For the past half-month, the bulk of Michael's efforts focused on understanding current societal landscapes—especially the intersecting worlds of the internet and Hollywood.
To extricate himself from dire straits, he naturally gravitated towards leveraging his most formidable skillsets.
But first premises—grasping the fundamental realities of contemporary society.
Hollywood mirrored his memories—James Cameron collaborating with the future governor to painstakingly construct a juggernaut battering-ram after their twin hits.
Yet that behemoth had merely set sail. The global box office champion remained Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park.
The internet tech sphere aligned similarly. Steve Jobs returning to Apple over a year ago, Cisco and Yahoo stocks steadily climbing...unless Michael missed his mark, the dotcom bubble wouldn't burst until the new millennium's arrival.
It was the best of times, an era birthing digital titans.
To hitch a ride on these prevailing winds required startup capital.
Not only was Michael penniless, but saddled with insurmountable debts. Over these interim weeks, he fruitlessly pursued loans or alternate financing—but information flows rapidly in the former Soviet territories. Given Seashore's insolvency, not even garden-variety loan sharks deemed him creditworthy.
As a Producers' Guild member, he had, at Mary's suggestion, submitted an application seeking assistance from their "Motion Picture Industry Health & Welfare Plan" program ostensibly aiding members in need.
But the guild was a trade association, not a union—real power residing with the major studios. His plea vanished into the bureaucratic ether, unanswered.
With no external lifelines, self-rescue became imperative.
Michael's gaze turned towards Hollywood—the film industry specifically—prompting tours of its major trade organizations and facilities.
Nightly, he pored over Seashore's past successes and failures, extracting valuable lessons.
Without money, any endeavor proved Sisyphean.
Seated in his office idly spinning a pen, Michael pondered his next crucial move. How could he raise funds rapidly? Money was the sine qua non for seizing whirlwind opportunities.
Setting the pen aside, he scribbled "Movies" into his notebook.
Thanks to his prior career, Michael could rattle off a laundry list of future Hollywood hits—not just domestic titles but their English renderings too.
The previous Michael possessed nascent screenwriting talents he opted to table for now. As an unknown, new spec scripts were impossible longshots to sell, much less at remunerative prices.
Nor did he entertain notions of personally writing, directing, and self-financing a project from scratch—neither Davenport iteration had such capabilities or resources.
The father-son duo functioned purely as investors and producers, hiring outside filmmaking talent like every other production house.
Running fingers through disheveled hair, Michael recognized the simple reality—movie financing paid out over extended cycles spanning years post-investment and release. Utterly incompatible with rapidly evolving windows of opportunity.
By the time profits materialized, any industry sea changes would likely have capsized his ambitions.
Clearly, simply bankrolling a film and awaiting box office receipts was a non-starter.
But what if he pivoted to leveraging film projects as the revenue generator themselves?
Tossing the pen aside, Michael carefully considered—in Hollywood, most production financing emanated from pre-selling distribution rights worldwide to assemble the initial shooting budgets. A film's foreign theatrical/home video/television licenses were commonly sold even before principal photography commenced, with those upfront proceeds funding actual production.
However, pre-selling that distribution pipeline required the imprimaturs of major studios and/or A-list talent attachments at minimum. Alternatively, films lacking either still needed third-party bond completion guarantors to pre-sell rights.
Seashore's paltry industry standing rendered any pre-sales an impossibility for Michael's purposes. As did the legal jeopardy of diverting North American or European financing capital to unauthorized personal usage.
Then a lightbulb flashed. This was still the 1990s—an era of relatively unfettered information flows overseas. To large swaths of the non-Western world, Hollywood remained an opaque, enigmatic realm.
Take the other side of the Pacific for instance—precious few truly comprehended the inner workings of the American film mecca.
What was stopping him from simply creating a film project to leverage for foreign financing?
Michael couldn't help recalling a past life's fraud case—a Shandong company posed as a Hollywood studio to illegally crowdfund over $3 million from unsuspecting investors.
Even some outright con men successfully scammed within Hollywood itself.
He vividly remembered another story of a charlatan impersonating a producer—not just defrauding millions, but befriending numerous entertainment luminaries along the way.
It did seem rather feasible, did it not?
Not that Michael would ever dream of fleeing across the Pacific to reprise such tactics on home soil, of course. He still retained a basal ethical core.
Pursuing mark victims within Hollywood itself would likewise prove unwise for future ambitions.
But building outwards from that foundational notion—what if he reverse-engineered a more sophisticated scheme?
