Exploiting Hollywood 1980

The Oscars Dinner-Dance, held in honor of the Academy's trustees, was held at the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel. All winners are required to attend.

Those nominees who did not win, and the audience, as well as those who did not enter the scene, all wanted to squeeze into this natural social occasion. It’s not uncommon in Hollywood for handsome men and beautiful women to be brought into parties and fly into the sky.

So almost everyone who was at the awards show came, except David Lynch.

Having failed in one of the eight nominations, this arrogant new director did not want to attend the dinner party and face the care and ridicule of others.

"How come there isn't anything?" Ronald and Diane walked into the dinner together and quickly found their agent Rick Niceta, who had arrived in advance. They found an empty table and sat down while eating. While chatting.

"This is the charm of the Oscars. No one knows the result before it is announced." Niceta took a bottle of red wine and poured it into several glasses. "Congratulations, Ronald, young Oscar winner, cheers!"

"Cheers!" Diane, Bert, and Richard also toasted.

Not many people noticed their joy, and the nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Song Lyricist were not very important awards, except for the waiter who gave them a smile.

"Can I see this statuette?" Bert said, staring at the trophy Ronald placed on the table. His biggest wish is to train his daughter to become a star actress.

"Of course," Ronald motioned for Bert to start. He took a plate of seafood pancakes as an appetizer, grabbed two pieces and stuffed them into his mouth. They tasted pretty good.

Ronald took another red wine and poured a little more into his glass. Coppola Winery, Napa Valley, says it in round letters on the label.

"Is this the Coppola I know?" Ronald asked Niceta.

"Yes, Coppola used the money he earned from 'The Godfather Part II' to buy a vineyard." Niceta took a sip and put down the glass. He glanced at Diane and his daughter, then leaned close and said in Ronald's ear:

"Spielberg will be a little late. I made an appointment with his assistant Catherine. You go and deal with your trophy first, make phone calls and so on. Then come back and wait for him in half an hour. Don't delay."

"I'll go right away." Seeing that he didn't continue drinking red wine, Ronald thought, "Doesn't it taste good?"

He picked up his cup and took another sip, then ate another seafood pancake in a hurry. He took the statuette back from Diane's hand, stood up and handed it to the staff of the college council.

A series of procedures need to be signed when returning the trophy. The most interesting thing is that the trophy cannot be resold privately. If it is put up for auction, the college has the priority to take it back for $1. This was the academy's remedial measure after some trophies were sold on the auction market in the early years.

"Mr. Li, the academy only provides one free trophy for each award, and the remaining one has to pay a cost of US$350." The staff politely asked him who would pay the money.

"So it's only 350 to sell and 1 dollar to buy?" Ronald muttered and waited for Michael Gore to come over. The two discussed it and divided the money equally.

After lining up to call Aunt Karen and sharing some happiness with the family, Ronald walked back to the banquet hall.

Once seated. Timothy Hutton came over, stretched out his hand to pull Diane to go with him, and pointed to the crowd of ordinary people, "Mary Tyler Moore wants to meet you."

Bert stood up and stood in front of his daughter, and agent Niceta also stood up, trying to avoid a conflict.

Ronald also stood up and stretched out his arm for Diane to take, "Let's go meet Ms. Moore together."

Niceta and Bert both thought it was a good idea to handle it this way, and stood up to prepare to go over.

"You are my female companion and should be with me." Hutton looked a little under the influence of alcohol.

"Poor kid, just because a girl agrees to go to the graduation prom with you, it doesn't mean that she will also dance with you after the prom starts." Ronald said a word and took Diane to meet the big shots.

"Hey! You're just a screenwriter who didn't win any awards." Hutton found that no one was paying attention to him, so he followed him back.

Diane greets actress Mary Tyler Moore. It turned out that Mary liked Diane's performance in "Love at Sunset Bridge" very much. Knowing that Hutton's female companion was her, she wanted to have a chat with her.

"Robert, this is Ronald who won the best original song." Redford is also a client of CAA, and Niceta introduced them to them.

"Mr. Redford, I am your fan." Ronald said quickly.

Redford responded politely, flanked by his adult daughter.

When Redford's daughter was just getting ready to go to college, she joked about Hutton, "Isn't this your female companion? Why is he with someone else? What does he do?"

"Just a screenwriter..." Hutton responded angrily, his voice a little loud.

Redford and Ronald looked back at the same time.

"You are a screenwriter, Ronald. What you write ultimately requires us actors to appear in front of the camera. You wrote so many scenes, but you can't appear in any of them. Movies are the art of performance after all, right?"

