pro when it came to real estate, and while Ted’s career tanked, she ended up keeping them afloat by absolutely killing it in the local market.

I’m telling you all of this because Rod Nachman had called me and told me that he had the perfect piece of real estate to set Belmarsh Entertainment up with its facility in Corpus Christi. That’s what Santiago wanted to do, because he was convinced that Padre Island, the part without all the high-rise condos on it, was the best place to shoot much of his William Eaton movie, and having sound stages a couple hours away was a super-easy situation to get the film done quickly.

But Nachman complained that the owner of the property he was looking to buy in Corpus was a pain in his ass, and then he let slip the name Stella Mirabellas.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

So I called Ted. And serendipitously, Stella answered the phone.

“This can’t possibly be the Mike Holman,” she said sarcastically.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Stella, why is my guy Rod Nachman telling me you’re a disaster to negotiate with?”

She laughed.

“So now I understand this. He’s with you in this thing you’re doing where you’re making movies or something?”

“He is. And he tells me this warehouse complex you have would make for some very nice sound stages that would provide for a whole lot of jobs over there.”

“He’s probably right.”

I could hear some hubbub in the background, and then I asked Stella if she’d put me on speakerphone.

“Holman,” said Ted. “Is that you?”

“Indeed, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry to call as an antagonist, but apparently that’s where we are.”

“That isn’t my fault,” said Stella. “I’m the one who has to safeguard the Mirabellas fortune, and the complex on Navigation Boulevard can’t go for less than $2 million if I’m going to do my job.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “That complex has been empty for four years, from what I’m told. Rod’s trying to take it off your hands and build a Hollywood studio property there which would boost the whole neighborhood around it. And y’all own some of that, don’t you?”

I could hear Ted and Stella talking quietly on the speaker. But I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

“Look,” I said, “I was planning to head that way anyway, because my guy Chris Santiago is almost ready to start shooting his movie about William Eaton and the formation of the Marines over there, so why don’t we get together while I’m in town? We’ll sit down, and we’ll figure something out.”

“Definitely, Mike,” I could hear Ted say, as Stella was muttering something unintelligible but almost certainly contrary.

And that was plenty enough for me to get Melissa to book a couple of tickets for PJ and I to fly to Corpus.

“Why do you need me to go with you there?” PJ protested.

I gave her a good answer. I said it was entirely possible we would be there for a whole week and I wasn’t interested in being away from her for that long, especially after all the time apart while I was in L.A.

And she kind of cocked her head and looked at me and said, “Oh. OK, then.”

So we did the Southwest Airlines odyssey which took us from West Palm Beach to Atlanta to Dallas to Corpus Christi, and then we got an Uber from the airport to the Doubletree on the beach.

“It isn’t as pretty as the beach back home,” she said, looking out of the window.

PJ was turning into a serious homebody. Well, maybe it’s not quite that. I think, after everything she’d been through — the disaster with Trumbull getting shot and her getting blamed for it, getting caught in the middle of that war down in Guyana, including her taking a bullet when they tried to assassinate Trumbull down there, then getting stuck in London waiting for Pierce to ultimately break me out of Belmarsh and thinking I was dead at the end of that… after all of those disasters she was very, very happy to settle into our nice, safe, exclusive little community on the water in Jupiter where nothing bad ever happened and there was tennis and golf and fishing and sunbathing on the gorgeous beach a mile from the house.

Plus the dog, whose near-hopeless house-training would be in the hands of Melissa the house-sitter for the next few days.

I couldn’t blame PJ for wanting a sedentary life for a while. In fact, I did what I could to accommodate that. It was one reason why I mostly worked from home. It turned out that she liked having me around, which made me feel… pretty good, actually.

But sometimes we’d have to go somewhere. And I didn’t really want to have a grouchy wife in tow, which I was sensing I’d have.

“PJ, come on,” I said. “The aesthetic quality of the beach here is not what matters at the moment.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Well, honey, I’m sorry. I’ll try to do business on prettier beaches going forward.”

