On May 21, far away in France, the 43rd Cannes Film Festival officially came to a close.
Simon did not go to Cannes this year. Only Ira Deutchman led the company team there.
Giuseppe Tornatore's second feature, A Family Journey, co-financed by Highgate Pictures and several European film companies, made it into the main competition. But compared to last year, when Simon's maneuvering helped Cinema Paradiso edge out Sex, Lies, and Videotape to win the Palme d'Or, A Family Journey came away empty-handed this time.
David Lynch's Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or amid fierce controversy and sharply divided reactions.
In the original timeline, because of the controversy, Wild at Heart could not even find a distributor and the producers had to handle the theatrical release themselves.
Simon did not like Wild at Heart, but he did not stop Deutchman from buying its North American distribution rights. In his memory, despite all the criticism, it did fairly well at the box office.
Besides Wild at Heart, Deutchman also brought back another film from Cannes that was extremely niche for North America, called Ju Dou. The North American rights to this film should have belonged to Miramax, and it even received a Best Foreign Language Film nomination at the 1991 Oscars.
From Simon's earliest Run Lola Run, to this year's Oscar juggernaut Driving Miss Daisy, plus the commercial success of films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and My Left Foot in between, Hollywood's art-house market had clearly seen a revival. Every major studio was pushing hard, and even the theatrical exhibition market had, in recent years, gradually developed more complete art-house circuits thanks to the steady run of art-film wins.
Once the giants stepped in, they naturally squeezed the independent distributors' survival space.
After getting under Miramax's nose on Cinema Paradiso, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and My Left Foot in succession, even though Daenerys Entertainment only secured distribution on one of them, the Weinstein brothers were struggling more and more in Hollywood, just as Simon predicted. At this point, Miramax was almost at the end of its rope.
It was against that backdrop that Highgate Pictures managed to secure Ju Dou, and it planned to try buying and operating more Asian films in North America going forward.
After last year's trial by fire, Simon loosened the leash on Ira Deutchman. Over the next two years, he planned to raise Highgate's annual releases to more than ten films a year, taking the industry position Miramax held in the original timeline.
Come to think of it, it was not only Miramax. Daenerys Entertainment's sudden rise was also squeezing another independent studio that should have risen this year, New Line.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally New Line Cinema's first film to break one hundred million in worldwide box office. That film established New Line's footing in Hollywood and eventually paved the way to the peak of The Lord of the Rings.
Now, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had long since become a Daenerys Entertainment project and was about to be released this summer. The entire Tolkien library was also firmly in Simon's hands.
Daenerys Entertainment's New World Pictures was also pushing into the horror field where New Line excelled. The success of the Scream series far outstripped New Line's pillar, the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. New World Pictures also successfully continued the Hellraiser and Children of the Corn series and other horror titles.
After Children of the Corn 2 opened on April 13 in the Easter season, with a production budget of three million dollars, its North American box office was already close to twenty-five million by the end of May.
After last year's Hellraiser 2, Hellraiser 3 would also be released at the end of the summer season in August.
The Children of the Corn and Hellraiser franchises could not match the Scream series in box office returns, but they could bring New World Pictures very stable revenue and profit, which in turn could provide a steady stream of funding for New World to develop other projects.
And it was not just horror. Simon had also started guiding New World Pictures president Danny Morris toward another commercial genre with huge box office potential: raunchy comedy.
In the original timeline, the 1990s saw two major comedy stars, Jim Carrey and Mike Myers, blow the raunchy comedy market wide open. Jim Carrey's Dumb and Dumber and Mike Myers's Austin Powers both achieved outstanding results, breaking one hundred million in North America. Coincidentally, both stars rose with New Line's backing.
After finishing the job of cutting Miramax off, Simon's next target was New Line.
On the Friday after Cannes ended, May 25, Hollywood's 1990 summer season officially began.
Universal's Back to the Future Part III and Paramount's Fire Birds became the opening films of the season.
After the steep drop of Back to the Future Part II relative to the first film last winter, Universal clearly did not have high confidence in Back to the Future Part III. That was why they rushed the final installment out before the summer competition fully ignited.
Still, the Back to the Future franchise was doing reasonably well.
Paramount, however, had even less confidence in Fire Birds, and that had everything to do with the two projects Paramount had "stolen" from Daenerys Entertainment last year: The Rocketeer and Fire Birds.
In the same holiday season last year, Paramount had pinned huge hopes on the comic-adaptation sci-fi film The Rocketeer, starring Tom Cruise and Meg Ryan. But because of the film itself and the impact of Batman, after a forty-five-million-dollar production budget and a twenty-million-dollar marketing spend, it only earned a bit over forty-three million at the box office, far below Paramount's expectations.
The inside story of the Rocketeer project was no secret in Hollywood. Daenerys Entertainment even took the opportunity to push a message: projects it had chosen might not succeed in someone else's hands. That idea made Daenerys Entertainment's later battles for script rights noticeably easier.
Also, to clear a release slot for The Rocketeer, Paramount had moved Oliver Stone's film, which should have been very successful, Born on the Fourth of July, into this year's Easter season. The film opened on April 20.
However, without the momentum of awards-season nominations and trophies, even though it received unanimous praise from critics, by May 25 it had only taken thirty-three million after five weeks in theaters. With its strong word of mouth, Born on the Fourth of July might still ultimately reach more than fifty million in North America on a solid long-run curve, but that result was still far below the seventy-plus million domestic total in the original timeline.
Oliver Stone had already been unhappy that Paramount dumped his film into the Easter slot. After the critical and box office performance became clear, the hot director of recent years publicly criticized Paramount in the media for severe marketing blunders, saying the film should have performed far better.
