Outside, the night was deep. Inside, the lights were bright.
Ryan sat behind his desk, working steadily through a specialized book on fund management. When he hit a key point, he paused to take notes. Every now and then he would stop to think, turning over the differences between what he'd known across the Pacific and how things worked here.
There was no getting around it. The gap between China and the United States ran deeper than habits and customs. Society, culture, law — all of it was different. A person from across the Pacific had to change more than just his daily routines to function properly here.
Fortunately, Ryan had inherited most of Anderson's memories, and so far nothing had gone seriously wrong because of a gap in his understanding.
When he reached the section on film funds, he set the fund management book aside and picked up his copy of California Entertainment Law to cross-reference.
He had already worked his way through both that and the main Hollywood industry regulations. He didn't have them memorized, but he had a solid general picture.
Here, just as everywhere, the rules were clear on paper and considerably more flexible in practice. These legal and industry frameworks kept the Hollywood machine running and gave it much of its energy, but the industry's entire history was also full of people finding ways around them. Understanding the rules properly was the first step toward knowing which ones bent.
That said, Ryan's main reason for reading was still to learn. Not just to find loopholes.
He had made two trips to USC recently and tracked down Anderson's former mentor, Professor Johnson, through whom he'd obtained a stack of highly specialized texts.
Johnson was approaching sixty, an academic who had spent years working in the industry before moving into teaching at the School of Cinematic Arts. He had real practical experience, not just theory, and he represented a substantial network of professional connections.
Anderson had effectively abandoned this relationship, too focused on charging ahead on his own terms to see the value in it. Ryan had picked it back up.
He was clear-eyed about one thing: he was not a genius, and Anderson hadn't been a super-genius either. Even combining everything both of them brought, there were still plenty of gaps. Opportunity had brought him back to 1998, and it was a genuinely extraordinary one. But opportunity without ability only carried you so far.
Back home, Ryan had been capable of running a departmental team. Anything larger would have been genuinely challenging. Coming back hadn't added to his abilities. Or not entirely — Anderson's screenwriting instincts had transferred, and those were real. The script for The Purge had gone through three revisions and was mostly where it needed to be. Whether it needed more changes after a director was on board remained to be seen.
Speaking of directors: was the one that agent had mentioned tonight actually reliable? He wouldn't know until he met the person. He put the question aside and turned back to the page.
After finishing the section on film funds, he picked up a book on producing and kept reading.
Hollywood ran on a producer-led model. The producer was the center of gravity on any project. Independent, lower-budget productions had fewer formal requirements, fewer union rules to navigate. The Purge was a non-union project, which simplified things, but it still wasn't simple to operate properly.
Ryan finally set the book down at midnight.
After long stretches of reading, the mind needed something else. He usually turned to the internet.
In North America in the late nineties, internet penetration was already well established.
He pulled up Netflix's website. Just as he remembered, it was a small, early-stage operation. The site offered rental services for VHS tapes and the newly emerging DVD format, but the catalog was tiny. North America's copyright system was well developed, and without proper licensing agreements Netflix couldn't offer much. For the company to grow, it first had to solve the content problem.
Ryan thought for a moment, then opened his email and sent Mary a brief work note asking her to look specifically into Netflix when she got in tomorrow morning. Then he closed the browser and opened his blog.
Blogs weren't new. This relatively primitive form of online self-publishing had existed for a while, though it would gain considerably more traction after 2000. Ryan had set one up early on as a backup — a fallback if everything else went wrong. What he was currently doing carried real risk, and having another path available was just good sense.
Publishing fiction through a blog was something North American writers would do in the years ahead. The author of The Martian was one example.
Ryan had actually considered The Martian and ruled it out quickly. If a novel made a strong impression, you remembered the main arc, but the specific details faded. The Martian in particular leaned hard into hard science — physics, biology, aerospace — areas where Ryan had almost nothing to work with. He didn't have the time to research his way into that kind of material. It wasn't possible.
Turning future films into novels was hard across the board, and time-consuming in a way he couldn't afford.
So Ryan had settled on something he considered genuinely captivating but relatively straightforward to approach: Fifty Shades of Grey.
No complex business mechanics, no specialized technical knowledge, no intricate plotting. Its main appeal was the romance, the wish fulfillment, and the sadomasochistic elements. Those were its core. The challenge was more about execution than research.
His plan was to write a proper outline and setting, then put in half an hour to an hour each day on the actual writing.
There was no guarantee it would succeed, but even as a failed project it would be useful screenwriting practice.
One immediate issue: he was writing this as a man, and the original was written from a female first-person perspective. He couldn't manage that. Describing events through the eyes of a female protagonist in that kind of story would feel genuinely wrong to write.
Since he was committing to this, he was going to write it from the male lead's perspective.
The male lead could take some inspiration from his own situation: a handsome, well-dressed man who takes over a small struggling company and fights his way up to a net worth measured in the tens of billions, becoming a genuinely prominent figure. Behind the success and the polish, a private appetite for sadomasochistic games.
With that kind of money and that kind of standing, there was no reason to limit the story to a single female lead. Several women, each with their own complicated history with the male lead. Some tangled in love and conflict with him. Perhaps some with each other.
The explicit content still needed careful handling. North American publishing was open by most standards, but there was a line between literary frankness and something that belonged on a different kind of shelf entirely.
After sketching out the male lead's profile and roughing in the main female characters, Ryan started working on the central plot. His brows pulled together steadily as he went.
He had discovered a problem. This novel seemed simpler than hard science fiction or a twisting thriller, but it actually required specialized knowledge of its own.
The sadomasochistic element wasn't just a backdrop. It was the whole point. And it was a genuinely specific subject. How was he supposed to write about it convincingly with no firsthand knowledge at all? Could what he produced be actually engaging?
Should he set aside time to watch relevant material? Take a trip to the San Fernando Valley? Or something else entirely?
Ryan rubbed his temples. He set the question aside for now and focused on building out the outline and the main plot structure. When he got to the specific scenes in question, he would figure it out then. One way or another.
Everything was in service of the larger goal.
For several days running, Ryan spent his daytime hours on company business and his evenings writing the outline for Fifty Shades of Grey after recharging. He also had dinner with a smaller agent and arranged details around the use of extras on the production.
When the new week started, he got a call from the agent named Edward. He would be coming by Starlight Entertainment the next day, bringing his director client.
The director's name was James Wong.
The name rang a faint bell. Ryan's first thought was the Chinese-American director behind Saw, but that didn't quite fit. That James was almost certainly still in school. He couldn't already be in Hollywood with multiple X-Files episodes to his name.
He would find out when they met.