Chapter 46 - 45 : San Bruno

Chapter 46: Chapter 45 : San Bruno

B14.

A small round table sat in the middle of the room under a black tablecloth. Two chairs, ten wings, three cameras: a Z1U on each side angled at a chair, and an HC3 up on a ladder for the wide shot. Mac had on an Iron Pit tank top, and before he sat down, he made a point of smoothing out the logo for the main camera. Rhett had bet he wouldn’t make it to wing four.

Wing one was ketchup. Mac put it away in one bite and nearly took the bone down with it, then leaned back in his chair. "That’s it? I thought this was supposed to be hot. Sierra, is this a kids’ show?"

Sierra didn’t take the bait. She flipped through her note cards. "That lifetime Iron Pit membership. Since you signed, how many times have you actually gone?"

Mac’s grin stalled. "...What kind of question is that?"

"A researched one."

"Three."

Sierra turned over another card. "The front desk says two. And one of those was to ask if you could leave Owen’s car in their lot overnight."

Mac twisted around toward the dark behind the lights. "Who told her? Dom! Was it you?" From off camera came the sound of Dom losing a fight with himself.

Wings two and three, Mac talked less and turned redder. By wing three he was fanning himself with one hand and explaining that he was just getting warmed up. Sierra asked what he was warming up for. He said wing four, then looked like he’d just heard himself say it.

He made it to wing three and a half. He took one bite of wing four, set it down, stood up very calmly, walked very calmly across the room, and put his whole face under the spout of the water cooler.

"Mac," Sierra said to his back, "we’ve got six to go."

"You’ve got six." His voice came out from under the running water. "I’ve retired."

Sierra turned back to the camera and ate the other six. Nothing on her face. With every wing she asked the empty chair a question, and Mac shouted an answer from off camera with his arms wrapped around the water cooler. By wing eight his answers had stopped making sense. Whatever she asked, he yelled "Milk."

After wing ten, Dom cut the cameras. The second the red light went off, Sierra put both hands flat on the table and let out a long, slow breath. Then she stood up, shoved Mac out of the way, yanked the whole jug off the water cooler, and drank three huge gulps straight from it.

Mac looked at the empty stand, then at her. "You were dying from wing one, weren’t you?"

Sierra wiped her mouth and shoved the jug into his arms. "Make it past wing five next time, and I’ll tell you."

Dom didn’t delete that one either.

When they’d wrapped, Dom dubbed a copy of the main-camera tape, snapped the original into a hard case and handed it to Rhett. The tapes from the other two cameras sat in a stack on the editing desk, labeled DON’T ERASE.

"You’re seriously taking this to YouTube?" he said. "One angle, not a single cut. And there’s a part where Mac hugs a water cooler and yells about milk."

"That’s the part that matters." Rhett slid the case into his bag. "Anybody can sit two people down at a table. Getting a guy that size to hug a water cooler and yell about milk, and making people want to watch him do it again next week, that’s the part nobody else can do."

The sun wasn’t up yet when the Ferrari got on I-5. Dom was in the passenger seat with a pillow in his lap and the old camcorder in his hand. He’d said shotgun was his, and he’d meant it.

The sky was only starting to gray when they came down off the Grapevine. North of that, there was nothing on either side but flat land running out to the horizon, an almond orchard here and there, a gas station here and there. Past Coalinga, a smell of cow manure came pouring in through the vents, and Dom lifted his head off the pillow.

"What is that?"

"Harris Ranch. Biggest cattle operation in California," Rhett said. "Twenty more minutes and we’re past it. Next time you drive this road, remember. Once you’re past Coalinga, switch the air to recirculate."

Dom mumbled something about how Rhett knew everything, pressed the pillow over his face, and went back to sleep.

It was only after he’d said it that Rhett realized he’d never driven this road. Not in this life. What he remembered was twenty years off. A rental car, a trip up to Silicon Valley to close a deal he would go on to lose down to the last dollar, and this same smell the whole way.

He switched the air to recirculate.

A little before noon they came off the 101 into San Bruno. YouTube’s new office was in a low, forgettable building off Cherry Avenue. The sign by the door was still temporary, a laminated sheet of printer paper taped to the glass.

Kim Ostrander was already waiting in the parking lot. Early thirties, jeans and a blazer, a badge around her neck that didn’t have a photo on it yet. She watched the Ferrari ease into a spot marked VISITOR and raised her eyebrows.

"We saw the KTLA clip," she said. "The whole office saw it."

