The morning sun lit up the road, washing over storefronts and street signs packed with English letters. Ryan stood in front of a newsstand, still smelling of alcohol, staring hard at a copy of the Los Angeles Times.
The date on the paper read January 5, 1998.
He rubbed his haggard face and ran a hand through his messy hair. He'd already figured it out when he came to in a bar at dawn. Now, standing here in the morning sun, he was completely sure.
He'd come from across the Pacific, more than twenty years in the future, to Los Angeles in 1998.
Burbank, more precisely. A satellite city just outside Los Angeles.
"Morning, Mr. Anderson." The newsstand owner greeted him first. "A newspaper today?"
Ryan nodded, bought a copy of the Times, and walked toward the entrance of the small office building next door.
"Isn't that Ryan Anderson?" A plump middle-aged woman stepped out from behind the newsstand. "Look at how down and out he is. What a waste. Old Anderson spent ten years building that company and his son threw it all away."
The newsstand owner pulled at her arm. "Lisa, stop it."
"It's the truth, isn't it?" she grumbled.
Every word reached Ryan clearly. He ignored them. They weren't wrong. The previous owner of this body had left behind a real mess.
He stopped in front of the office building and found the name among a row of hanging plaques. Starlight Entertainment. He didn't go in right away, just stood there looking at the gold lettering.
The story was simple. He'd gone out drinking with an advertising client back home, stumbled back to his place, and woken up in a bar in Burbank as a twenty year old named Ryan Anderson. Whether it was the similar name or just bad luck, he had no idea.
He'd spent the hours between dawn and now sorting through the memories that came with the body. They arrived in pieces at first, then in full scenes, until he had a clear enough picture.
He'd read enough transmigration stories to accept the situation without too much trouble. His old life hadn't given him much reason to fight going back. A decent job, no real ties, no one waiting. He'd been a lone wolf across the Pacific, and now he was the same kind of lone wolf on this side of it.
Ryan closed his eyes for a moment and let the last of the memories settle.
Ryan Anderson. One sentence said it all: ambitions as high as the sky, but luck as thin as paper.
The kid had come from a good family. His father, Old Anderson, was a millionaire who started Starlight Entertainment back in the early eighties. The company made direct to video B-movies, the kind that filled shelves at Blockbuster and never got reviewed by anyone. Old Anderson was careful and conservative. He never touched a project with a budget over a million dollars. The company stayed small and mostly unknown, but it stayed alive, and the family had done well.
Then, a little over a year ago, Old Mr. and Mrs. Anderson died in a landslide during a hiking trip in Utah. The company and all the family assets passed to their son.
Ryan Anderson was nineteen. He dropped out of USC film school and took over.
He had big ideas. He wanted Starlight to become something real, not just a supplier of cheap video content. He threw out everything his father had built and started from scratch. He pulled together the company's cash, his personal savings, the insurance money from his parents' deaths, mortgaged the family home, and came up with six million dollars total. He put it all into one production: a bloody action film called Desperate Survival.
It wasn't a crazy idea at the time. This was 1997. Nicolas Cage had done Con Air and Face/Off in the same year and both had made a lot of money. Action films were selling well.
But Desperate Survival opened in early October and was pulled from theaters after only four weeks. North American box office: eight hundred thousand dollars. After the distributor took its fees, Starlight's share was almost nothing. The overseas rights went unsold.
The money ran out. Banks started calling. Staff started leaving. And Ryan Anderson, the real one, the nineteen year old with the big dreams, had just broken down. He'd been drinking his way through Burbank ever since.
Until last night, when someone else woke up in his place.
'He's not Larry Ellison. But he still dropped out of school and bet everything on one film.'
Ryan almost felt sorry for the kid. The talent had been real. The script for Desperate Survival was Anderson's own work and it wasn't bad. But having talent and having good judgment are two different things, and Anderson had one without much of the other.
From Ryan's experience, the right way to work in film was never to risk your own money. You used other people's capital. You spread the risk. You built slowly enough to survive your mistakes.
That was easier said than done, of course. Especially from where he was standing right now.
Ryan had come up the hard way in his old life. He'd graduated from a second tier drama school, started as a production assistant on film sets, and worked his way up slowly through years of long hours until he was a small producer with some real credits behind him. When the streaming boom hit, he moved to Tencent Video, handling content production and operations. Not the top of the industry, but he'd learned how the business actually worked, which was more than a lot of people with bigger titles could say.
He looked at the Starlight plaque one more time.
