A dock south of Melbourne.
After three straight days of shooting, Batman finally wrapped its opening action sequence.
The story kicks off with five linked murders in Gotham: victims shot, necks snapped, or mauled as if by an animal. Batman tracks the clues, saves Gotham Gazette reporter Vicki Vale at the last second, then chases the killer through the sewers to an abandoned dock on the city's edge.
The killer reveals himself: a hulking, fanged, scaly monster that looks half man, half crocodile.
After a brutal fight, Batman subdues Killer Croc.
Meanwhile, a shaken Vicki calls the police. Commissioner Gordon, already investigating the murders, arrives with his team. With sirens closing in, Batman slips away before he can interrogate his captive.
The action is followed by a quieter scene.
Gordon and Batman's first real encounter.
The recent night shoots run from six in the evening until two in the morning, eight hours flat. It's high summer in the southern hemisphere, daylight lingering, but by the time prep is done darkness has usually fallen.
It's one o'clock now; the fight sequence is in the can. No major set change is needed. The cops are cleaning up the wreckage on the same dock while Gordon, alerted by one of his men, walks toward a nearby warehouse.
The warehouse set is already dressed. Simon briefs Adam Baldwin and Tommy Lee Jones for a few minutes, then calls for quiet.
Slate claps. Extras move.
Gordon approaches the pool of light beneath a streetlamp. Batman crouches on the warehouse roofline, most of his body swallowed by the cape.
The framing is deliberate: Gordon in the light, Batman in shadow.
A faint scrape overhead makes Gordon look up. There he is, the vigilante the department has been hunting.
They hold the stare a moment. Gordon speaks first. "All right… but you're doing good work."
Batman offers no pleasantries, voice low and flat. "Have you connected the cases?"
Gordon nods. "Counting Vicki Vale, three reporters attacked in the last week. Something's going on in this city. Someone's trying to bury it."
Batman pauses, he knows there are five linked killings, not three but says only, "I need the interrogation report on that crocodile."
"I don't make deals with criminals," Gordon snaps, then catches the hesitation. "You know more than you're saying."
Batman returns the line coolly: "I don't make deals with cops."
Gordon's brow creases. "Then why should I hand you the report?"
"Tomorrow night. Midnight. Here."
Gordon shifts his weight, weighing how to regain some control. He glances away for a second when he looks back, the rooftop is empty.
"CUT!"
Simon lifts a hand behind the monitors and reviews the take.
Baldwin and Jones join him at the playback.
"Still a touch off emotionally," Simon tells Jones, pausing the footage. "Tommy, this conversation plants the seed of an unspoken alliance. The rhythm has to feel natural. And that little foot shuffle it read too deliberate. Loosen it next time."
Simon is chasing a feeling; he can't spell it out note by note. The actors have to find it themselves.
They talk it through, reset, and go again.
Bruce Wayne in Batman mode is largely stoic easy on Baldwin. Jones is a seasoned pro. A handful of takes later, Simon has what he wants.
Two a.m. wrap, right on schedule.
Simon is in bed by three. He's up again at nine, breakfast finished, back in the study of his hotel suite.
Jennifer's main job is liaison with the North American companies; she doesn't need to pull all-nighters on set. When Simon walks in, she has the day's files ready.
"We've opened five thousand long Nikkei 225 contracts on the Osaka Exchange," she says. "Average entry around thirty-one thousand two hundred. Margin per contract roughly twenty-five thousand three hundred dollars, total margin posted one hundred twenty-six million. Dad thinks a fifty-million reserve is plenty for risk coverage, so we could add another thousand contracts."
There are two main Nikkei 225 futures markets: Singapore (multiplier 500 yen) and Osaka (multiplier 1,000 yen).
On Osaka, each of Westeros's contracts has a notional value of 31.2 million yen.
The yen has been strengthening for years; the current rate is about 123 to the dollar. That makes each contract worth roughly a quarter million USD—far larger than an S&P 500 future. Same ten-times leverage, same ten-percent margin.
Simon listens while flipping pages.
The Nikkei has accelerated the past two weeks. When it broke 30,000 in December, the monthly gain was only 623 points. These last fourteen days it has climbed 860—almost three percent.
He isn't sure whether that's coincidence or the first whisper of followers piling in.
Westeros currently has two hundred million in free cash, the recent transfer from Daenerys. Once the planned five thousand contracts are filled, only seventy-four million remains. Simon is far less certain about Japan's trajectory over the next year than he was about North America in '87; he can't go all-in. He needs a buffer against possible margin calls.
if the index reaches the original timeline's peak above 38,000, and after Japan's transaction taxes and capital-gains bite, the two hundred million could roughly double—100 percent net by year-end.
