Without responding to Alia's compliment, Simon recalled something and asked, "By the way, how tall are you?"
"Five feet nine inches."
The Indian woman did not understand why Simon suddenly asked but answered immediately.
She even stood up to show him.
Alia was wearing only a loose light-blue pullover sweater and white jeans in the apartment. The slightly oversized sweater still failed to hide her balanced, graceful figure. Even though her ethnicity was easy to recognize from her black hair and facial features, if she walked down the street she would definitely draw an extremely high rate of second glances.
He gave up the idea of pulling the woman over for a quick play and shook his head. "Too bad. You're too tall."
Seeing Simon withdraw his gaze, Alia squatted down beside him again and kept her arms resting on the sofa armrest as she asked, "Sir, is there a problem with that?"
Simon said, "If you were under five feet six inches, there would be a role that would suit you perfectly."
There was not the slightest trace of disappointment on Alia's face. She glanced at the storyboard in Simon's hand and asked, "Is it for the movie you are preparing right now, sir?"
"No," Simon shook his head. "Another one, called Scent of a Woman. There is a tango scene in the film that I believe will be very eye-catching. The male lead needs a dance partner, but unfortunately you are a little too tall. It would not fit."
In the original version of Scent of a Woman the tango girl, Gabrielle Anwar, actually had half Indian blood.
If Alia had not been so tall, Simon would have been quite interested in letting this woman, whose looks and temperament far surpassed Gabrielle Anwar's, give it a try.
Five feet nine inches, however, converted to more than one hundred and seventy-five centimeters, was already model height.
Al Pacino was only barely five feet seven.
If Alia wore high heels during filming, the image would feel very mismatched.
Alia did not press further about Scent of a Woman. Her amber eyes looked over. "Actually I dance quite well. If sir has time, I can dance for you."
Simon said nothing. He simply raised his head slightly and nodded in one direction.
Alia turned her head.
Janet was standing at the living-room doorway, smiling as she watched them.
An ordinary Manhattan resident would already feel very spacious with a one-hundred-and-twenty-square-meter apartment inside any of the skyscrapers. This three-story duplex exceeded one thousand two hundred square meters, so one could imagine how large the interior space really was.
The living room where Simon and Alia sat was on the second floor of the duplex, while the kitchen was on the first floor. The Indian woman had assumed the lady of the house would not appear suddenly and had dared to cozy up beside Simon.
She had not expected to be caught red-handed.
Forcing herself to stay calm, Alia stood up and tried to meet Janet's gaze. "Madam, um, I will go downstairs now."
Even as she spoke, under Janet's watchful eyes the woman did not dare move for a moment.
Simon had only wanted to tease her a little by not warning the Indian woman about Janet at the door. Sensing the obvious fright in Alia's tone now, he spoke up. "Go downstairs and help AB and the others prepare dinner."
With the master speaking and Janet at the doorway stepping slightly aside, Alia finally looked as if she had been granted amnesty. She lowered her head slightly and hurried out.
The moment the woman left, Janet pounced on him with bared teeth and claws.
Simon quickly set the storyboard aside and caught Janet's slim waist.
Janet straddled him and nibbled for a while before softening into his arms. Her mouth, however, kept going. "We still have not settled the account for you taking several women to Hawaii for a wild weekend a few days ago. Hmph, you are sleeping on the sofa tonight."
Simon gave Janet a light kiss on the lips and smiled. "Sure. We can experience sleeping on the sofa together tonight."
"You sleep on the sofa by yourself."
"Then I will miss you so much I will not be able to sleep."
"Mmm, little rascal."
After cuddling for a while, Janet finally brought up the real matter. "Dad wants us to come back to Australia for Easter."
"Sure. We can see the child while we are there."
"And Aunt too."
"…"
Janet pressed her forehead against Simon's and teased, "You are going back to Los Angeles tomorrow. Do you want to take Alia with you and let her dance for you?"
Simon reached out and tickled Janet's ribs. The woman giggled and softened against him once more.
After reconfirming the acquisition strategy for LTD, Simon flew back to Los Angeles the next day.
Many recent Daenerys Entertainment projects required Simon's personal involvement.
After the Academy Awards, Scent of a Woman starring Al Pacino began principal photography on April 6.
Since Alia was not suitable, and to stay as close as possible to the classic tango scene in his memory, Simon personally selected the original actress Gabrielle Anwar.
In addition, Daenerys Entertainment had greenlit several other important projects.
One of them was Forrest Gump.
Because of how much he valued the project, Simon had been using his spare time lately to write the Forrest Gump screenplay and had personally drawn many concept art pieces and storyboards.
However, since Tom Hanks had already signed on for Daenerys Entertainment's collaboration with Disney on Sleepless in Seattle, with the release slot set for next summer, Forrest Gump could only be scheduled for the end of 1993.
Counting Pixar's second 3D animated film The Lion King and the Paramount collaboration Mission: Impossible, by the end of 1993 there would be three Daenerys-related blockbusters alone. The competition at that time would be fierce.
Besides Forrest Gump, the two other novels by John Grisham, author of the summer release A Time to Kill, had also been greenlit. One was The Firm and the other was The Pelican Brief.
Daenerys Entertainment had signed a priority-rights agreement for all three novels with John Grisham from the very beginning.
In the original timeline A Time to Kill, The Firm, and The Pelican Brief had all been very successful film projects in the nineties.
Unlike A Time to Kill, which had already been published in the eighties, The Firm novel had only come out last year, and The Pelican Brief had not even been officially published yet.
According to studio practice, they usually waited until one of an author's adapted films was released before deciding whether to pursue adaptations of his other works.
