Manolo came into the room. “Dinner is served,” he said, and everyone followed him into the dining room.

Rick walked arm in arm with Stone and whispered, “We’ll get down to business over coffee.”

5

When the dishes had been taken away, Manolo approached the table. “Would you like to have coffee in the study, Mr. Stone?”

“Thank you, yes, Manolo,” Stone replied, and stood.

Glenna looked across the table at Dino. “Dino, would you like to take a look at the gardens while they talk business?”

“Of course,” Dino said, standing and offering her his arm.

Stone, Rick Barron, and Charlene Joiner settled in the comfortable library/study with coffee and brandy.

“Now, Stone,” Rick said, “I want to tell you what’s going on and where we stand.”

“Thank you,” Stone said.

“A private hedge fund called Prince Investments has made us two offers, both of which we rejected, the most recent one over the objections of nearly half our stockholders. Now they’re coming back with a final offer, and I’m going to need fifty-one percent of the voting shares to keep us in business.”

“What was the last offer?” Stone asked.

“Twenty-five hundred dollars a share,” Rick said. “My sense of the other stockholders is that they’ll sell at something near three thousand.”

“How many stockholders?”

“Fifty-five. Arrington is the largest shareholder, with three hundred thirty-three thousand shares, I’ve got a hundred thousand shares—I’ve sold various blocks over the years to studio executives, to keep them—and Charlene has fifty thousand shares.”

“How many shares extant?”

“One million. With Arrington’s shares we’ve got four hundred thirty-three thousand, and I know of one other stockholder who will very likely vote with us—Eddie Harris, who was running the studio when I joined them, in 1938, had two daughters, one of whom died in her thirties. The other is Jennifer, who is in her midseventies now, and she holds twenty-five thousand shares, which can put us over the top.”

“Tell me what will happen to the studio if the sale takes place.”

“The studio was originally on two hundred acres, and we sold off fifty in the 1960s to build Centurion City, a mixed commercial/ residential development. That money got us out of debt, and we’ve stayed that way. Prince’s offer is for one hundred ten of the remaining one hundred fifty acres. That would consist of all of the back lot—our standing sets—our Western town, our small-town square sets, and numerous street sets, including our New York streets. It would rob us of five of our six soundstages, two of our three audio recording studios, and our set storage buildings. We would become, in essence, a small office park, including our admin buildings and the offices we rent to a couple of dozen independent producers who use our production facilities.”

“And what would that do to your ability to make pictures and TV shows?”