She turned from the sliding glass door in the hotel room and gave me a funny smile.

“OK,” she said, “that was a decent Holmanism.”

“I do what I can,” I said.

“So what are we here for, again? You want to buy some warehouses and turn them into a movie studio?”

“Well, sort of. Rod thinks this is a good place to set up Belmarsh Entertainment’s headquarters and production facility. The warehouses he wants to buy are perfect to be built out as sound stages, and Sentinel Construction has a big facility in Houston with those giant 3D printers they’ve got, so there’s a lot going for this.”

“And Ted the crazy radio host there owns the property?”

“Ted isn’t crazy. Actually, I think you’d really like him. But I think it’s his wife Stella who controls the real estate we’re trying to buy.”

“OK,” she sighed. “So what do you need me to do?”

“I need you to charm the pants off Stella. Make her feel like she’s an asshole if she doesn’t make a deal for that property so Nachman can get it and turn it into a movie studio Hollywood would be envious of.”

And, to my surprise, she absolutely knocked her role out of the park.

We went to dinner that first night, and PJ couldn’t have been more charming when we met the Mirabellases at this very nice steakhouse a block from the water for dinner, and she kept Stella talking when we ended up at a late-night place close to the hotel where Ted and I got into a very deep discussion about what this whole project was trying to accomplish.

“Look,” I said, “my guy Chris Santiago says that Padre Island happens to look a lot like the Libyan coast, and because of that it’s a good place to shoot our William Eaton movie. That doesn’t happen to make a difference to our conversation; we can set up Belmarsh Entertainment’s main facility anywhere. But Nachman, who you’ll meet tomorrow when he flies down here, thinks this place is a perfect anti-Hollywood. We can build out this property of yours and set up a bunch of sound stages and start cranking out IP that’ll change the culture.”

“I love all of it,” said Ted.

“Then let’s make a deal.”

“I think what’s in the way for Stella and I,” he said, “is that this is an opportunity to do more than just sell some land.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Well, specifically, it seems like you should have some interest in a film production or two that would be a big draw.”

“I take that to mean you have a film idea to pitch me.”

“Yes, I have a film,” said Ted.

“And what’s that?” I asked him.

Ted immediately launched into a discussion of Dominus Rex, an ancient Roman story that he and Stella had written.

“So Kalius,” he said, “the dominus of the province, is a closet Christian, and it turns out that the whole place turns away from Roman rule and sets up its own Christian country. Now they’ve got to fend off the Romans.”

“That could be interesting,” I said.

“What’s fun about it is that it could be a forum for the Catholic vs. Orthodox debate while still grounding this whole thing in a Christian religious narrative, but more than that it’s about how terrible it is to have to be governed by freakin’ heathens.”

“Sure,” I said, not overly convinced.

“Look, check it out. It’s historical fiction. I’m sure you’ve got dozens of screenplays…”

“Hundreds,” I said.

“OK, hundreds. Anyway, I can’t compete with all that. All I can say is this is a good story to tell.”

“I’ll certainly read it,” I said.

“You’re going to need to do more than that,” said Stella. “We want to make this movie, you want to make a film production studio. Win win.”

“So you’re not going to sell us the property unless we make this thing?”

They both just looked at me.

“Can we read the script?” said PJ.

“Of course,” said Ted. “It’s in the car.”

And five minutes later I had it in my hands.

“This thing had better be good,” I said.

“It’s good, Mike,” said Ted. “It’s actually Stella’s screenplay.”

“Not really,” she said. “It was kind of both of our idea. I did most of the writing, but Ted told me what to make the characters say.”

The conversation drifted to other things and then it was time to head back to the hotel.

And the next morning when I woke up, PJ was sitting on the balcony in her robe, her feet resting on the railing, and she was reading Stella’s screenplay.

“How long have you been up?” I asked her.

“Since dawn, I guess. I’ve been reading this. Almost finished.”

