Chapter 120

Phil spent the rest of the day with Marc Edmonds. Edmonds’ grandfather had been one of the initial investors in Lambswool back in the 1950s and Edmonds held an abiding love of the man and, although the family had long divested itself of the stock, Lambswool Studios.

“My grandmother worked here,” Edmonds explained as the pair ate in the canteen. “Grandpa was 30 years old when he moved out here. He made his money in oil after World War II. Grandma was an aspiring actress and, as she tells it, her aspirations didn’t offset an appalling lack of talent.”

Phil chuckled. He could see his grandmother telling the story.

“When I was a kid, my parents travelled a lot,” Edmonds continued. “My father inherited his father’s oil business so he was gone a lot. That meant I spent a lot of time with both sets of grandparents. I was 16 when a big company bought us out. You know how that goes. I’ve read a lot about Barton Holdings in the past few months. Except the oil company didn’t handle the takeover the way your family would have. Everyone affiliated with Edmonds Petroleum was let go within a year. It didn’t matter if they were a month from a pension or if they did their job better than the person brought in to replace them. If you knew my father, they fired you. I guess they didn’t want divided loyalties because my father was among the first pushed aside.”

“I’m sorry,” Phil said.

“They promised him a vice presidency in one of their subsidiaries,” Edmonds continued. “They didn’t want him around our Houston office because that would be awkward. Someone else was in charge. They moved him to Galveston and we packed up and moved with him. I was going into my sophomore year of high school and I was not pleased. We no more than got settled into Galveston and they found a reason to let him go.”

“Like I did with the people today,” Phil said, frowning slightly.

“I view that differently,” Edmonds said with a shrug. “I mean, I was a teenager so I don’t have the whole story but I’ve heard enough of it to draw my own conclusions. They wanted Edmonds but they didn’t want him. They couldn’t have one without the other. I’m not sure how much you know about oil production or Texas in general, but Galveston is on the Gulf. A lot of their drilling is offshore. A week or two after my dad took over there, one of the rigs caught fire and six or seven men were hurt pretty badly. Dad didn’t even have a chance to go over the safety records to see if he could find a cause before the environmentalists went crazy.

“The fire caused a pipeline leak and a lot of crude was spilled into the Gulf. I’m not saying the environmental groups were wrong to be upset. I think they were upset at the wrong people. It took six months for the company to conclude its investigation and, at the end, they let my dad and several others go. Dad already felt like hell because people were hurt and because of the spill. This sort of drove him over the edge. We stayed in Galveston for the rest of the school year. My mother and father divorced and I came to live with my grandparents. My grandfather had been opposed to the sale of the company in the first place but he did what he could to help my folks out. In the end, it didn’t matter. My dad was broken. He couldn’t find another upper-level management job. My mom enjoyed the money more than the companionship, I guess. The sale of Edmonds had left us well-off but not nearly as well-off as she thought we should be. She left him and Dad hit the bottle pretty hard. He pretty well stayed in the bottle for the next 10 years.”

“Damn,” Phil said, shaking his head.

“In a way, you’re lucky,” Edmonds said. “Today, it’s a lot easier to discern someone’s intentions. I mean, Christ, a simple background check costs $20 but it gives you a list of addresses and phone numbers for whoever you’re looking at. A few phone calls and you know all about the person. That is, if they don’t post their entire life on a social media site on their own.”

“And if you miss something, the media will do their best to ferret it out,” Phil added.

“In your case, yeah,” Edmonds agreed. “My family wasn’t considered extremely wealthy, not by Texas oil standards. Still, Grandpa had enough cash to invest in a few things. Lambswool was one of them. He didn’t hold a major stake or anything but he got a kick out of telling the folks back home he owned part of a movie studio.”

“I was telling Hailey the other day that a lot of Lambswool’s investors own stock for that very reason,” Phil agreed. He found himself liking Marc Edmonds, despite the fact that Phil had very little use for attorneys – Hailey’s father excepted. “You still feel a connection to this place, though. I could tell it from the way you spoke about it last fall.”

“I worked here in various capacities from the time I was a kid,” Edmonds said. “My first paying job was handing out towels in the men’s room. That was my grandfather’s mantra: You start small and work your way up. I think that was a lesson he forgot to teach my father so he made sure he taught it to me. I worked the security booth out front while I was in college. I stayed out here with them after high school and went to UCLA. When it was time for law school, my grandfather sold the stock here to help me pay for it. I didn’t know until I’d finished. He loved this place but the stock was the most valuable thing in his portfolio so he sold it. He was tickled when I got hired in the legal department here. That was back in the good old days.”

“You’ve been here since 1994, is that right?” Phil asked.

“I finished law school in ‘92,” Edmonds confirmed. “I got a job working with one of the agencies here in town.”

“Agencies?” Phil asked.

“We have several large law firms in the city that do nothing but represent actors, singers and athletes,” Edmonds explained. “That was my first job. I worked for one of the bigger firms in the city. It was a terrible job. I finished top of my class in law school and the best job I could find was putting together contracts for some D-list celebrities.”

“So you didn’t actually represent the actors?” Phil asked. He had no idea how the system worked. That was why there were lawyers.

“Nope,” Edmonds said with a small smile. “It’s probably a pretty good thing. I had met some of the TV personalities that used to do shows here. That was before we branched out to features in the 1990s. Most of them were pretty decent people. I guess it was a different generation. The TV stars from the 1970s and 1980s didn’t advertise their drug habits or marital infidelities.”

