Harvey Weinstein wasn’t the only one that Victor and Gloriana had under their thumbs. As news circulated, more people began to trickle into them, giving them, at first, a small list of high level Hollywood corporate-types that they could squeeze.
It wasn’t all as simple as I’m making it out to be, of course. This was a multi-year endeavor, something that they continued with throughout the rest of their lives. That and the high level executives sometimes didn’t want to go along with Victor and Gloriana Graves’ urging. For those, they’d make examples of them. They’d fund legal teams and work to collect evidence against them and have them tried in court.
The pair were building a network of people that were willing to work for them. And it wasn’t just Hollywood, but the music industry as well. They’d get volunteers to come forth and tell their story, and then they’d talk to those same volunteers about getting back at the leeches, about making it even. They’d convince them to go undercover, to collect evidence against other suspected predators.
They’d take an exploited person, person A, who had been exploited by person B, and go to person D (who had exploited person C) and go undercover and try to document and prove malicious intent. Here we have the dichotomy of Victor Graves again. This was a controversial way of doing things. Was it right, wrong? Was he using these exploited people for his own personal gain? Yes. But he was up front about what he wanted to do. He wanted to change Hollywood, and the exploiters didn’t have to help him do it if they didn’t want to. It was all consensual. There were enough volunteers that the strategy worked. Tit for tat.
This was all part of the Conquest of Hollywood, which Victor began in earnest after the Oscars ceremony where he had made his speech. Before that, though, he had been discussing/propagandizing (propaganda used to be a neutral word) the Gravers. Telling them what they could accomplish together, convincing them to work with him to change the world for the better.
This all dovetailed together. He had some of Hollywood under his thumb so that when he commenced with the Conquest, he was able to keep making movies. He had enough influence that the Hollywood machine wasn’t able to hamper his plans to make them.
As I write through these things its apparent to me how it’d make more sense to have Victor Graves be that millennial that I originally envisioned him as. The time table works much better. Him selling in 2014 and coming out with the movie at that time and then doing the Subjugation of Hollywood. That and the lead up to the 2016 election made more sense, too, with a growing sense of populism happening in the country. Should I mention what the candidates of that election said about Victor Graves? I could, certainly, but I don’t know if I should, given that you might be burnt out on politics by this point. No, I think I’ll leave that alone for now. But back to my point, maybe you should imagine Victor Graves as a millennial for a little bit. We’ll go back and forth between millennial and gen-z. Just know that some stuff from the real world has to be put on hold during the same time in the Gravesverse, to allow V&G to enact those things themselves.
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He made music videos and philosophical videos against Hollywood, too. This was a controversial thing for him to do, but not overly so. Hollywood has long been seen as a bit corrupt, hasn’t it? Victor went to great lengths explaining himself to the press and to the common people in addition to his Gravers. It helped that Hollywood fought back viciously. They tried to leverage their power over the movie theaters against him.
The movie theaters didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. They said as much to the Graver Chapters that were assigned to them. Victor Graves acknowledged their concerns but tried rallying them to his cause.
“For too long Hollywood has held too much sway over the movie theaters. They’re bleeding you dry. Movie theaters are in a sorry enough state as it is. You have to charge more to recuperate the fact that you’re not making as much money from the movies themselves, and as a result, people aren’t going to movies as often, going only a few times a year on average. All while the a-list actors make sums of money to the tune of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, while the studios themselves rake in billions, while streaming services continue to eat away at your profits.
“Not that they aren’t in their right to do that, of course, I’m not complaining about capitalism here, but I’m suggesting we use their own playbook against them. They have power and influence over you, but with me, I’ll give you a way to tip the scales back in your favor, to give you back bargaining power. I’ll use the same principles I used when I made my distribution network, when I made Graver Nation, I’ll use People Power. We’ll go to them as a single unified front and demand that they change. I envision a future where movie theaters are once again a cultural hotspot in our country, where people go regularly and often. Where we may even watch historic events unfold in the news.”
The movie theaters were skeptical of this at first, as I’m sure you would be if you were in their position. They were between a rock and hard place, though. They wanted to stay on both Hollywood and the Graves’ good sides. Victor Graves was really shaking things up in the industry. His steady drip of content that they didn’t even have to pay the Graves back for was really revitalizing the theaters themselves. That and with the nature of the videos, them being music videos and with as relatively short a runtime as the whole movie was, there was a strong urge for people to rewatch them. That and they liked the Gravers, for the most part. They liked hosting them. Yes, they had seen the power of Victor and Gloriana Graves firsthand, and they, for the most part, agreed that they’d at least hear him out, that they’d at least give it a shot.
