The wind on the Hardangerjøkulen glacier had finally decided to stop screaming. It was still blowing a steady, biting chill across the massive expanse of white, but the complete whiteout conditions from the previous two days had broken. The sky was a heavy, flat gray, completely blocking out the sun.
Daniel stood in snow that came up past his knees. He was watching a man named Mick swear violently at a small black plastic box.
Mick was the lead pyrotechnician. He was a guy in his late fifties who had spent his entire life blowing things up safely for the camera. He was currently wearing four different jackets, kneeling in the powder about fifty yards away from a massive, multi-tiered metal structure that the art department had spent a week assembling on the ice. It was the Rebel shield generator.
"The lithium cells are completely dead," Mick growled, pulling his thick gloves off with his teeth so he could manipulate the tiny wires with his bare fingers. His knuckles were bright red. "The cold is just sucking the charge right out of the detonator packs. I put fresh batteries in ten minutes ago and they're already reading at five percent."
Tom Wiley was pacing a tight circle in the snow a few feet away, holding his clipboard against his chest like a shield. "Mick, we have to shoot this today. We lose the location permits tomorrow morning, and I am not paying to keep eighty crew members in that hotel for another week."
"I can't blow the charges if the receiver doesn't have power to catch the radio signal, Tom," Mick shot back, tossing a dead battery pack into the snow. "Unless you want me to run a physical det-cord across two hundred yards of ice and manually light it with a match."
Daniel looked at the massive prop generator. He absolutely refused to handle the explosion in post-production. Computer-generated fire never looked right. It didn't cast the correct light on the environment, and it didn't interact with the snow. He needed the physical blast.
"What if we insulate the receivers?" Daniel asked.
Mick looked up, blowing warm air into his cupped hands. "With what? I don't have thermal blankets small enough for these boxes."
Daniel turned around and looked at the craft services table that had been set up under a heavy canvas tent nearby. "Hey, Emma! Toss me a box of those hand warmers."
One of the production assistants grabbed a cardboard box full of heavy-duty chemical hand warmers and waded through the snow to hand it to Daniel. Daniel ripped the top off the box and dumped a dozen of the small, plastic-wrapped packets into Mick's lap.
"Crack them open," Daniel told him. "Tape them directly around the battery packs, then wrap the whole thing in duct tape to keep the wind out. It should generate enough ambient heat to keep the lithium from freezing up for at least twenty minutes."
Mick looked at the packets. He grabbed one, cracked it, and felt the chemical reaction instantly start producing heat. A slow grin spread across his face.
"It's a completely stupid, jury-rigged solution," Mick said, grabbing a roll of silver duct tape from his tool bag. "I love it. Give me fifteen minutes to re-wire the primary charges."
"You have ten," Tom said, looking at his watch.
Daniel left the pyro team to their duct tape and trudged across the snowfield toward the main camera positions.
About sixty yards away from the shield generator prop, the art department had dug a long, winding embankment into the deep snow. It was a defensive line for the Rebel soldiers. A dozen extras were already standing down in the dug-out area, stamping their boots to keep their blood flowing.
Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, and Sebastian Stan were huddled together at the far end of the embankment, leaning against the packed snow wall. Jack Black was standing next to them, fully zipped into the massive, synthetic fur Chewbacca suit.
Daniel slid down the icy slope and dropped into the embankment next to them.
"Tell me we are blowing something up soon," Bale said. The Welsh actor had his blue parka zipped all the way up to his chin, the fur-lined hood pulled tight around his face. "I can't feel my fingers anymore."
"Mick is taping hand warmers to the detonators," Daniel said. "We're going to roll in about ten minutes."
"Hand warmers?" Florence asked, raising an eyebrow. She was shivering slightly inside her white snowsuit, holding a thermos of hot water. "That sounds incredibly safe."
"It's fine," Daniel assured her.
Bale rubbed his gloved hands together, looking out over the desolate, freezing landscape. He shook his head, a dry chuckle escaping him.
"You know, three years ago, I was sitting in a terrible apartment in Los Angeles," Bale said casually. "I was going to auditions for generic bad guys in network television shows and getting told I didn't have the right look. I was eating ramen noodles and trying to figure out how I was going to pay my car insurance."
Sebastian nodded, leaning his head back against the snow wall. "Yeah. I was right there with you. I was doing off-Broadway plays for equity minimum."