Then, once Fire Birds opened, reviews were overwhelmingly negative. This military film about U.S. Apache helicopter units not only failed to challenge the record set a few years ago by Top Gun, it did not even come close to Back to the Future Part III in the same period.
You could say Paramount had "messed up" three projects in a row.
Even though back in March, Paramount released The Hunt for Red October, the second breakout hit of 1990 after the Valentine-season fairy tale Pretty Woman, Simon knew the deep foundation Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg had built for Paramount was already crumbling away. In the original timeline, Martin Davis, the chairman of Paramount Communications, eventually paid the price for pushing out those top executives, any one of whom could have supported a major studio on their own. In the end, he had to sell Paramount to Viacom's Sumner Redstone.
Palo Alto, near San Francisco.
The date was May 26. While juggling the DC film universe and Daenerys Entertainment's other business, Simon had also been flying to Silicon Valley frequently lately. He rarely stayed for a full week like last time, usually returning the same day.
Today was Saturday. Simon flew up to San Francisco to inspect the internet cafe project led by America Online.
Before this, Westeros had finished reshaping its holdings in Cisco, America Online, and Ygritte.
The capital injection into America Online was fully completed, and Westeros's stake rose to 75%.
At the same time, Westeros completed the purchase of a combined 42.5% stake from several other Cisco shareholders at a three-hundred-million-dollar valuation. After the transaction, Westeros paid $127.5 million to raise its Cisco stake to 57.5%.
As for Ygritte, after a year of operations, Simon's initial funding had been used up, and Ygritte clearly still had not generated revenue sufficient to maintain daily operations.
Westeros reinvested into Ygritte at a twenty-million-dollar valuation, and the amount was also twenty million.
Simon had originally given Tim Berners-Lee 10% of Ygritte. In this round, Simon did not deliberately try to squeeze Tim's holdings. He even proposed lending Tim money at zero interest so he could maintain his stake.
But Tim Berners-Lee, conservative by temperament, did not want to suddenly take on two million dollars in debt, so his stake was diluted down to 5%. [TL/N: STUPID MF!]
Westeros's stake in Ygritte therefore rose to 95%.
On the personnel side.
John Chambers, previously at IBM, officially joined Cisco at Simon's invitation, temporarily taking the role of company president. Simon planned for Chambers to take over once Cisco's current CEO, John Morgridge, reached the end of his contract at the end of next year.
Carol Bartz from SUN, and Jeff Bezos, whom Simon had pulled early from Wall Street into the internet industry, quickly stepped into their roles and had already begun taking control of Ygritte's daily operations.
As for America Online, its management team remained unchanged for now.
However, over the past month, thanks to steadily rising exposure, aggressive marketing, and the official launch of Ygritte's graphical browser and portal business, America Online's performance saw a small surge.
In just one month, America Online added 38,000 users, pushing its total past 100,000.
In reality, this was also the result of the accumulated base of American PC users since the seventies. The foundation had already been there.
In Simon's memory, once the internet industry truly exploded, America Online's user base jumped from a few hundred thousand in 1993 to ten million by 1996 in only three years.
While bringing in new users, Steve Case also efficiently upgraded America Online's existing users for free. Keeping some of the original online game functions, America Online reinstalled modems and the IE browser better suited for accessing the Web.
The next goal for Tim Berners-Lee's technical team was to further improve IE's dynamic pages and graphics display so that America Online's existing online game functions could be integrated into IE.
To achieve that goal, Simon had already recruited another computer language development team from SUN before he even brought in Carol Bartz.
In the original timeline, this previously obscure team under SUN would, in the following years, release the more powerful Java language, and then go on to release JavaScript, a scripting language that dramatically improved web page display.
To secure the team, Simon made an agreement with SUN. The team's expenses would be covered by Ygritte. The patent rights for Java, as originally planned, would still belong to SUN, but the patent rights for the web-embedded scripting language JavaScript would belong to Ygritte.
Although JavaScript would still need about a year to be fully refined, with support from the IE team, many functions had already been realized ahead of time.
The Ygritte portal site, which seemed to appear almost overnight, and its features such as online news, email, personal homepages, and forums, had been drawing more and more attention from the media and the public.
Inside a storefront on a commercial street near Ygritte.
Simon, Tim Berners-Lee, Carol Bartz, John Chambers, Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, and a whole crowd of others gathered there.
If someone could have taken a photo at this moment, they would discover a few years later just how formidable this lineup truly was.
This storefront was the model location for the internet cafe concept led by America Online, the result of nearly a month of nonstop work after the AOL team moved into Silicon Valley.
Compared to the smoky, dim internet cafes Simon remembered, this place could actually be called a "bar."
Simon's internet cafe plan was not meant to make money. It was meant to promote the products of America Online, Ygritte, and even Cisco. So the cafe used a relaxed layout closer to a traditional coffee shop.
This model location was a 50 square meter space with only twenty brand-new IBM desktop computers installed with Windows 3.0. Some were arranged in paired seats for couples, some were tucked into small private spaces divided by partitions, and some were lined up in a row that encouraged conversation.
It was not just for going online. The cafe also offered drinks and snacks, doing its best to create a relaxing, comfortable atmosphere.
As for pricing, Simon would have liked to run it as a subsidized operation, purely as brand promotion.
But since America Online had registered a dedicated subsidiary brand, Internet Bar, and also brought in IBM as a 40% equity investor, they still had to consider revenue and profit. So the internet price was set at three dollars per hour for now, with drinks and snacks charged separately.
American movie tickets had only recently pushed past four dollars. Given that America Online's cafes were more comfortable than a theater, three dollars per hour was still on the low side. The cafes would likely end up relying on drinks and snacks, the add-ons, for profit, much like many theaters did.