For a full two weeks, Ryan spent most of his time trying to understand the world he'd landed in, with a focus on two things: the internet and Hollywood.
If he was going to get out of this hole, he had to work in the areas he knew best. But before he could do anything useful, he needed a clear picture of where things stood.
Hollywood was pretty much what he remembered. After two collaborations with the future governor of California, James Cameron had spent years building a massive ship-shaped production. That ship had just sailed, but the current global box office record still belonged to Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park.
The tech world was the same story. Steve Jobs had returned to Apple about a year ago. Cisco and Yahoo stock prices were climbing steadily. If he remembered right, the bubble wouldn't burst until the turn of the millennium.
This was the best possible time to be alive, if you had the money to take advantage of it. Internet fortunes were being made right now, and the window wouldn't stay open forever.
To catch that ride, he needed startup capital.
The problem was that Ryan didn't just have no money. He was deep in debt. Over the past two weeks he'd looked into loans and other financing options, but credit information in the US was thorough and well-organized, and Starlight Entertainment's repayment record was poor. Regular banks were out of the question. Even the private lenders he contacted didn't think much of him.
Since Starlight was a member of the Producers Guild, Mary had reminded him to apply for funding through the guild's film and television industry assistance plan. The program was meant to support guild members in exactly this kind of situation.
The guild was a trade organization, though, not a union. Real power sat with the medium and large companies. The application went in and nothing came back.
With no outside help available, he was on his own.
Ryan turned his attention back to Hollywood. Movies were the only real asset he had. He made a point of visiting several industry organizations to get a better feel for how things worked on the ground, and every evening he went back through Starlight's history, looking at what had worked and what hadn't.
None of it changed the basic problem. You couldn't do much without money.
He sat in the office one afternoon, slowly turning his pen in his fingers. What was the fastest way to bring in cash? That was the only question that mattered right now.
He stopped twirling the pen and wrote a single word in his notebook: movies.
From his years in the industry, he could list a long string of future Hollywood hits, not just the titles but most of the key details. That knowledge had value. The question was how to use it.
Anderson had real screenwriting ability. Ryan had noticed that going through the kid's memories. But he set that aside for now. New writers pitching spec scripts rarely got much attention, and even when they did, the money wasn't significant. Directing was out entirely. He'd never directed, Anderson hadn't studied it, and he had no budget anyway.
Both the senior and junior Andersons had always worked as investors and producers, hiring directors and crews from outside. That was the model Ryan understood.
He ran a hand through his hair. The trouble with films was the timeline. From investment to profit, two or three years was completely normal. By the time a movie he produced started making real money, the tech boom would already be over. There'd be no ride left to catch.
So making a film and waiting on box office returns wasn't the answer. But could a film project be used to generate cash in a different way?
Ryan set the pen down and thought it through carefully. Hollywood projects were often financed through pre-sales. A film didn't need to start shooting before its overseas distribution rights could be sold. The money from those pre-sales then funded production. It was a standard model.
The problem was that it only worked for mid-to-large distributors, or productions attached to known names, or at minimum with a professional insurance company providing a third-party guarantee. With Starlight's reputation, the chance of pulling off a legitimate pre-sale was zero.
And using a domestic project to funnel financing for other purposes carried serious legal risk.
He picked the pen back up.
Then something clicked.
This was the nineties. Information didn't flow the way it would twenty years from now. For people outside the film industry, especially people overseas, Hollywood still had a certain mystique. Very few people outside North America really understood how it worked.
He could establish a real film project and go looking for overseas financing.
Ryan's mind went immediately to a fraud case he'd read about in his previous life. A company in Yantai had operated under the cover of a Hollywood film production outfit and raised tens of millions illegally from investors who didn't know better.
There'd been another story too. A con artist posing as a producer had managed to pull in millions in investment right here in Hollywood and had somehow ended up close friends with several well-known celebrities in the process.
So it was possible. Clearly possible.
Ryan wasn't going to go back across the Pacific. He still had that much conscience.
And running something like that inside Hollywood wasn't right either. It would destroy any chance of building something real here long-term.
But somewhere in between those two lines, there was space to work.
He started thinking it through more carefully. Starlight Entertainment had been operating for nearly ten years. It had produced a library of video titles and held a guild membership. Opening a new film project was completely normal for a company like this. Nothing about it would raise eyebrows.
So: create a legitimate film project and use it to raise outside financing. Keep the actual production budget well below whatever figure was presented to investors. Not fraud exactly, but not entirely clean either. Somewhere in the gray area that Hollywood had always been comfortable with.
To make it work, he needed a target.
The right target had to have money, limited knowledge of how Hollywood actually operated, and limited recourse if things went sideways. Someone the American legal system wouldn't bend over backward to protect.
He also needed the project itself to be packaged convincingly. It had to look real at a glance, because it was real. The project would be genuine. The gap would just be between the stated budget and the actual one.
All of that still required startup capital. It kept coming back to the same problem.
Ryan set it aside and moved on to the next question: a backup plan.
If this didn't work, what then?
He wasn't going anywhere. He had to live in North America for the foreseeable future, which meant he needed options.
He looked back through his notebook and his eyes stopped on the word blog.
Anderson had real screenwriting instincts. If everything else fell apart, Ryan could serialize fiction online and submit to publishers. He'd absorbed enough of the bones of future bestsellers and hit films to put something together. It wasn't guaranteed, but it was a path.
And if all else failed, there was always Anderson's version of Fifty Shades.
Once he'd settled on a direction, Ryan was the kind of person who moved toward it and didn't look back.
The film project needed a script, and the scale had to be believable for a company like Starlight. Nothing too big. Something that fit its track record.
Action films were dominant right now. But action was expensive and slow to produce, and that didn't suit what he was trying to do.
B-movies were a better fit, and they were exactly what Starlight had always made. That consistency would help with credibility.
B-grade horror specifically made sense. Horror was one of the few genres that stayed relatively stable no matter what was happening in the world. Budget-friendly, quick to produce, and easy to package.
He'd need to pick something that wouldn't risk offending whoever he was going to approach for money.
Which meant he needed to settle on a target first.
Across the Pacific was off the table. Europe and Australia weren't ideal either. Their film industries were developed enough that the people with money knew too much.
Then his eyes landed on something he'd circled two weeks ago.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority from the UAE had set up an office in Los Angeles.
Abu Dhabi wasn't just wealthy. The people running that money probably didn't know much about how Hollywood actually worked on the inside. And Arabs, fairly or not, did not enjoy a sympathetic image in the American legal system, which limited their options if something went wrong.
More importantly, if he was remembering correctly, Abu Dhabi had been sitting on enormous oil wealth since the mid to late nineties and was actively looking for ways to build international recognition and influence. They wanted a seat at the table. That made them motivated.
There was also the question of existing tensions. Jewish influence in Hollywood was significant, and the way Arab characters were written in American films was consistently unflattering. It was hard to say the two facts were unrelated.
Ryan wrote all of it down. He'd verify the details before committing to anything.
Then he frowned. Abu Dhabi was on the other side of the world. Getting there to pitch anything, even if the pitch went well, would cost money he didn't have right now.
He needed startup capital first. Everything else came after that.
Ryan reached for the intercom. "Mary. Set up a meeting with Blockbuster. I want to talk about selling the video rights for Desperate Survival."
That film hadn't made him anything at the box office. But it could still make him something.