“Is it any good?”

“Let me get to the end.”

So I rolled over and went back to sleep, only to be awakened a little while later by someone with very friendly hands.

“You seem to be in a good mood,” I said. “Does this mean you like Ted’s script?”

“Well, I’ll say this — Stella’s not an awesome writer. And there are parts of it that are confusing. I don’t know anything about movies, but I think there are things in here which need a rewrite.”

“So it sucks.”

“No! It actually doesn’t. It’s an amazing story, or at least I think somebody could make it into one.”

So we went down to the beach — Nachman wasn’t due in until that afternoon — and I read the script.

And over a shrimp taco lunch at a Mexican place up the street from the Doubletree, she finally got it out of me.

“The pacing needs a lot of work,” I said. “It’s too long and some of the dialogue is wordy.”

“I kind of like the wordiness,” she said, taking a sip of Modelo.

“I dunno. I can hear Ted thundering away on the radio while I’m reading some of this. It’s not that what’s said isn’t good, but this thing is an old-school epic action flick. There isn’t going to be a lot of space in here for a long-ass Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged monologue.”

“Right, but it’s got potential, though, don’t you think?”

“I know what Rod is going to say. He’s going to lose his shit over two different period pieces as Belmarsh’s first two projects, plus this is an epic thing with Roman legions and chariots and horses and all of that and he’ll say we’ve got to be crazy trying to put on another epic thing right after Desert Odyssey.”

“But we don’t get the studio property without it.”

“Not sure that’s true. The question is, are those warehouses worth losing $20 million, or more, on a box-office bomb?”

“You think it’s a bomb?”

“I don’t know, honey. I think as is, it’s definitely a bomb. This thing has the makings of exactly what we don’t want to do, which is to trade out woke propaganda for right-wing propaganda. That isn’t going to work.”

“Well, but…”

“Honey, I’m not trying to preach to people. I’m trying to give them entertainment and fulfillment. So while I think there’s a market for a semi-biblical period piece like this, and I definitely think the churchy folks will like the idea of it, you better not bore them.”

“And you think a Christian epic thing is boring.”

“ Not necessarily, but I think this one is. But I think maybe we give it to Rod and let him have a look.”

“So this is the price of our studio property?” Nachman asked me when he finished.

“I’m not sure, Rod. From the sound of it last night, Ted and Stella want to make this thing and they’re not moving off that position.”

“This is gonna be expensive as shit to make,” he said. “Unless we just go completely AI with it.”

“You want to use AI?”

“I think if you’re making a movie about the spread of Christianity it might be a bad look if all of it’s just computer-generated deepfake stuff,” said PJ.

“I know,” said Rod. “But this is probably a $100 million, maybe a $200 million production otherwise. And I would not put $100 million into this script.”

“Can we fix it?” I asked.

“Maybe. Find me a good writer who’ll actually want to fix it and we’ll talk. But virtually all of the second act would have to go, except for the naval battle scene. That I’d keep. And the final scene, where the Roman general gets an arrow through his head… nah. We need something a lot more climactic than that.”

A little while later Santiago met us; he’d been out at the King Ranch to look at some scenery and scout for the film. And the four of us drove out to the warehouse complex to see Ted and Stella, and around the conference table in the main office at Ted and Stella’s property, Nachman laid out the problems with the script.

“It isn’t that this can’t work,” he said, “but the problem with an epic story is it’s expensive as hell to make. So your plot has to move fast, there have to be lots of visual highlights, and your dialogue had better move things along. And there’s a lot of telling in here; not enough showing.”

“Well, it’s our first time writing a screenplay,” said Ted. “We can do some rewrites if you want.”

Santiago was thumbing through the pages, an inscrutable look on his face.

“What do you think, Chris?” I asked him.

“Give me a week with this,” he said, looking up.

“You can fix it?” asked Rod.

“I can make it a Ben Hur. Be glad to.”

