Volume 4: White Devil Chapter 303 Press Conference
Diane Lane thought Tommy was not joking, so halfway through the premiere reception, she secretly called her father and hinted that he might have to change jobs because the boss behind the theater was a jerk and she didn't want to be taken advantage of by him, even if he had to pay.
Instead, she learned a shocking that her father actually held 5% of the theater's shares. What's even more exaggerated is that when Tommy brought Ottilia to live in New York, he made a special trip to visit him to thank him for raising a beautiful daughter who could play his girlfriend Ottilia in the movie. The shares were a thank you. He also asked his father to keep it a secret from her, on the grounds that he wanted his baby daughter to firmly believe that there is no good man in Hollywood, and she should tighten her belt when facing them.
After hearing what her father said, Diane Lane hung up the phone and looked for Tommy Hawke at the party which was about to end, but found nothing until she got news from Stephen and Susan. It turned out that after saying hello to his familiar friends, Tommy, Jason and Susie rushed back to Stanford University to work.
"Hi...uh...my father told me...you and Otilia visited him." Diane Lane got Tommy's number from Stephen and dialed it.
In fact, she didn't know what to say, but she felt she should say hello.
Tommy smiled and said on the phone, "If you can't offer $700,000 a night, don't even think about me turning Paige around and returning to Los Angeles to get a room with you , Ms. Diane Lane."
"It seems like you and my father are not talking about the same person on the phone. Maybe he made a mistake." Diane Lane couldn't help laughing when she heard Tommy still speaking in that annoying tone. This was the Tommy she was familiar with, the kind and gentleman who only existed in other people's descriptions, not as a real person.
"Actually, I was squeezed dry by an old woman before I went to Los Angeles. I'm harmless, so you don't have to worry about me. I..." Tommy said with a smile on the phone, but before he finished, Jason beside him said loudly into the phone: "Don't believe his lies. He has a delayed ejaculation pill in his pocket. Before I left, I saw him sneakily buy it from the pharmacy, and he even took off the wrapping paper! It's for you!"
“You stupid jerk!"Then a series of roars and curse words broke out on the phone. Even if Diane put the phone away, she could still hear Tommy yelling at Jason on the other end: "One million and a half million! Do you know? One million and a half million, I gave Diane Lane one million and a half million! I didn't even touch her hand! I finally got this girl to call me, but your screaming ruined it! Jason, you fucking owe me six million, remember to pay me back the dividends at the end of the year."
Diane Lane's expression became dull as she answered the phone. She had indeed earned $700,000 from him, but he told his friend that he got $1.5 million without paying anything, and now he wants the other party to pay him back $6 million?
"Why is it six million? Didn't you say one and a half million?" Jason was stunned at first, then sighed, and finally asked in dissatisfaction.
"In order to pick up girls, I also spent 4.7 million to buy a small theater in New York for her father. So all in all, I should say that I spent 6.2 million on this woman. Since you are my best friend, you only need to compensate me 6 million."
"Shit! You're really willing to spend a lot of money to pick up girls, Tommy, you should stay away from Stephen. You can't forget your background. You're a complete pauper. You should learn to save money! Women in Hollywood are not for people like you!" Jason opened his mouth and said, "I... okay, put it on my account."
After Tommy confirmed that Jason had admitted the debt, he counted on his fingers with satisfaction. Six million minus seven hundred thousand, minus the two hundred thousand he had invested in the theater, he still had five million and one hundred thousand left. He smiled and said to Diane Lane, who was already dumbfounded on the other end of the phone:
"You heard me. According to the price you offered, I can let you chat with me for the next week. After a week, I can still have 200,000 yuan of profit left to replenish my kidneys. 700,000 yuan... 700,000, 700,000, 700,000 yuan... Now that this matter is over, I can tell you calmly, Diane, you are as beautiful and holy as the Statue of Liberty sent by the French in New York to lick the American balls. So if anyone wants to chat with you, tell him that you are worth 7 million yuan. You are definitely worth it! Although I won't patronize you, I am willing to testify for you. You can tell everyone casually that I am worth 7 million yuan overnight. If you don't believe it, go ask Tommy Hawke! That guy paid this high price! As long as you give me 10% commission after selling it. Of course, if you are willing to increase the commission to 30%, I can publish your real name in the newspaper to prove it for you."
