The Boy Who Never Grew Up Read Online Free PDF

and everything. And Schlom will own half of our studio.”
    “Making him your partner.”
    “Not for long, if he can help it. Once Schlom gets half of Bedford Falls he’ll stop at nothing to get the other half. He wants to gobble us up. Desperately.”
    “Does Pennyroyal realize this?”
    “I’ve tried to explain it to her, but it doesn’t seem to sink in. She’s in over her head.”
    “You can’t convince her to accept cash in lieu of half the studio?”
    “There is no cash, Hoagy. At least not that kind. Matthew sank his entire fortune into Bedford Falls. Other than his house, it’s all he owns. He and the bank. And the overhead is huge. The bank loan, the payroll, insurance, taxes. We rent out the sound stages, but that barely dents it. Matthew keeps it afloat himself. He’s our cash flow machine. Channels all of the profits from his movies and merchandising back into the studio. Twenty-eight million last year alone.”
    “And this year?”
    “This year he didn’t do quite so well,” Shelley replied tactfully.
    “I see.” Now I understood why he wanted Matthew to make a movie with fuzzy aliens.
    “Someday soon, we’ll be able to stand on our own,” Shelley vowed bravely. “I’m sure of it. We’ll make it. But right now he’s personally keeping us afloat.”
    “You don’t own a piece of the studio yourself?”
    “It belongs to him,” he said, with no trace of bitterness. “I earn a nice salary, and I’ve already made all the money my family will ever need. We’re also taken care of in case anything should happen to him. Half of Bedford Falls goes to Shelley and me, half to Georgie. Pennyroyal was to control Georgie’s half until he turned twenty-one, but I changed Matthew’s will the day she walked out. Shelley and I control it now.”
    “Why is Schlom so interested in Bedford Falls? Because you pose a threat to him?”
    “Because we’re an asset. If he takes us over, he makes Panorama City Communications even more attractive than it already is.”
    “To whom?”
    He raised an eyebrow at me. “Who do you think?”
    I poured myself more coffee and sat back in my chair. “Are we talking foreign investors, here? Pacific Rim, perhaps?”
    “We are,” he informed me, gravely.
    The selling of America. The business pages had been full of little else lately. One of the news magazines had gone so far as to run a picture of the Statue of Liberty on its cover adorned with a For Sale sign. This was no mere gossip column war I was walking into. This was bigger. Much bigger.
    I said, “You’d better tell me the rest.”
    “It’s getting harder and harder to make a movie,” he began. “The average cost has tripled in the last ten years—up to thirty million. That’s the average . Pictures like Dick Tracy and Terminator 2 actually ended up costing a hundred mil by the time they finished marketing them. Revenues, meanwhile, have flattened out. All of the studios, no matter how big they are, are in desperate need of fresh capital. That means globalization. Four of the seven majors have already been bought up by foreign corporations. They’re suckers for the Hollywood mystique. They love it. Rupert Murdoch, who’s Australian, has bought Fox. Pathé, an Italian company, has bought MGM-UA. And the Japanese electronics giants are squabbling among themselves over the rest. Sony buys Columbia for $5 billion, so Matsushita turns right around and buys MCA for $6.6. And now their third biggest hardware empire, Murakami, wants to take over Panorama for who knows how much—that means Panorama City Studios and their theme park in Orlando, their TV production company, record company, cable system, publishing house … If Schlom can deliver them Bedford Falls on top of all that—even better. They’ll own the rights to all of Matthew’s movies then. They love Matthew in Japan. I hear Murakami wants to build a Yeti theme park in Osaka. It’ll be a major draw for them. Big time.”
    “What’s