And just like that, we ended up with a studio complex and another big-budget movie out of that trip to Corpus Christi. Nachman and Santiago had a meeting the next day with the Sentinel Construction folks out of Houston, and before I knew it they’d fired up a laptop computer and they were designing the studio space on the RKTech app.

And coincidentally, Hank called just then.

“I’m watching my film production company design its headquarters space on your app,” I said. “It’s a little surreal that you’re calling.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Especially when I’m calling you about my movie app.”

“I don’t think I’m in a position to do anything with that until I get my hands on a film catalog,” I said. “And I’m 0-for-2 in trying to get one.”

“Well, there are developments.”

“Such as?”

“What they’re building now, you load a screenplay into it and it’ll make the movie from scratch.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious. The entire thing is AI.”

“Deepfake movies, huh?”

“Dude, this thing is beyond radical. You load in the screenplay, and it’ll break it down scene by scene, and then it will take you to storyboard mode. You can upload still shots, drawings and whatever to aid in the prompts, or you can just prompt it to create on its own, and it will literally make the movie, scene by scene. This thing is the most incredible piece of tech I’ve ever seen.”

“OK,” I said. “It does sound amazing. But how in the hell are we going to sell full-on AI movies to the public?”

“Meaning what?” Hank said.

“Meaning I’m guessing it will piss people off.”

“You know there’s a band out there getting millions of views on YouTube for their videos and the whole thing is AI,” said Hank. “People are just now realizing it.”

“You’re talking about that Velvet Sundown thing?”

“Yeah. It’s here, Mike. We just happen to have the best app for it, and it’s almost ready to go to market.”

“OK. And you want to sell it to me now, I guess.”

“I just want you to invest in it. We’re gonna need another couple of million to bring this home.”

“And you’ve put in all the money you’d like to.”

“I have a different project that I want to move forward with, so I’m a little extended. But this thing is perfect for your effort. You guys can crank out so much IP with this app that you’ll bury Hollywood.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure it’s the right way to bury Hollywood, though.”

“If nothing else it’s a production aid.”

I said I’d get back to him. And I asked Nachman and Santiago what they thought of the new CASTR iteration.

“Sounds like we’d save a fortune on CGI,” Santiago said. “But I’d want a server farm if I was going to make wide use of an app like that.”

“Why?”

“Crank out two-hour movies or 10-episode streaming series seasons with AI? Do you have any idea how much data that is?”

“I assume it’s a lot.”

“Ohhh, you bet it is.”

“Well, Pierce built one of the three biggest data centers in the world down at Liberty Point. I wonder if he’d be interested.”

“The thing about a data center, or a network of them you’re tapped into,” said Nachman, “is that if you have one now you can run a streaming service.”

“Probably wouldn’t mind a satellite network, too,” I mused.

“What are we talking about?” asked Santiago.

“Just Pierce Polk stuff,” I said. “This is the distribution side I’m still working on.”

“Y’know,” Santiago said, switching gears, “I’m pretty sure who I want in the role of Valeria Drusa.”

“Georgia,” I said. “She’s perfect, isn’t she?”

“She’ll have to go brunette, but yeah. She’s the right age, and Valeria is a statuesque, striking woman nobody can blow off, so when she gives the speech rallying the Callecians against Caesar it has to be believable.”

“Lena Headey in 300,” said Nachman.

“It will absolutely make her a star,” said Santiago.

A few minutes later, the Sentinel Construction guys were taking Nachman and Santiago through their plans for converting the Mirabellases’ warehouses into sound stages, and the bells and whistles seemed pretty cool — if incomprehensible. But the plans for the main sound stage really blew my mind — it was a floor-to-ceiling digital screen wrap, a little like The Sphere in Las Vegas but with higher resolution and more options on lighting.

“This is better than green-screen,” one of them was saying, “because the actors can see the background they’re up against with this.”

Nachman and Santiago were all smiles. I was starting to get a little concerned about budgets.