Diane Lane couldn't keep up with Tommy's train of thought. She hadn't recovered from the cruel reality that this guy could get six million just by blackmailing his companions. This guy had already taken the initiative to suggest that she raise the price? And if she could give him two million and one hundred thousand, he would be willing to accept an interview with the newspaper under his real name and publicly prove that she was worth seven million a night?
Completely ignoring another question that the public might have: if she really made seven million from Tommy, why would she continue to engage in the flesh trade?
She didn't even know how to respond to Tommy's joke. She could only smile with the same exasperated look that Tommy had put on at the party and said, "After hearing you get mad at your friends just now, I realized that you were still a gentleman when I rejected you."
The series of angry greetings Tommy had just thrown at Jason made Diane Lane realize how crazy he would be if someone caused him to lose a large amount of money. Even though she had caused him to lose more than 700,000 yuan, he could still remain rational when seeing her, which showed that it was not easy.
"Of course, I am aggressive towards rich people, but I am polite to poor people. If I am gentlemanly to you, it must be your problem. That's it, ma'am. When I am done with my work and think of you, and you happen not to have done something that disgusts me, we can talk about making a biopic of Jean Seberg."
"What do you mean by something you hate?"
"Like finding a nigger boyfriend or something."
"Black man, boyfriend? Of course not, I never thought about it." Diane Lane was stunned.
"Good night, Diane, good night, Hollywood." Tommy said his final greeting and hung up the phone neatly.
There was no mention of flying her to San Francisco and letting her earn money for a week.
"Good night, rude man." Diane Lane replied to the phone that had already been hung up.
After hanging up the phone, Tommy and Jason smiled and looked at Susie who had been silent the whole time. Susie leaned back in the seat of the limousine, enjoying the attention of the two men waiting for the queen's decision. After more than ten seconds, she said to Tommy, "If you want, that woman will never escape from your grasp."
"Of course, I have this kind of charm. As long as she has had close contact with me, I can make her have sex with me a second time as long as I want, no matter what her identity is." Tommy shrugged and did not deny it.
"Come on!" Jason looked at his girlfriend speechlessly. "That woman didn't come and chase Tommy to bed, nothing happened, but I was blackmailed for six million by this bastard. I could have used the money to buy a small winery in Europe for us, and we could have enjoyed the fun of winemaking during our vacation."
"Jason, dating and dating a man is a very, very independent behavior of a woman, OK? I am a woman, I have the right to decide who can put a golf club in my body. Recall the last conversation, Tommy said that if she didn't do things that disgusted him, they could meet again, what was the woman's reaction, she said black people? Boyfriend? Of course not. This was her subconscious answer. Guess why Tommy always likes girls who are not smart but beautiful? Because it is easy to use words to influence their behavior inadvertently." Susie said to Jason in a positive tone:
"If he hadn't been rushing back to Stanford tonight, that woman would definitely have appeared in his room tonight."
"AmigaOS is more attractive to me than a woman. It should also be attractive to you because you will appear in front of the world with it." Tommy did not continue to talk about women. He smiled and looked at Susie:
"Jason is a technical person, and you are certainly a technical person too, but Jason is a construction worker, and you can be an architect. We have a lot of construction workers here, including Jason, Holly, Susan, Mark, even Ted, and even Stephen, but there are very few top architects. Jim is one, Charles is one, and Benjamin is half. If a person tries to build an Empire State Building in his mind, he must always remember the design drawings and be able to adjust them at any time when the building is half built to ensure that there are no safety hazards in the building. Not everyone has this ability, to be rational, calm, cruel, and know how to give up. I think you can be considered half an architect if AmigaOS is successful."
"How should I respond to you?" Susie looked at Tommy. She understood that Tommy wanted her to take more responsibilities. She actually liked being a rich woman doing nothing. No kidding, she would just lie in her mansion every day and play with hacking techniques, so that more poor people could enjoy free calls and the like, and accept their worship of her like a queen in the virtual world. If she wanted to go shopping, she would drive a sports car to a high-end shopping mall and swipe Jason's card to make purchases. She also studied how to make her face, figure, skin color, and plumpness more attractive.
Jason is a good man with a bad taste. If Tommy is still there, Jason will be Tommy's best lieutenant and executor. But what Tommy wants is that if he leaves, the business can still remain aggressive. And he may be slightly better than Jason in some aspects, such as cruelty and rationality.