"And now look at us," Bale smiled, gesturing to the massive camera rigs set up on the ice above them. "We are standing in a frozen ditch on a glacier in Norway, getting paid an absurd amount of money to pretend a plastic generator is going to explode. The film industry is completely ridiculous."
"I like it," Jack Black chimed in. His voice sounded muffled coming from inside the heavy Wookiee mask. He raised both of his massive, furry arms and let out a loud, surprisingly accurate Wookiee roar that echoed across the ice field.
A few of the extras down the line jumped, startled by the noise, and then started laughing.
"Keep doing that, Jack, it keeps morale up," Daniel smiled. He looked at Florence. "You ready for the run?"
Florence took a deep breath, watching her breath turn to fog in the cold air. The scene called for her, Bale, and Jack to run out of the embankment and sprint across the open snow right as the explosion went off behind them.
"I'm ready," Florence said. "Just make sure Mick doesn't blow us up."
"I'll mention it to him," Daniel promised. He grabbed the edge of the snow wall and pulled himself up out of the embankment.
He walked over to the primary camera position. They had three massive 65mm IMAX cameras set up behind heavy, clear polycarbonate blast shields. The operators were bundled up in heavy coats, checking their focus rings.
Tom walked over, holding a radio. "Mick says the hand warmers are holding the battery charge. He has green lights on all three receivers. We are good to go."
"Alright," Daniel said, grabbing his megaphone. He stepped behind the thick plastic blast shield of the center camera.
He looked out across the glacier. The gray sky, the endless white snow, the massive metal prop sitting in the distance. It looked completely authentic.
"Listen up!" Daniel yelled through the megaphone. His voice carried sharply over the wind. "This is a one-take shot! We only have one prop, so we only get to blow it up once! When the generator goes, Christian, Florence, Jack, you sprint for the tree line markers! Extras, you hit the dirt and cover your heads! Do not look directly at the blast!"
Daniel looked at the camera operators. They all gave him a quick nod.
"Roll sound," Daniel ordered.
"Sound is speeding," the mixer called out from his insulated tent.
"Roll cameras."
The heavy, mechanical whir of the IMAX cameras spinning up filled the quiet air.
"Action!" Daniel shouted.
Down in the embankment, Bale, Florence, and Jack scrambled up over the lip of the snow wall. They hit the deep powder and immediately started running, their boots sinking deep into the snow with every step. They looked genuinely desperate, fighting the terrain to move forward.
Daniel picked up his radio. "Mick. Hit it."
Two hundred yards away, the Rebel shield generator simply ceased to exist.
The primary charges went off in a deafening, chest-rattling crack. A split second later, the secondary fuel charges ignited.
A massive, towering wall of bright orange fire erupted into the gray sky. The heat was instantaneous. Even from behind the polycarbonate shield, Daniel felt the sudden, aggressive wave of warmth wash over his face.
The shockwave hit the snow, kicking up a massive cloud of white powder and black smoke that rolled outward in a violent circle.
The extras in the embankment dove into the snow, covering the backs of their heads, reacting naturally to the sheer volume of the noise. Bale, Florence, and Jack kept running, the massive fireball rising high into the sky right behind them, casting a harsh, flickering orange light across their backs.
The fire burned hot and heavy for a few seconds before the dark, thick smoke began to obscure it, drifting heavily across the glacier.
Daniel watched the actors hit their final marks near the edge of the framing.
"Cut!" Daniel roared into the megaphone.
The camera operators immediately stopped the heavy film magazines from rolling.
For a second, the only sound on the glacier was the crackling of the burning debris left over from the explosion and the howling of the wind.
Then, Mick stood up from his hiding spot in a snowbank a safe distance away and threw both of his hands into the air in victory.
The entire crew erupted into cheers. The extras stood up from the snow, clapping and yelling. Christian Bale stopped running, bending over with his hands on his knees, laughing out loud. Jack Black let out another massive Wookiee roar for some reason.
Daniel let out a long, heavy breath, lowering the megaphone. He looked at Tom, who had actually dropped his clipboard into the snow and was grinning widely.
"That's a wrap on Norway," Daniel announced, his voice carrying over the celebrating crew. "Pack the gear! Let's go home!"
The applause got twice as loud. Nobody wanted to stay on the ice for another minute.
A week later, the freezing winds of Finse, Norway felt like a weird fever dream.