“The only real media that focused on those things back then were the tabloids,” Phil pointed out. “Now, celebrity dysfunction is a cottage industry.”

“True,” Edmonds said. “Still, the people back then just seemed, I don’t know, more authentic. Maybe it was because I was a kid. I still have an autographed baseball cap from Steve Sellers. Do you remember that private detective show he was on?”

Phil shook his head. The show had been off the air for almost 15 years by the time he was born. Most recently, the guy played a crime boss on a network television show.

“He was so nice,” Edmonds said as he drifted down memory lane. “I used to sneak on the set of ‘Paradise Resort.’ That was considered a risqué show because all the women were bikinis. I was must have been 10 or 11 when Anna Stahl caught me. I thought she was going to kill me. The set was closed, you know, because they didn’t want a bunch of pervs showing up and trying to take pictures of her. Instead, she just laughed and got me on the approved list. She also gave me one of her calendars for Christmas. My mother had a fit when she saw it.”

Phil couldn’t picture the matronly actress from another network show that was geared to teenagers being a sex symbol but he smiled politely.

“So, yeah,” Edmonds said with a grin. “I guess you could say I feel a connection to this place.”

Phil nodded his head in agreement.

“That’s why I’d like to name you CEO in September,” Phil said.

“CEO?” Edmonds asked, this time shaking his head. “Phil, I have no idea of how to run a movie studio.”

“So you’ve never sat down and thought about how you’d do things differently if you were in charge?” Phil asked.

“Well, sure,” Edmonds admitted. “Anyone who has worked anywhere has thought that but not to the point where I can say I’d actually be able to do any of the things I’ve thought of.”

“I’ve done a great deal of research on Lambswool in the past few months,” Phil said. “I’ve determined Lewis Steinmetz’s biggest flaw. You know he worked here for close to 20 years before he moved up to CEO.”

Edmonds nodded. He had known Lewis Steinmetz since the mid-1980s when the man was just a casting director at the studio.

“He spent so much time theorizing about how he’d do things that he had no clue what to do when the theory didn’t meet the reality,” Phil said. “The times have changed. You’ve seen that. Shows that were considered sexy in the 1980s would be considered blasé now. Lewis wanted Lambswool to be edgy. He wanted to be on the cusp of the industry’s next wave. The problem is that we don’t have the capital to take those risks. ‘Iconoclast’ is edgy for a television show but it will be three or four more years before the industry responds to the audience ‘Iconoclast’ has developed. By that time, our show will be history. I think we can both agree to that.”

“Reluctantly, but yes,” Edmonds said. “Many people tried to point out the flaws in Lewis’s logic. We knew going in that we had no real way to pay for the show. Lewis seemed to think that the money would take care of itself.”

“His problem is that he involved himself solely on the TV side,” Phil said. “He didn’t have a grasp on what was happening on the feature film side. I honestly think it took him by surprise when he found out that the shit we’ve been putting out for the past two or three years wasn’t making money.”

“It did,” Edmonds confirmed. “But that still doesn’t make me qualified to run a studio.”

“You see the big picture,” Phil said. “And most importantly, you’ve never lied to me. Sure, you’ve told me a lot of stuff I didn’t want to hear but you never once glossed over the facts. When I had a question, you answered it or you directed me to someone who would answer it. The reason I kept Lewis on was to make him pay for his sins – greed, arrogance. But I also kept him on so I could replace him eventually. Just as importantly, you’re willing to make the hard decisions. Look, let’s be realistic. I’m entering my junior year of college. I am not old enough to drink or rent a car. No one is going to take me seriously – unless I force them to take me seriously. I have neither the time nor the inclination to handle this right now.

“I will continue to hold the reins for another six weeks but eventually I’m going to have to let them go. I would prefer someone I trust take them up but if I have to go outside and bring someone else in I suppose I will. But that money will have to come from projects that deserve to be completed. We will have to move all of our independent films off the books. We won’t be able to finance any more documentaries like the one on the Civil War a few years ago that got us back on the map in Hollywood. I know the filmmaker wants to do another on the Korean War in a year or two and he’d like to do it here. But if I have to continue to pay Lewis Steinmetz and someone else, it’s not going to happen. It also means that ‘Iconoclast’ will be done without even a movie to wrap up the storylines. I don’t want to see that happen.”

“Nor do I,” Edmonds said. “Not to be mercenary but I would expect a salary increase if I’m going to take on more responsibility.”

“And you’ll get one,” Phil said. “It won’t be $45 million a year but I would be willing to offer you a percentage of stock equal to what your grandfather owned. I believed he owned 3 percent.”

“Stock options in a company that loses money aren’t very enticing,” Edmonds pointed out.

“That is the fatal flaw in my proposal,” Phil admitted. “But I don’t see much hope of Lambswool surviving 10 more years if I don’t have you or someone like you at the helm.”

“I’d like some time to think it over,” Edmonds said.

“I understand,” Phil replied. “I will give you a call in a couple of weeks. If you have questions, you can reach me anytime you want.”

It was almost time to leave for their dinner reservations by the time Phil made his way back to the hotel. He and Marc Edmonds had visited with the few executives left at Lambswool to explain their revised duties and met with Lewis Steinmetz to prioritize projects already moving forward.

He had ridden back to the hotel in silence as he pondered what in the hell he would do if Marc Edmonds decided to remain at the head of the legal department.

Hailey was already back by the time Phil walked into the room. She was bustling around trying to find space to store all of the purchases she’d made that day.