Tommy hopes that she can make up for Jason's shortcomings. If he is lazy and unwilling to work hard, his life as a rich woman may become more and more distant from him.
"Let's wait and see." Thinking of this, Susie said to Tommy.
The launch of AmigaOS was finally held in the Stanford University Auditorium. It was not because WinStar had no other venue to choose, but because Susie hoped to tie WinStar and Stanford more closely.
Tommy watched the press conference live on TV in his apartment near Stanford University. This was probably the only advantage of owning your own TV station, which was that you could let the station broadcast whatever you liked to watch.
Susie used the increased budget to invite more than a thousand American media reporters to attend the conference. Every reporter who came to the scene could take away the Compaq laptop that they had experienced at the press conference.
A brand new laptop computer is much more expensive than the cost of ordinary media advertising manuscripts. It is said that this generous gift even made many journalists who did not receive invitations look for their colleagues and ask them if they had other arrangements and whether they could transfer their invitation letters to the conference.
Sophia went to the scene to help Susie with some auxiliary work. Only Quinn came over specially and said that he wanted to watch the press conference with Tommy.
"Fuck! Can you tell your girlfriend to scream a little quieter? Even if you ignore me, the press conference is held at Stanford University. Please give your alma mater some respect, OK?" Tommy was sitting on the sofa in the living room with a beer in his hand. He turned his head and yelled in dissatisfaction towards the bedroom.
When Quinn said he came to accompany him, it was more like he was too lazy to pay the hotel room fee with his girlfriend, so he came to borrow his large apartment and enjoy the large bubble bathtub that could accommodate three people.
When the bedroom finally quieted down, the press conference began. The place was pitch black. There was no host or staff on the stage. Just as the attendees were about to ask if there was a power outage, the Stanford-patented oversized cinema-style screen in front finally lit up.
As soon as the screen lit up, the whole audience let out their first exclamation, because the face of Hollywood's popular star Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared on the screen.
The camera gradually zoomed out, and he stood behind a wheelchair with his hands on his wife Maria Shriver's shoulders. She was sitting in a wheelchair. The couple looked quietly into the distance, enjoying the tenderness.
The camera movements were at the level of a movie, and the pictures were as beautiful as oil paintings. For a moment, even Tommy was a little curious about who helped Susie shoot this short film.
The plot of the movie is very simple. The wife is a photojournalist for VOX. She lost her ability to move in an accident and needed a long period of recuperation and rehabilitation. She could no longer carry a camera to see the world with her own eyes, and could no longer take shocking photos. The wife said nothing, but Arnold understood that his wife wanted to see.
So, Arnold took his wife's camera, packed his bags and set off, going to one place after another to take pictures and interview, in Europe, Africa, Asia, snowfields, rainforests, grasslands, deserts...
He took a photo after another, then opened his laptop, turned on the AmigaOS system, used the browser to look up local information, wrote information, and sent an email to his wife sitting in the backyard of his home, attaching the photos to his wife. In every email filled with love and warmth, Arnold would write: To dear Ms. Shriver, your dear life assistant, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Miss Amiga.
At the end of the short film, Maria, who was in a wheelchair and never left her house, won the journalist award. When accepting the award, she gave a speech and finally thanked the most important people in her life, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Miss Amiga.
The film ended, the lights in the venue came on, and Susie White was already standing on the stage in a smart professional dress, looking at the audience with a smile.
Seeing that Susie knew that she was blatantly cheating at the press conference, Tommy felt that he was right to choose her.
Email currently cannot transmit attachments at all, but that doesn't stop them from making it seem like it can be done. After all, they are selling AmigaOS, so the email problem should be left to their own professors and Stanford University to deal with, as they developed this thing.
Susie started with the research and development, portraying herself as the creator of Amiga, because she was lonely and she longed to be around more lonely people, so she decided to create AmigaOS... It sounded very touching, because when Tommy saw Susie talking about how she ran away from home at the age of fourteen, bid farewell to her beastly family and came to Los Angeles to make money by prostitution to buy hardware and teach herself computer technology, some emotional female reporters in the audience burst into tears.
The second time the whole audience exclaimed occurred when Susie asked everyone to turn on the computers in front of them and enter the system, and then enter the browser developed by Stanford University, and enter a simple forum, where they could post and communicate with other colleagues on the scene about their experience with AmigaOS in real time, and it was anonymous, so there was no need to worry about being in trouble for negative criticism.