A full year of work for a single double feels thin compared to '87. Plenty of other memory-guided investments could match it in twelve months.
Columbia Pictures stock, for instance.
In calendar '88 Columbia released fifteen films that together grossed only eighty-eight million domestic—under six million per picture.
TriStar, its joint venture with HBO, did better fifteen films, one hundred ninety-eight million, but rumors pegged cumulative five-year losses north of half a billion. Time Inc. allegedly buried the bleeding through creative accounting.
Sony acquisition rumors are already circulating, yet the studio's dismal performance keeps dragging the stock down, even taking Coca-Cola's forty-nine percent stake with it.
Columbia's market cap has shrunk to 1.6 billion, with debt equal to equity. Another leg down and it's technically insolvent.
Simon remembers the eventual deal: Sony pays 3.4 billion cash and assumes the 1.6 billion debt—total enterprise value five billion. More than triple from today's levels.
Buying now would likely double his money by fall, with less volatility than futures.
But he's too visible in Hollywood. The move would spark insider-trading whispers, maybe even an SEC probe.
With Boesky, Milken, and the rest of the eighties arbitrage crowd in handcuffs, ambitious prosecutors would love to bag a bigger, stranger fish like Simon Westeros.
So he passes on RJR Nabisco, on the coming Sony-Columbia deal, on every obvious equity arbitrage.
Betting long on Japan against most of Wall Street's short consensus carries no such taint.
Where the profits actually come from is not his concern.
Listening to Jennifer relay James Rebould's recommendation, Simon thinks a moment and nods. "All right."
Six thousand contracts keeps risk manageable. Still, the projected return leaves him hungry.
Cash is the bottleneck.
He has no intention of borrowing to speculate in index futures. banks wouldn't lend for it anyway, and he won't take that kind of leverage.
A thought strikes him. "Is your dad still in the office?"
Jennifer nods. "It's six p.m. in New York, but yes he called while you were having breakfast and said he'd wait."
She picks up the desk phone, dials from memory, hands him the receiver.
After the Motorola reduction, Westeros holds stakes in twenty-five public tech companies: board seats in sixteen, pure financial positions in nine.
To avoid collateral damage to the sector during the Motorola sell-off, the firm announced a one-year no-sale pledge on the non-board holdings and a three-year pledge on the board seats.
That year is up. Simon can now quietly trim some positions to free capital for Japan.
He and Rebould talk for half an hour and settle on six names: three recent laggards and three he always planned to lighten, including Apple.
He deliberately stayed off Apple's board to keep flexibility.
Westeros entered Apple during the crash when the company was valued around three billion; total invested roughly one hundred fifty million plus small top-ups to cross the five-percent threshold.
Today Apple's market cap is 5.3 billion. The stake is up more than seventy-five percent worth about two hundred sixty million.
He recalls the company climbing past seven billion in a few years, but he isn't waiting. Nor will he dump the whole position at once; five percent is already a large block—flooding the market would crater the stock.
Still, six names should yield three hundred million in cash over the next month even after the inevitable announcement dip. Once Daenerys finishes its audit, another tranche can move over.
More than half a billion total would let him comfortably scale Nikkei exposure to fifteen thousand contracts.
He could push further, but chooses restraint.
After the coming month's sales, once prices stabilize, Westeros will continue trimming—but the excess cash will go into adding to Microsoft, Intel, and similar names. Those long-term compounding returns dwarf anything the Nikkei can offer.
Simon hangs up, turns to the stack of Daenerys files.
He reads Iger's report on ABC's demand to slash Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's second-season license fee and take a cut of in-show placements.
He dials Los Angeles.
Mid-afternoon there.
Daenerys cleared two hundred fifty million net on season one; ABC only eighty. Simon would love to keep that split forever, but he knows it's impossible.
Last year they exploited the writers' strike. ABC won't make the same mistake twice.
At least Daenerys locked Survivor for three more seasons with NBC beforehand.
Survivor rates even higher, but thirteen episodes a season is a smaller footprint. NBC feels less threatened.
They discuss negotiation strategy with ABC, then Simon ends the call.
The phone rings again almost immediately.
This time it's Sophia Fache , calling from Florence—Gucci's headquarters.
She reports securing thirty-nine percent so far and still negotiating with other family branches.
Though the broad acquisition framework was agreed in Melbourne, the family's shares are scattered. Price and terms must be hashed out separately with each major faction.
With ample funding, Sophia now believes she can push past sixty percent, well above the absolute majority originally planned.
Simon listens, one hand on the receiver, idly flipping open Nancy Brill's proposal for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game.
His eyebrows lift in genuine surprise.