Exploiting Hollywood 1980

The two Israeli filmmakers saw that they had no hope of winning the award, and that staying in Montreal would only lead to reporters asking embarrassing questions, so they changed their tickets and went to America in advance without waiting for the film festival to end.

Before leaving, Minahan and Ronald had breakfast together and exchanged contact information. During the conversation, he knew that Ronald's script was valued by Jane Fonda and sold at a sky-high price, so he immediately invited Ronald to Cannon Pictures in Los Angeles to discuss his "Intersection" script.

"Ronald, if we work together, we will win an Oscar. We will make it into a replica of the greatest family movie in Hollywood in the past 20 years. Family movies are about to become popular in Hollywood."

"The greatest family movie?" Ronald thought for a moment, "Is it "The Godfather"?

"Nonono, it's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." " Minahan shook his head.

Ronald knew that this movie was about a white daughter bringing a black boyfriend to her parents' house for dinner, and then understanding and reconciling with each other.

However, he was very afraid that his script "Crossover" would be made into a musical with Chinese and Italian people dancing together by Minahan, so he declined his kindness on the grounds that he still needed to polish the script.

Minahan had just entered the Hollywood game field, and he would not let go of someone in the circle who sold scripts at sky-high prices. "Anyway, you have to come to Cannon Pictures to talk to us. You are a genius playwright, and I am a genius director. Our cooperation will definitely be a great success."

Well, Ronald only agreed to go to Cannon Pictures to take a look. He didn't want his script to be made into a movie that would be criticized by the audience.

The participating films of the film festival were screened at a rate of about one per day, and Ronald began his real career as a film buyer. Roger Corman did not give him a purchase quota, but only suggested that if there were any good movies and the price was right, he could contact Gale of New World.

So Ronald just picked some movies that he was interested in to watch, regardless of whether they were new or old movies. If he was not interested after watching for 20 minutes, he would get up and leave.

For example, Hitchcock's daughter brought two movies to pay tribute to Hitchcock. Ronald watched both movies, "Rear Window" and "Vertigo".

Although both movies are Hitchcock's masterpieces, Ronald never had the chance to see them. He had never seen the movie theater re-screening in America, and he even attended Scorsese's film appreciation class.

It turned out that Hitchcock knew that his daughter had average talent and had no future in the film industry, so he bought the copyrights of his five most satisfactory color films, including these two, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Strange Case of the Dead, and Rope, and left them to his daughter.

With the copyrights of these five movies in hand, his daughter's family can live a worry-free life.

These two movies are ingeniously conceived, and the photography and performances are great. As a movie fan, Ronald wanted to watch them several times to figure out the techniques after watching them once. Especially the close-up of Grace Kelly that filled the big screen became her appearance in the entire movie, which was very amazing.

When the scene of Vertigo was showing Jimmy Stewart going up the stairs, a dolly zoom appeared, creating an effect where the male protagonist was motionless in the camera, while the background was moving, to show the male protagonist's dizziness caused by fear of heights.

At this time, the audience applauded and cheered collectively, and it seemed that they all knew what they were doing. This was the first time that the dolly zoom technique appeared on the big screen in film history, and was later used by Spielberg in "Jaws".

In addition to satisfying his curiosity, Ronald's main focus was on non-English films. The competition for English films was too fierce.

For example, "The Stuntman" starring Peter O'Toole has been bought by 20th Century Fox and screened in America. Even the bid for the second run was sold at a price much higher than Ronald's budget.

The first thing that attracted his interest was a film by the Soviet Union, "Stalker". According to reports, the artistic value of this film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky was highly praised.

Even though Ronald had a buyer's badge, he still had to go through some trouble to get in and find a seat in the back row.

Most of the people who came to watch were insiders in the film industry and fans attracted by the publicity.

This movie tells the story of a mysterious place that seems to have alien relics. The stalker is a guide-like character who takes others through this mysterious place. Some people want to get wealth by going through the mysterious place, some want artistic inspiration, and some think it is evil and want to blow it up.

Some people, like Ronald, found themselves hypnotized.

The pace of the movie was extremely slow, and Ronald fell asleep from time to time. After a two-hour and forty-minute battle with sleep, the screening finally ended, and a head of the Soviet Union National Film and Television Committee (Gosko) was being interviewed and asked questions by the audience.

"Yes, the pace of this movie is very slow, and Gosko also made the same suggestion to director Tarkovsky, asking him to speed up the pace and shorten the length.

"No, we don't interfere with the director's creation, we just make suggestions, and director Tarkovsky's intentions have been well preserved. ”

The whole movie does present a completely different technique from commercial movies, and you can feel the strong personal style of the author and director. In the middle, the protagonist Stalker also quoted a passage from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, "When people are born, they are soft and fragile, and when they die, they are hard and strong." This gives the movie a philosophical temperament.

However, Ronald looked around and saw that most of the audience had been under a sleeping spell and had a very good sleep quality. No one in America dared to buy this kind of movie for large-scale release.

Ronald saw that most of the buyers had left the table and the head of the National Film and Television Commission looked quite lonely, so he approached him and talked to him through an interpreter.

He told Ronald that the alliance gave a lot of subsidies to film exports in order to promote cultural propaganda, and this film was screened at several major film festivals. I hope it can be seen by the American people, and they should not just focus on profits.

For this purpose, Gosko is willing to sell the film screening rights at a very low price. If you are interested, you can contact the cultural counselor of the Soviet Embassy.

