Chapter 51

Three years later I was sitting in a business meeting, for the first time in many years. It had taken quite a lot of work to get to this point but I was a whole lot more prepared this time, than I had been years ago. Again, it was my company and I had people working for me. For instance, I had an elderly gentleman playing the role of our CEO. Hey, we would be working against producers who were familiar working with actors and actresses. Besides, I wanted to see if the opponent had done their homework. As to what was I selling? Simply the most 'state-of-the-art' digital special effects. Anything you could imagine could be produced, only much cheaper and faster than what it would be otherwise. Natural-looking textures, effects and even skin. All of this was patented and ready to run.

OK, someone with much greater resources would probably top us within two years, but not now. That is why we were here, now. The company we started the negotiations with was probably not the one we would be working with, but we had to start somewhere. I had done MY homework.

A bit later, it didn't look much better for them. They made us wait in a lousy lobby for half an hour without any explanation, and once we started the only word to correctly describe our counterpart would be slimy. Before we started he reserved our supposed to be CEO and started telling us about himself and his experiences with Hollywood stars. I mostly ignored him but suddenly I started listening.

" ... started with her at theater on the East coast. She really was a tight piece of ass, and it took me two months and some chemical help to get past those defenses of hers, but it was well worth it. But the theater turned out a bit boring compared to movies, so I moved out here. Oh, boy, you cannot believe what those little tramps are ready do, here, and quite willingly."

My 'CEO' looked almost disgusted, but suddenly I was much more interest in doing business with this slimeball.

Both my lawyer - he was a very real one - and my CEO were shocked when they found out my interest to continue negotiating, here. We had a short private meeting in which I nailed my conditions to both of them and my lawyer started to look grim.

"Noel, are you sure about this?"

"Absolutely, I've done my homework. The truth is that they have nothing. They want to use us in getting some money and more contracts. Just make the contract airtight. We can use this time in finalizing our product."

I had it right. The slimeball took it all. Hook, line and sinker. Now they had a month to show us the script, to give us accurate initial images to start the rendering and to show the distribution plan.

Of course they failed in all three parts. They did get the publicity, yes. But after three months, they could not send us the manuscript, nor a single image to start with. They claimed they were 'negotiating' about a distribution contract. We had very politely reminded them multiple times about breaking the contract. Then we took them to court. The slimeball was out of business, and once he was down there were others who also accused him of breaking his promises. There was something else, too. Some of those people were underaged females. It seemed that his next production would have quite a different audience.

Okay, it had been personal. I never claimed that I was an absolutely good person.

Meanwhile, we had negotiated another deal. Surprisingly, there seemed to be no hard feelings from the other companies, that we had caused one of the smaller production companies to go down. Instead there were some people who came to thank us ... off the record, of course.

Now we were really in business, and doing something. Both of my ladies teased me that I was like a little boy, but certainly I was not. They didn't complain, since I mostly worked from home. I was the designated cook of the family and did my part in taking care of Luke. Hell, I almost had to fight so that I could play 'boy's games' with him. Later on, my ladies complained that I had been a bad boy and that they had to punish me. Well, I took it like a man. Only Katy and Eve complained that we'd had to move to a bigger house, just so they could sleep at nights. Of course, they still grinned like crazy.

Melissa would soon be out of college and she had informed us that there would be only one graduation present she would accept, and I was supposed to deliver it. Once delivered we would have less than nine months to look at a new, bigger house. Do I need to say that I was outvoted when I tried to discuss this? And all the future attempts to affect things would just result in me getting punished, again. But hey, a man has to try.

Edited by Jmadd and JIM7