"Then you saw the plate frame too." Rhett climbed out. "It belongs to a friend of mine who sells used cars. I’m just running errands for him. Today the errand happens to be Northern California."

Kim laughed out loud and led them inside. Dom brought up the rear with his old camcorder raised, framing the paper sign on the glass door, the Ferrari in the visitor spot and the back of Rhett’s head in a single shot. "I’m filming the whole thing once we’re in there," he said under his breath. "Negotiating with YouTube. This is history."

Inside was a lot messier than outside. Half the desks were still in boxes. An engineer in shorts was sitting on the floor screwing a chair together, and a whiteboard on the wall was covered in numbers, a few of them circled in red with ??? written next to them. The whole building smelled like new carpet.

Someone was already sitting in the conference room. Mid-forties, gray sweater, a laptop open in front of him, and a badge on his chest with the Google logo.

"Paul Lindgren. Google, ad partnerships." He stood and shook Rhett’s hand, and didn’t let go right away. "Let me ask you something first. Do you know you cost us a hundred and fifty million dollars?"

Dom nearly dropped the camcorder. Outside he’d been talking about filming the whole meeting, but the second he walked into this room and saw that Google badge, the camcorder went down into his lap, and the lens cap stayed on.

"The weeks we were negotiating," Paul said, letting go and sitting back down, "their side kept a folder on the table the whole time. Nothing in it but your numbers. Every time your numbers went up, so did their price. We wanted to hold out a little longer. Then the second part of your BMW video came out, and my boss said forget it, sign now, if we wait any longer this kid’s going to make another one."

"I made that folder," Kim said, taking the seat beside him without a trace of embarrassment.

What he’d guessed in the back of a New York cab, somebody was now saying to his face. A week early, a hundred and fifty million more. He knew exactly how big his part in it had been. A few pages in a folder, probably. But a few pages were enough. Those pages were the reason this meeting existed.

"Then I’m sorry about that." He sat down. "But at least the money stayed in the family."

Paul blinked, then laughed and tipped his chin at Kim. "You were right. He doesn’t scare."

Kim slid a bound packet across the table. There was nothing printed on the cover.

"Starting next year, we’re planning to share video ad revenue with the people who make the videos," she said. "Not everybody. We’ll invite a small group first, a dozen or so channels, run ads around their videos, and split the money. MrPelican is first on the list."

"What’s the split?"

"Forty percent to the creator."

"For the record," Paul added, "forty is generous. As of today, nobody anywhere has ever paid a cent for home videos."

None of it surprised Rhett. In the version he remembered, the program didn’t go public until next May, and the split was never printed anywhere official. But a few years later everybody in the industry knew the standard had ended up at fifty-five percent to the creator. The years in between had been one channel at a time, one fight at a time.

He didn’t touch the packet. "Three questions first," he said. "Of the dozen channels on that list, how many are making money on their own right now?"

Kim thought about it. "Honestly? One."

"Second. Did you know that about thirty percent of my views don’t happen on YouTube at all? They happen in the player on my own site. I sell the ads over there myself. Sony pays me directly. The servers run through Sony’s Akamai account."

Paul’s fingers paused on his laptop. Clearly he knew.

"Third. Three years from now, the best of those dozen channels are all going to get phone calls. Somebody offering more to take them somewhere else. TV networks, record labels, maybe one of your competitors. When that happens, do you want them picking up?"

The conference room was quiet for a few seconds. Out on the floor, the engineer’s drill whined once and stopped.

"I’m not asking for more because I’m greedy," Rhett said. "I’m asking because the split has to be high enough that they don’t want to pick up. Fifty-five. To the creator."

In the corner, Dom’s mouth opened and closed again.

Paul didn’t answer right away. He turned his laptop around. A traffic chart filled the screen. "You said it yourself. Thirty percent of your views happen on your own site." He tapped the screen with his pen. "So help me understand. Why would we pay fifty-five to somebody who’s competing with us for traffic?"

That was the question Rhett had been waiting for. "Have you looked at what’s in that thirty percent?" he said. "Dozens of hours of raw night-vision footage. A twenty-one-minute blooper reel. Live streams. Your cap is ten minutes. None of that could go up here even if I wanted it to. Whatever you can’t hold, I’m holding for you."

"And the episodes?"

"The episodes go on YouTube and nowhere else," Rhett said. "Starting with the next one, if an episode shows up on my site, it plays in your embed player. The views count for you. The ads are yours."

Kim wrote something down.