Hollywood. The internet. There was a lot of money to be made here, for anyone who knew where to look and had the patience to do it right.
'I just need to get out from under this mess first.'
He pushed open the door and went inside.
It was working hours, and the lobby had its usual foot traffic. Heads turned as Ryan walked through. Conversations dipped to a low murmur behind him.
"Old Anderson's ten year company, gone in just over a year."
"Look at him. You think he's going to jump?"
"What a failure."
Ryan took the stairs to the second floor without slowing down.
Starlight's office was smaller than he'd imagined. A few dozen square meters, counting his private office. The company had run close to twenty people at its best. Now there were four left, all of them Old Anderson's people, the ones who had stayed out of loyalty when everyone else walked.
A brown haired woman in her forties crossed the room toward him as he came in.
"Ryan?" Her voice was careful.
"I'm fine, Mary." He shook his head before she could say more.
Mary had been Old Anderson's personal assistant for years and had quietly taken on most of the finance work after the rest of the staff left. She was sharp and steady, and right now she was one of the only things holding the place together.
Ryan had barely sat down when the knock came. A middle aged man let himself in and placed a document on the desk without a word.
"Mr. Anderson. My resignation."
Ryan picked it up and looked it over. "Jamie, the company hasn't gone under yet."
"I know." Jamie didn't sit down and didn't look sorry. "But I've got a mortgage, a car payment, and two kids. I can't wait around."
You couldn't argue with that. Ryan signed the letter and used the intercom to ask Mary to handle the rest.
He could hear her in the hallway outside, her voice low and sharp, pushing back at Jamie before he left. He let it go. The morale in this office was already broken. If nothing changed soon, all four people would be gone before the end of the month.
Another knock. Mary again.
"Miss Judith from the bank is here."
The old Ryan had been avoiding this call for weeks. Avoiding it wasn't a plan, it was just putting off the problem. "Ask her to come in."
The woman who followed Mary into the office was tall and blonde. She didn't look like she expected a warm welcome. She set a payment notice on the desk, took in the smell of alcohol with a quick flicker of distaste, and got right to it.
"Hello, Mr. Anderson. Your company's one million dollar loan is due in three months. Your personal property loan is due in six. We hope you'll repay on time."
Ryan glanced at the notice. "I understand."
Judith gave a short nod and left.
Ryan set the document aside. Banks didn't send people in person unless they were genuinely worried. Starlight's loan was backed by the copyright library from the pre-1997 films. His personal loan was secured by the North Hollywood apartment he'd inherited from Old Anderson. The bank didn't want to foreclose. That meant there was still a window.
He pressed the intercom. "Mary, how much money is in the account?"
"Twenty-five thousand dollars."
Ryan leaned back in the chair. He had about five thousand of his own. Thirty thousand total, give or take, against two million in debt and a six month clock before the bank ran out of patience.
Thirty thousand dollars covered maybe two months of operating costs. Salaries, utilities, office rent, phones. Mary was the most loyal person left in this building, but even she couldn't keep working for goodwill forever. Americans lived on credit, and the bills didn't stop.
Mary's voice came through the intercom again. "The video and TV rights for Desperate Survival are still available. If we sold them to Blockbuster, it would give us a little room."
"Let me think about it."
A box office bomb's secondary rights weren't worth much, but they were worth something.
"That's all for now, Mary."
He heard her pause before the line went quiet.
Ryan pulled the Times toward him and asked Mary through the intercom to go pick up a stack of recent newspapers and trade magazines. He needed information before anything else. Going in blind was exactly the kind of thing that had gotten Anderson into this situation in the first place.
He read through the morning and into the early afternoon, going through everything carefully, pen in hand, notebook open beside him. By the time he put the last magazine down, he'd filled two pages of notes and circled four items.
First: James Cameron's Titanic had crossed two hundred million dollars at the North American box office over the weekend.
Second: tech stocks were surging. The Nasdaq kept climbing. Cisco and Yahoo were getting a lot of attention from the financial press.
Third: a man named Matt Haughey had launched a community blog site called Metafilter, and the early response from internet commentators was mixed but interested.
Fourth: the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority from the UAE had opened a new office in Los Angeles.
Ryan looked at the four circles for a while.
Last year, North American theaters had sold over 1.4 billion tickets. The industry wasn't dying. The money was real. And there was more money coming into this city from places that most people here hadn't paid much attention to yet.
He closed the notebook.
Six months. Thirty thousand dollars. A skeleton crew, a handful of low value film rights, and a head full of knowledge that nobody else in this city had.
'It'll have to be enough to start with.'