However, after The Firm was published last year it quickly became one of 1991's best-selling novels. That level of recognition was already enough to greenlight it directly. The Pelican Brief, whose original version starred Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, was greenlit before publication mainly to lock in the two stars' schedules.
Moreover, signing the formal adaptation rights agreement with the author before A Time to Kill even opened would allow Daenerys Entertainment to secure the project at a much lower cost. Otherwise, once A Time to Kill became a hit, even with the priority agreement Daenerys would have to pay a higher price.
On the other hand, before Easter, the summer slate films Wonder Woman, Indecent Proposal, A Time to Kill, The Last of the Mohicans, and others that Daenerys Entertainment would release had all completed final cuts. Simon also needed to devote a great deal of energy to personally reviewing and approving these films.
Daenerys Studios.
Inside Simon's office, a meeting had just ended and the last of the ten-film plan had been officially locked in.
Up to now, counting the films still awaiting release this summer, the original four-film plan had already completed nine titles: the Disney collaboration The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the Fox collaborations Sleeping with the Enemy and Terminator 2, the Columbia collaborations Single White Female and A League of Their Own, the MGM collaborations A Few Good Men and A Time to Kill, and the Warner Bros collaborations The Fugitive and The Last of the Mohicans.
The final slot belonged to Warner.
Terry Semel had chosen The Pelican Brief over the newly greenlit The Firm, believing Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington offered stronger box-office security.
As for The Firm, the original male lead had been Tom Cruise. This time Simon planned to cast Keanu Reeves.
After playing Sandra's boyfriend in Run Lola Run, Keanu Reeves had delivered solid box-office results in the past few years with Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Point Break. In addition, Keanu would star this summer in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which in the original timeline had also been a global hit that crossed two hundred million dollars.
Therefore, even though his popularity was slightly below Tom Cruise's, Keanu Reeves was already a hot A-list young leading man in Hollywood.
In the original timeline most people remembered Keanu Reeves only as Neo in The Matrix and John Wick, but in reality the actor's range was extremely wide.
Right now, for example, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was a comedy, Point Break was an action film, and Bram Stoker's Dracula was a fantasy horror.
In the original timeline Keanu Reeves had also starred in a film of the same type as The Firm, The Devil's Advocate. Both movies told the story of a young lawyer fresh out of school torn between money and justice, and both had been very successful.
After that incident, since he had personally told many people he would never work with the three main creators of Rain Man again, Simon had no intention of making an exception for a single film unless it was a special case like Meg Ryan.
The current Daenerys Entertainment also possessed more than enough confidence to uphold Simon's stance. Even if one film failed it would not cause any real damage.
Moreover, Simon was full of confidence in casting Keanu Reeves in The Firm. Without Cruise the production budget could be cut from the original forty million dollars down to twenty-five million, which further reduced the risk Daenerys Entertainment would have to bear.
After seeing Terry Semel off, Simon headed to a conference room in the administration building for the Desperate Housewives production meeting.
Besides the main creators, the supporting cast for Desperate Housewives had basically been finalized over the past few days, and construction of the Wisteria Lane set at Universal Studios had also officially begun.
Inside the conference room Simon listened to Robert Iger outline the production schedule while flipping through materials on the supporting roles.
Then one name caught Simon's eye.
It was the actress cast as Julie Mayer, daughter of Susan Mayer, one of the four housewives.
In the original Desperate Housewives, Susan's daughter Julie had been written as fourteen or fifteen years old, but the actress who looked possibly twenty and whose acting was very ordinary had left almost no impression.
The girl whose materials Simon was looking at now was, at least to him, far more famous than the original actress.
Sarah Michelle Gellar.
This fifteen-year-old actress had been the lead in the famous nineties series Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the original timeline and had also starred in several successful nineties teen horror films. She was an actress Simon rather liked.
According to the materials Sarah Michelle Gellar was currently only five feet two inches, roughly one hundred and fifty-seven centimeters, a petite height. Compared with the original actress who had been almost the same height as Teri Hatcher, Sarah Michelle Gellar fit the image of a daughter far better.
When the meeting ended Simon casually pulled out Sarah Michelle Gellar's materials and handed them to one of the Desperate Housewives producers, asking him to send a copy of the girl's audition tape to his office tomorrow.
He had given the instruction offhand, yet that evening at a party Barbra Streisand was hosting in Beverly Hills a certain little girl appeared in front of Simon.
The fifteen-year-old girl wore a somewhat mature black cocktail dress and light makeup. Although she was short, she gave Simon a very precocious feeling. [TL/N: Simon, pls don't do it.]
A WMA agent personally brought the girl over, introduced her, and then discreetly stepped away.
"Hello, Mr. Westeros. It is very nice to meet you. I have seen all your movies, especially Batman. It was so cool."
Sarah Michelle Gellar spoke without any shyness. She checked Simon's expression, then stepped forward like a kitten extending its paw and carefully tried to slip her arm through his.
Seeing that Simon did not refuse, she really did link arms with him and adopted a little-bird-clinging-to-its-branch pose.
Simon's current height was roughly one hundred and eighty-five centimeters. Being linked arm-in-arm with a girl who, even in small heels, was only one hundred and sixty centimeters created a very distinctive height difference.
There were quite a few guests at the party, yet everyone acted as if they had seen nothing, as though they had not noticed the young little vase suddenly beside Simon at all. Or rather, they had definitely noticed but were simply pretending it was the most normal thing in the world.
Such things were indeed commonplace in Hollywood.
Simon exchanged pleasantries with the crowd for a while and was about to speak with the little girl when Madonna walked over.
The Queen of Pop had sharp eyes. She glanced once at the little vase beside Simon and went straight to her own business. "Simon, have you read that script yet?"