"One more thing," Rhett went on. "My site has a few hundred thousand registered accounts, and every one of them left an email address. Every time a new video goes up, all of them get one email with one link in it, and the link points here. The first day’s traffic, I’m the one bringing it to you. Think of my site as the guy standing at your door, walking people in."

Paul turned the laptop back around, leaned back and traded a look with Kim. "Even so. Fifty-five each for a dozen kids with camcorders? Nobody upstairs is going to sign off on that."

"Then don’t sign off on it for a dozen kids," Rhett said. "Sign off on it for one company."

He took the hard case out of his bag and set it on the table.

"A dozen channels means a dozen contracts. Every time one of them films something that gets you sued, that’s another phone call you have to make. What I’m saying is, sign one contract, with me. Every channel under the MrPelican name, I sign the paper, I answer the phone, I clean up the mess. Cameras, editing, lawyers, lights, all on me."

"And you take a cut of theirs," Paul said.

"And I take a cut of theirs. Same as any record label." Rhett nudged the case forward. "I’d like to show you channel number two."

Dom was already on his feet. His own old camcorder couldn’t read HD tape, so he’d packed one of the company’s HC3s before they left. He pulled it out of his bag to use as a deck and had it hooked up to the conference room TV in about three moves. "Main camera only, nothing’s cut yet," he added quietly. "The sound might jump around a little."

They watched all twenty minutes. The second the picture came up, Kim said, "218." Paul added, "And the tree." They’d watched that video more times than either of them could count. Paul could probably have told you the timestamp of the shot where Mac turned into a tree during Red Light, Green Light.

Kim laughed when Mac asked if this was a kids’ show. Paul laughed at the front desk saying two. When Mac put his face under the water cooler and announced he’d retired, they both laughed out loud. By wing eight, when the first "Milk" came from off camera, Kim had her glasses off and was wiping her eyes, and the engineer from the floor stuck his head in to ask what they were watching.

When it ended, Kim and Paul looked at each other. It wasn’t as if they’d never seen a show like this on TV. But the ones on TV weren’t this funny, and they didn’t have this kind of life in them. This one hadn’t even been cut. The sound jumped around, the camera never changed angles, and they had still watched every minute of it.

Paul hesitated. "Did she study this? Broadcasting, something like that?"

"No," Rhett said. "I signed her less than a week ago. Back then, she wouldn’t say a full sentence on camera."

Kim didn’t say anything. She tore a blank page out of her notebook, wrote MrPelican at the top with (label) after it, drew a line down, split off a branch, and wrote 218 girl at the end of it.

"And the tree boy," she said, looking up. "He’s yours too, right?"

Rhett nodded and held out his hand for the paper and pen. He crossed out 218 girl and wrote Sierra next to it. Then he drew a second branch and wrote Mac.

"Two, for now," he said. "Mac’s show launches next year. The way I’ve planned it, there’ll be a lot more after that."

Paul opened his mouth, clearly about to ask about the label part. Rhett had already drawn a line through the word. He wrote something above it, turned the paper around and slid it back to the middle of the table.

"This is what I’m going to call it."

On the paper, it said: Multi-Channel Network.

Kim and Paul looked at each other again.

Where Rhett came from, nobody would come up with that phrase for several more years. A handful of companies would ride those three words to valuations in the hundreds of millions, and plenty of lawyers would get rich arguing over them. Today it had turned up early, on a sheet torn out of a notebook in San Bruno.

In the end, MrPelican would come into the first group as a company, at fifty-five percent, and any channel under the MrPelican name would be covered by the same contract. Ads on the main channel would start as a trial in January instead of waiting for the public launch in May.

The episodes would live on YouTube, and anywhere they showed up on his site, they’d play in YouTube’s embed player. The raw footage, the extras and the live streams, everything YouTube couldn’t hold, would stay on his own site, and YouTube wouldn’t touch it.

"Legal will send you the paperwork," Kim said.

"Tell them to hurry," Paul said, closing his laptop. "Before this kid changes his mind and asks for another ten."

In the hallway, Dom held it in all the way to the men’s room. Then he dropped his voice. "We’d make money at forty too. Weren’t you worried they’d get annoyed and take the whole thing off the table?"

"Sure I was. That’s why I asked those three questions first," Rhett said. "You heard Kim. One channel on that list makes money on its own. When this thing launches next year, the people upstairs are going to want results. Without us, what do they show them? They need that list to look good a lot more than we need to be on it."