Hutton said, "The spotlight in Hollywood is always on the star, Ronald. And the girls only know me."

Redford couldn't help but frowned after hearing this. The screenwriter of Ordinary People was at the scene. Didn't Hutton include him when he said this? In order to invite him to adapt this best-selling movie, I wasted a lot of effort.

Everyone at the scene also saw the problem, and everyone looked at Ronald to see how he would respond.

"Mr. Hutton, you won the Best Supporting Actor award, but you appear in every scene of the movie. Who are you supporting?"

Ronald fought back with words. Hutton was obviously the protagonist, but he didn't dare to compete with Robert De Niro, Jack Lemmon, Peter O'Toole and other veteran actors this year, so he turned to the Best Supporting Actor to compete for the fruit.

The actors in the crew who were nominated for Best Supporting Actor and forced to give way, Mary Tyler Moore who failed to compete directly for the Best Actress, and Donald Sutherland who was squeezed out by Hutton and was not nominated for Supporting Actor, all gave Ronald a thumbs up in their hearts.

Hutton, who had just debuted, won an Oscar, and some of his behaviors really made many people dislike him.

"You!" Hutton, who was hit on the heart, blushed immediately.

Robert Redford saw all this and thought that this young man was sharp-tongued. I wonder how his screenwriting works are?

Nicita took the opportunity to introduce Ronald to him as one of the nominees for this year's Best Original Screenplay. Redford became interested in Ronald and said:

"A good script is what movie actors dream of. My film festival in Park City, Utah has been moved to January from this year. If you have a good script that can be made into a low-cost movie, you might as well send it to the exhibition next year."

Ronald quickly expressed his gratitude, and after chatting for a few words, he and Diane returned to their seats.

At this time, several heavyweights just walked into the other side of the hall.

George Lucas and his wife Martha were discussing the final editing of the new film "The Lost Ark of the Covenant" with Steven Spielberg.

Martha Lucas is also a film editor. "It was cut from 3 hours to less than 2 hours, which is very good. But I think the movie lacks an emotional climax.

The male protagonist Indiana Jones and the female protagonist Marion Ravenwood did not meet in the end. So the audience left the theater with a sense of loss."

"You are right. The audience at the preview generally felt that this was a problem. I am preparing the reshoots of Harrison and Kelly." Spielberg said, "Martha, George, did you see anything in the final version?"

"What?" Martha asked.

"The shot of the McDonnell Douglas DC-3 aircraft," George Lucas smiled, "Is it a reused shot from an old movie?"

"Hahaha, yes. It can save a lot of budget. I don't think ordinary audiences can see it. It was edited very cleverly."

The three of them took a glass of Coppola's red wine and continued to sit down and chat.

"Why did Francis start selling red wine?" Spielberg asked Lucas.

"His new film 'Love Like New Love' was withdrawn by investors, and now he needs to mortgage his own vineyard to complete the film, which will be used at the Oscars dinner, so that ****'s valuation can be higher."

George Lucas was once Francis Coppola's younger brother. He was full of emotion when talking about this big brother, "I advised him, but he liked the film very much and invited the dance king Gene Kelly to be the choreographer. For this film, he bought a large studio in Los Angeles and rebuilt the scene instead of shooting on location."

Several of them are old friends. They know Francis Coppola's style. The budget of the film is always getting higher and higher. Every shooting is like gambling. Coppola also loves gambling. He once took a thousand dollars to Las Vegas, hoping to win the bet and buy a better camera, but he lost it all.

"It doesn't matter. The more pressure Francis Coppola is under, the better he performs." Spielberg said.

"Hahaha. You are right." Lucas knew that his old friend was referring to the previous film "Apocalypse Now", which also invested tens of millions of dollars and successfully turned the box office around.

"We'll stay here for a while and then leave. What about you, Steven?" Martha Lucas asked. They were not sociable people by nature. When they met old friends, they would talk endlessly about their favorite topics, but they were not very enthusiastic about social occasions like Hollywood, where people build relationships.

"I'm going to meet a young man too. He gave me some suggestions on the script of my new film, and they think the same as I do."

"Young people who interest you? Someone like Zemeckis?" Robert Zemeckis was equivalent to Spielberg's apprentice, but he served as the screenwriter and Spielberg's 1941 was a complete failure.

Spielberg contacted Columbia again and asked Zemeckis to direct "The Deception", which will be released soon.

"I don't know, so I want to meet him."