Daniel sat behind the large mahogany desk in his corner office in Burbank, California. The sun was shining brightly through the large windows, casting a warm, yellow square of light onto the carpet. The temperature outside was a perfect seventy-five degrees.
He was wearing a light t-shirt and jeans. He had finally regained full feeling in his toes.
The door to his office opened, and Elena Palmer walked in. She was carrying a massive, rolled-up tube of architectural blueprints under her arm, and a thick folder in her hand.
Marcus Blackwood walked in right behind her, holding a cup of coffee and looking unusually stressed.
"Welcome back to civilization," Marcus said, dropping into one of the leather chairs across from Daniel's desk. "I saw the dailies from the explosion. Mick is a madman."
"Mick is an artist," Daniel corrected him, leaning back in his chair. "What's going on? You guys look like somebody died."
Elena unrolled the massive sheet of paper and spread it out across Daniel's desk, using a stapler and a coffee mug to weigh down the corners.
"Nobody died," Elena said, taking the empty chair next to Marcus. "But we have a massive logistical crisis. It's a good crisis to have, but it's currently a nightmare to manage."
Daniel looked down at the paper. It was an overhead, top-down map of the current Miller Studios lot in Burbank.
The lot was large. They owned the property outright, having bought the land and the existing buildings a year ago after the Iron man money came in. It had a main administrative building, an art department warehouse, and four massive soundstages.
Currently, on the map Elena had spread out, every single square inch of the property was covered in red marker ink.
"We are out of space," Marcus explained bluntly. "We are physically, entirely out of space."
Daniel frowned, tracing the red lines with his finger. "How? We have four soundstages."
"And Jon Favreau is currently occupying two of them for Iron Man 2," Elena pointed out, tapping the map. "He has the Stark Expo set built in Stage 1, and the Monaco racetrack practical effects rig built in Stage 2. He needs both of them for the next three months."
"Okay," Daniel said. "What about Stage 3?"
"Zack Snyder has Stage 3 completely locked down for the 300 post-production," Marcus answered. "He's using it as a massive VFX review room and editing bay because his team needed the physical space to set up the server racks. Stage 4 is currently holding the Millennium Falcon set that we shipped back from London because we still need it for pick-up shots."
Daniel looked at the blank spaces on the map between the buildings. "What about the backlot? The parking areas?"
"Vince Gilligan took over the north parking lot," Elena sighed. "He needed an exterior location to build a fake car wash for a scene in Breaking Bad, and he didn't want to pay city permit fees to shoot on location. So he just built it in our parking lot. Half the crew is parking their cars three blocks away and walking to work."
Daniel rubbed his chin, looking at the map. He hadn't realized how fast the bullpen had actually grown. When he was just shooting one movie at a time, the Burbank lot felt massive. Now, with a Marvel movie, a highly stylized action epic, a prestige television show, and his own Star Wars sequel all running simultaneously, the seams were bursting.
"Plus, we have those six new directors you hired to bleed Warner Bros dry," Marcus added, taking a sip of his coffee. "They are all in pre-production right now. In about six weeks, they are all going to need soundstages to start rolling cameras, and we have absolutely nowhere to put them."
Daniel leaned forward, resting his elbows on the map. He looked at Elena.
"What are our options?" Daniel asked. "Do we lease stage space from Universal or Paramount for the mid-budget movies?"
"We could," Elena said. "But the rental rates are astronomical right now. Paramount knows we have money, and they'll price-gouge us on the daily stage rentals. Plus, you lose the security control. If our directors are shooting on a legacy studio lot, the legacy studio executives are going to be snooping around our sets trying to steal ideas."
"I don't want them on our sets," Daniel said immediately.
"Then we have to build," Marcus said simply.
Daniel looked at his friend. "Build what? We can't build another soundstage here. The property lines are maxed out."
Elena reached down and pulled a second rolled-up map out of the cardboard tube she had brought in. She moved the Burbank map out of the way and spread the new one across the desk.
This map wasn't just a city block. It was a massive topographical map of Los Angeles County and the surrounding valleys.
Elena had circled three different, massive areas in blue marker. One was located far out in the Santa Clarita valley. Another was a sprawling, empty stretch of land out past Pasadena. The third was a massive, decommissioned industrial park situated near the foothills of the San Fernando Valley.