Dom chewed on that. "What about Sierra and Mac? Once they’ve got their own channels, won’t they feel like we’re skimming ten percent off them for nothing?"

"Somebody’s definitely going to think that. So the ten percent can’t be for nothing," Rhett said. "We buy the cameras. We cut the videos. We hire the lawyers when something goes wrong, and we go out and sell the ads.

"If they walk into YouTube on their own, they get forty. With us, it’s fifty-five minus ten. That’s still more than forty, and they don’t have to carry any of it by themselves. Somebody’s going to have to sit down and walk them through that math."

"Who?"

Rhett turned on the faucet and looked at him.

"Me?" Dom pointed at himself.

"You cut half our footage, and you were in the room the day they signed. They trust you."

Dom stood there a second. Then: "And our site? If the episodes all go to YouTube, what’s left on our site to sell ads against?"

"The raw footage, the extras, the live streams, and those few hundred thousand accounts," Rhett said. "YouTube’s the storefront. That’s where people walk in. But who they are, where they came from, what their email address is, that goes in your own book. You can rent a storefront from somebody else. The book has to be yours."

Dom mouthed it once to himself, then pulled out his phone and typed it in.

Kim walked them out to the parking lot. As Rhett opened the car door, she took one more look at the Ferrari.

"Drive carefully," she said. "Cars like that photograph well."

Before they got in the car, Dom finally took the lens cap off. He filmed Rhett leaning on the door and waving to Kim. He filmed him nearly cracking his head on the roof as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

And he got the whole thing at the parking lot exit, where Rhett rolled down the window and informed the old man in the booth that he was a big star, he’d been on TV, and how about an autograph instead of the parking fee? The old man leaned out of the booth, looked him up and down, then looked at the Ferrari.

"Sure," the old man said. "And I’m Tom Cruise. Five bucks."

Rhett laughed so hard he slumped over the steering wheel, then handed over the five bucks. In Dom’s hands, the shot wouldn’t stop shaking.

Of the two hours of negotiating, Dom hadn’t gotten a single second. This was what the tape had instead.

They drove back into the sun. Past Coalinga, Dom switched the air to recirculate before Rhett could say anything, then hugged his pillow and fell asleep with the camcorder still in his hand.

It was full dark when Rhett’s phone rang. The screen said Chuck Ross.

"Congratulations," Chuck said, before Rhett could even say hello. "Look at you, driving around in a Ferrari now. I’ve got three or four press releases about you landing on my desk every day, which is more than the city council gets."

Rhett laughed. "None of those came from me, and the car’s not even mine. "

"Come on, who do you think you’re talking to?" Chuck didn’t bother circling around it. "Seriously, though. What’s the next one? You owe me an exclusive this time."

"Still on campus," Rhett said. "But it’ll be bigger than last time."

"On campus again?" Chuck snorted. "How much room does your school even have? If you really want to go big, why not rent that empty lot across from the main gate?"

Rhett didn’t answer right away. He remembered that lot. In his first life, a couple of years from now, a chain-link fence would go up around it with a sign for student apartments, and the sign would hang there for years.

"Isn’t that lot kind of a sore spot?" he asked, feeling it out. "If I put in for it, would they even approve it?"

"I wouldn’t bet on it either way," Chuck said. "But come up with a good enough theme and maybe the city loosens up. Don’t just have your own school playing, for one. Bring in people from outside."

"Oh?"

That one hadn’t occurred to him. Every video so far had been SCU kids on SCU ground. No matter how good it got, sooner or later people would get tired of watching the same school.

"Plus," Chuck said, as casually as if he were just thinking out loud, "developers fighting over land, nobody around here can stand that. If you could ride that, you might go from some college kid pulling stunts to the guy speaking up for the whole neighborhood."

"And then you get another exclusive out of it. Right?"

There was a beat on the other end. Then Chuck laughed a couple of times. "Sure, sure." He paused. "But let me warn you about one thing. The developers down in the South Bay, not a single one of them is somebody you want to—"

He didn’t finish. On Chuck’s end, a door opened, somebody said something to him, and then came the rustle of paper.

"Hm?" Chuck said, low. Then nothing.

When Chuck spoke again, his voice was completely different. "Where are you right now?"

"On the 5, just past Kettleman City. Why?"

"Go back to your studio," Chuck said. "You’re in trouble."

The line went dead.

Rhett tossed the phone onto the console and glanced over at the passenger seat. Dom was still asleep, and the camcorder had slipped out of his hand onto the floor mat. Los Angeles was a little more than three hours away. He put his foot down.