Ronald is very interested in the low price, but this movie really has no market. Maybe artists in the industry will learn some useful exploratory shooting techniques from it, but ordinary audiences? Maybe you can try to sell it to insomniacs?

Of course, he didn't dare to say this to Gosko's people. Ronald asked, "Do you have any works with strong storylines? Stories with plots and twists, the kind that reflect the lives of ordinary people? Only movies that are watched by people can let American audiences know you."

The head of Gosko listened to the translator's retelling and replied through the translator, "Yes, there is a movie in our country that is currently being screened, and it has broken the league's audience record. This time, a copy has been transferred to participate in the screening session. You are welcome to watch it then."

Ronald quickly wrote down the screening time, hoping that this movie would not make people sleepy.

Another movie that Ronald was very interested in came from Japan, the participating film "The Call of the Mountains". The director was not Kurosawa Akira, who he was familiar with, but a guy named Yamada Yoji.

This movie is about a love story of middle-aged people. Ronald is ready to learn some experience and see where his "My Brother's Protector" is not mature enough in the plot of the middle-aged love part.

The story tells of a man named Tajima Kosaku who broke into the home of a Hokkaido herder widow on a rainy night and asked for shelter from the rain. The widow Tamiko and her son Takeshi raise cattle and depend on each other. After accepting Tajima to take shelter from the rain, Tajima asked to work part-time at Tamiko's house.

Tamiko agreed, considering that the family needed a strong laborer. Tajima won the favor of Tamiko and her daughter with his down-to-earth style, and helped Tamiko drive away the farmers' association cadres who came to the widow's door to play hooligan. Takeshi also relied on Tajima as a father figure.

Two years later, Tajima's brother came to see him and gave him some money. It turned out that Tajima was a murderer. Because his wife borrowed high-interest loans to speculate in stocks and could not repay, she committed suicide. In anger, Tajima accidentally killed the creditor who came to the funeral to collect debts, and then fled to Hokkaido.

In order to fulfill Takeshi's wish, Tajima participated in the horse racing event in the countryside of Hokkaido. Tajima won the championship at the racecourse, but was recognized by the police who followed his brother and was taken away.

The court was manslaughter because of the provocative behavior of the creditor and Tajima was not intentional. Finally, Tajima Kosaku was sentenced to three years in prison.

On the train that took him to serve his sentence, Minzi brought food and got on the same carriage. After asking the police for permission, she sat next to Tajima and told her neighbor Tajima that she had sold her cattle and was going to move to the city and wait for Tajima to come back.

The whole movie was shot in a simple and smooth manner. Ronald hadn't seen this kind of oriental implicit movie style for a long time. The shooting technique of the movie was a bit old-fashioned, but the emotion was real. The relationship between a pair of orphans and a widowed mother and a long-term worker who was a fake father was very touching. With the scenery and folk customs of Hokkaido, it is a movie that the audience will like.

Ronald wanted to buy the screening rights of this movie and found the manager of the Japanese distributor Shochiku Films to discuss American distribution.

"..."

"What? I don't speak Japanese. Can you speak English?" Ronald asked embarrassedly.

"I said, I speak English?"

Uh, the English of Japanese people is really hard to understand. Ronald got a translator from the organizing committee to help him communicate normally with the manager of Shochiku Films.

"What? Five hundred thousand dollars? That's absolutely not possible. It's too expensive."

"Ronald-san, but this movie is worth this price. You can see that many viewers are crying."

"Yes, I also proposed to buy the distribution rights in America because this movie is simple and touching. But this movie has no stars, and it's a foreign language movie..."

"This movie has no stars? Ronald-san, Shochiku's manager pulled Ronald in front of the poster. The male lead Tajima is played by Ken Takakura, who is a first-class star in Japan. The female lead Tamiko is played by Chieko Baisho, who is a national female star. The audience can't celebrate the New Year and Bon Festival without seeing her."

"I understand that they may be stars in Japan, but no one knows them in America. I also like their performances very much, so I want to introduce them to America. If you can reduce the price to less than 80,000 US dollars, I can consider showing it in theaters in big cities, so that our people can also get familiar with your country's stars."

"I'm really sorry, this is beyond my authority. I'm very sorry to disappoint you." The manager of Shochiku Films kept bowing and apologizing, but he refused to reduce the price.

Ronald was also a little disappointed. The movie was well made, but its values ​​and culture were incompatible with American audiences. It could only find a market among some audiences who liked foreign films and art films.

For example, in the ending where Tajima and Tamiko meet on the train, if it were in America, Tamiko would definitely go up to communicate with the police, let the two meet and chat, and finally they would definitely hug and kiss, and the passengers on the train would applaud. In Japan, Tajima could not talk to Tamiko directly. On the one hand, the police were nearby and could not violate the rules, and on the other hand, Tajima could not face Tamiko.

This kind of implicit beauty is really not appreciated by American audiences, and they would also think that Tamiko's feelings for Tajima are not deep enough. This big cultural difference made Ronald dare not make up his mind to pay a high price.

He found the organizing committee at the film festival and faxed his optimism and opinions on "The Call of the Mountains" to New World Production. Ronald was ready to continue watching the film.

"Protest racial segregation, protest racial discrimination!"

A group of people shouted slogans at the door of the screening room from a distance, and wanted to boycott the movies shown here.

Ronald immediately became interested. He showed his buyer's badge to the staff and walked into the empty theater with few viewers.

Isn't it free marketing to be boycotted?