Seashore Entertainment had been around for nearly a decade as an established direct-to-video distributor and guild member. Launching an ostensibly legitimate film venture would seem utterly routine under such auspices.
Seed an entirely new bellwether "development project" for...well, not deception per se. Foreign financing under precise conditions and constraints.
To secure that foreign capital pipeline, Michael required an airtight campaign plan sturdy enough to withstand primary vettings.
First was identifying a properly vetted target demographic.
His marks needed ample idle capital yet minimal Hollywood insider knowledge. Equally crucial—demographics disinclined to attract undue establishment scrutiny or backlash.
Needing ironclad assurances that even in worst-case exposure scenarios, they possessed limited legal recourses to retaliate.
Secondly, Michael needed to impeccably package and sell the ersatz film project itself.
From the outside looking in, it must seem fully authentic and investable...no, it would be an actual legitimate film venture Michael piloted. Just with discrepancies between the publicized budget projections and those funneled into his true coffers.
But accomplishing all that necessitated raising some starting seed capital first.
Money—it always returned to money as the crux.
Running hands through his hair, Michael temporarily tabled that obstacle to ponder his exit strategy.
What were his contingencies if this gambit failed? No plan survived first contact 100% intact. And he needed sustainable long-term anchors in North America.
His eyes settled on a key phrase in his research notes—"blog."
The previous Michael boasted respectable screenwriting talents. Perhaps that was his fallback—serializing fiction blogs and novel manuscripts to pitch directly to publishers. A potential revenue stream, however modest.
He still vividly recalled the broad strokes and characters from many source novels adapted into major film hits. No certainties, but it represented one viable path forward.
If all else failed, he could always write The 50 Shades of Davenport!
Once Michael committed to a path, he wholeheartedly pursued the most promising vector for success.
His ersatz film project required a sensibly scaled package, something lending itself to modest budget—nothing straining Seashore's plausible resources and backstory.
With hyper-stylized action tentpoles all the rage, perhaps concocting an action flick would...?
No, engineering an actual legitimate movie slate, even modestly budgeted, provided valuable working cover beyond inevitable losses.
But action epics proved too logistically over-complicated and capital-intensive. Far better suited reimagining Seashore's established B-movie traditions instead.
A low-budget horror film seemed ideal—one genre minimally impacted by societal trends.
But which specific horror property to repurpose? For now, Michael lacked a concrete candidate.
Wait—any such horror retread must avoid running afoul of cultural sensitivities from his prospective marks' demographics.
He needed to conclusively identify them first.
The other Pacific shores were out—Michael would sooner self-immolate than attempt defrauding on sovereign soil. Mainland Europe and Australasia's robust entertainment industries also disqualified them.
Then the answer hit him from his notes—about the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund opening a Los Angeles office last year to facilitate their petroleum riches westward expansion.
Not only fabulously wealthy, but distinctly disconnected from inside Hollywood mechanics. More crucially, their Middle Eastern ethnic identity inspired inherent skepticism and profiling from insular American establishment quarters.
Crucially, if Michael's recollections rang true, the mid-to-late 1990s marked a fervid epoch for Abu Dhabi's Arab magnates aggressively leveraging their staggering oil fortunes to expand their clout and global soft power footprints.
Could he perhaps exploit the historically acrimonious Judaic-Islamic cultural divides?
The Jewish diaspora's disproportionately outsized grip over Hollywood was self-evident. Yet Arabs endured perpetual vilification across its cinematic windscreens. The two realities were assuredly interlinked, if subconsciously.
Michael transcribed all these provisional analyses, intending to verify their veracity before proceeding.
Then he frowned again—Abu Dhabi might as well be on the dark side of the moon given its remoteness. Just the travel expenditures alone for an in-person hustle would represent astronomical sunk costs upfront.
No, better solidify the funding pipeline first.
"Mary!" he buzzed her line. "Please set up a meeting with Blockbuster to discuss selling off the Surviving the Killzone home video rights."
In the interim, even a box office underperformer's ancillary markets offered some emergency liquidity.
Mary's voice, calm and efficient, crackled through the intercom. "Right away, Mr. Davenport. Anything else?"
"Yes, also arrange a meeting with our legal team. I need to discuss some structural changes for Seashore Entertainment."
"Understood. I'll get right on it."
Michael leaned back in his chair, feeling a glimmer of hope. The plan was taking shape, and with the right moves, he could navigate his way through this tangled web of challenges.