"If we want to keep expanding the bullpen," Elena explained, pointing to the three blue circles. "We can't operate out of a single city block in Burbank anymore. We need to buy a massive plot of raw land. I'm talking two hundred, maybe three hundred acres."
Daniel stared at the map. The scale of what she was suggesting was staggering.
"You want to build a new studio," Daniel said quietly.
"I want us to build a city," Marcus corrected him, leaning forward. "Look at the legacy guys. Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal. They don't just have a few buildings. They have their own zip codes. They have dedicated streets built for exterior shooting. They have massive water tanks for underwater scenes. They have entire buildings dedicated just to post-production audio mixing."
Marcus pointed to the circle near the foothills of the San Fernando Valley.
"This plot right here," Marcus said. "It's two hundred and fifty acres. It used to be an aerospace manufacturing facility back in the seventies. The warehouses are rotting, and the concrete is cracked, but the zoning allows for heavy industrial construction, and the city is desperate to sell it to get it back on the tax rolls."
Daniel looked at the blue circle. It was an enormous piece of land.
"If we buy it," Elena continued, picking up the thread, "we tear down the rotting buildings. We pour fresh concrete. We can build twenty state-of-the-art soundstages. We can build a dedicated VFX hub that rivals Industrial Light & Magic. We can build permanent backlot streets—a New York street, a generic suburban neighborhood, a European village."
"A self-sustaining ecosystem," Daniel murmured, understanding exactly what they were pitching.
"Exactly," Marcus said. "Our directors would never have to leave the gates. We wouldn't have to deal with city location permits or traffic control or paparazzi standing on the sidewalks taking pictures of our actors. Everything happens inside our walls."
Daniel stood up from his chair. He walked over to the window, looking out over the crowded Burbank lot. He could see the corner of the fake car wash Vince Gilligan had built taking up a massive chunk of asphalt in the distance. He saw grips navigating heavy carts around parked cars because the walkways were too congested.
They had outgrown their shell.
"How much?" Daniel asked, turning back to face them.
"The land acquisition for the San Fernando plot will cost us roughly eighty million," Marcus said, not flinching at the number. "It's a distress sale by the holding company. But the construction costs... pouring foundations for twenty soundstages, running heavy-duty commercial power grids, building the administrative offices... that's going to take a massive chunk of capital."
"We're looking at a half-billion-dollar investment just to break ground," Elena estimated. "And it will take at least three years of constant construction before the main lot is fully operational."
Daniel walked back to the desk. He looked down at the map.
A half-billion dollars was a massive bet. Even with the insane, record-breaking profits of Inception and Star Wars sitting in their accounts, spending that much cash on concrete and steel was a terrifying proposition. It was the kind of move that either cemented a company's legacy for a century or bankrupted them overnight.
But Daniel thought about the future. He thought about the Marvel universe expanding. He thought about the mid-budget directors he wanted to mentor.
And he thought about the legacy studios in town who still looked at him like he was just a lucky kid who got a few good rolls of the dice.
"Buy the land," Daniel said.
Marcus blinked. "Just like that? You don't want to bring the accountants in to run a risk assessment?"
"The risk is staying here and letting our directors suffocate because we don't have enough stage space," Daniel said firmly. He tapped the blue circle on the map. "Call the holding company today. Make an aggressive cash offer to close the deal before the end of the month. Don't let them drag it out in escrow."
Elena grinned, writing a quick note on her legal pad. "And the construction?"
"Start taking bids from commercial architecture firms immediately," Daniel instructed. "I want the soundstages built specifically for modern filmmaking. I want reinforced ceiling grids that can hold the weight of a practical centrifuge. I want dedicated cooling systems that run dead-silent so they don't interfere with the audio recording. I want the best facility on the planet."
Marcus stood up, grabbing his coffee cup. He looked energized. "I'll get the legal team drafting the purchase agreements right now."
"We are going to make Warner Bros look like a community theater," Elena smiled, rolling the map back up.
"That's the plan," Daniel said.
As Marcus and Elena hurried out of the office to start making the calls, Daniel sat back down at his desk. He looked out the window again.
The Burbank lot had been a good home. It was where he had built his foundation. But looking at the cramped buildings and the crowded parking lot, he knew they were leaving it behind.
He was going to build a city.
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A/N: Sorry for no update yesterday. I started going to the gym (for the first time in my entire life) and had severely underestimated the pains that come with it. XD
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