Everyone tried it and found that their posts soon appeared on the page. The whole place was filled with the sound of keyboard tapping, but no one spoke, only constant exclamations. This was because these writers had witnessed firsthand how convenient it was when words had the ability to be transmitted in a timely manner. They didn't need to call their colleagues, they just had to turn on their computers and open this program called a browser, and they could exchange work experiences with more than a thousand colleagues and speak freely.
The third time the audience exclaimed was when they were asked to open their email system, where the staff had stored the email numbers of people familiar to those reporters so they could communicate in a timely manner.
Through the shooting of various camera angles and the display on the big screen, people can see that some people on the scene sent emails to their bosses far away in New York, some sent emails to their wives and daughters in their hometowns, and some sent emails to friends they had not seen since college, and then they received their replies very quickly.
Those people watched the press conference in another part of the world, and then communicated instantly with those on the scene through email. It seemed as if the distance no longer existed.
The fourth time, it was when Stanford University President Donald Kennedy took the stage and exchanged emails with the former Secretary of Education online. The broadcast was broadcast live through the signal of the filming crew in Washington. The big screen clearly showed the former Secretary of Education clumsily operating the keyboard in his study. In the end, because his hand speed was too slow, he called his granddaughter to help him criticize the Stanford University president. One email after another helped the two of them convey their anger to each other.
This is of course fake, because Donald has not criticized the other party since the Secretary of Education retired. The two old men were able to stand up and perform their years-long feud like a live reality show this time, mainly because the former Secretary of Education received a sufficiently generous platform fee from WinStar. This time the mutual criticism did not involve academic and educational issues, it was just a pure show.
But the big screen instantly displayed the contents of the two people's emails. The humorous remarks between the two made everyone laugh. The frequency of thirty-seven emails in ten minutes also made everyone realize the immediacy and efficiency of online mailboxes.
The fifth time happened after the break performance. Suzy invited Guns N' Roses to compose and sing the theme song "As long as you are willing, Girl" for AmigaOS. Every set of AmigaOS has this song built in, and users can enjoy it without paying.
At the end of the performance, Suzy invited Guns N' Roses to talk about their views on the Internet. The band's lead singer Axl Ross said with some disdain that he felt that everything at the press conference was fake, just like they came here to perform, not because they liked WinStar, but just because the performance paid enough.
Susie said that all of this is true, just like the theme song says, you can do whatever you want as long as you want.
Then Axl Ross took the microphone and asked Susie a very difficult question: Some people say that we are now the best rock music in America. If you say that I can do anything with Amiga, then let your Miss Amiga tell me if there are any rock bands in the Soviet Union on the other side of the earth. If so, I want to compete on the same stage with the Soviet rock bands.
This question made many people at the scene applaud loudly, and some even felt that given the rebellious character of Guns N' Roses, all this could not have been arranged in advance.
After all, not everyone knows now that the United States is inviting the Soviets to visit the United States. Most of the time, in the eyes of the American people, these two huge countries are still maintaining a very dangerous confrontation.
In full view of everyone, Susie opened AmigaOS, opened the browser, searched the website, and kept jumping between web pages. Finally, the picture froze. She turned around and pointed at the page that finally froze on the big screen, and said affirmatively: "I said that as long as you want, Amiga can do anything for you. This is the answer you want. I tell you, the Soviet Union has rock music, and AmigaOS found them. See, this is a Soviet website address , and the string of numbers displayed on it is the phone number of the agent of the most famous underground rock band in the Soviet Union. Boys, are you ready for a rock battle with the Soviet Union? I can help you with the tactics."
"This press conference is so cool!" Quinn sat down in the empty seat next to Tommy wearing a small exposed camisole. She curled up her legs and put potato chips into her mouth. She stared at the TV screen and said, "Is that band number real? Or did you find a few Russian exiles in the United States to pretend to be a rock band?"
"The webpage is fake. We can't connect to the Soviet website at all. I don't even know if the Soviet Union has a public node website. But the number is real. It belongs to a very well-known Soviet rock band. You are right. Susi's level of forgery is very cool." Tommy turned his head and looked at Quinn. He moved his butt to the side and said with disgust:
"Ma'am, could you please take that thing off your waist before you come out? Please keep it away from me and stop sticking it wetly on my legs. I'm scared."
