Chapter 112: Besties
Sitting at the table, Rick Salomon looked diagonally across at Duke Rosenberg, who was chatting with his father. Duke looked indifferent and sounded calm, just as he had when dealing with Rick back then. It was as if he weren't speaking to a top executive of a major Hollywood studio, but to an ordinary nobody.
His father, on the other hand, showed no signs of anger. Instead, he was incredibly enthusiastic, acting as if the Duke Rosenberg sitting there weren't a twenty-four-year-old kid, but a top-tier director like Steven Spielberg.
Why was it like this? Rick Salomon knew perfectly well. Duke's two movies had been back-to-back massive hits, making him the cream of the crop among Hollywood's rising directors, completely entitled to be taken seriously by every film studio.
Looking at a Duke Rosenberg who had reaped both fame and fortune, then thinking about his own current situation and the words he had used to mock Duke back then, Rick Salomon felt like an absolute joke.
"You don't belong in Hollywood! Give up on being a director!"
Remembering what he had said, Rick Salomon felt his heart fill with bitterness. It seemed those words were much better suited for himself.
The guy he had mocked for not belonging in Hollywood or the directing industry had not only achieved massive success in North America with his first feature film, raking in over 350 million dollars at the global box office, but his second movie had taken it a step further. Its global box office had now firmly crossed 400 million dollars...
Forget newcomer directors—looking at the entirety of Hollywood, how many directors could deliver two consecutive movies with North American box offices over 100 million dollars and global box offices exceeding 300 million?
Even if he wanted to deny it a thousand times over, he couldn't change the reality that Duke Rosenberg was now one of the hottest commercial directors in Hollywood.