Exploiting Hollywood 1980

After hanging up the phone, Ronald was still upset and walked around the room, trying to calm himself down.

The problem of inconsistent acting skills and mismatched emotions filled the whole film of "Fast Pace". When he thought about it, Ronald felt extremely embarrassed and wanted to call the actors and staff back to reshoot.

The mismatch in the emotional intensity of the same character before and after is actually not the most serious problem of the film. After all, most audiences only watch the movie once and are not as sensitive as professionals. The plot between the two appearances of the actors will also dilute this feeling of mismatch.

Ronald felt very lucky when he thought of the plot of a character being inserted into the plot of other people. "Fast Pace" is a group play with multiple protagonists. In this case, each person's plot is only one-sixth of the whole movie, and it is less likely for the audience to find problems.

If your first film is a traditional story with one protagonist as the main character, or a romantic comedy with two protagonists playing against each other, then the wrong intensity of the emotions before and after will make the audience feel that something is obviously wrong.

Imagine if the whole movie was about the story of Stacey and the nerdy Mark, then during their first date, Stacey would be even more excited than when they first kissed, which would obviously distract the audience.

Now, the two dates between the two are interrupted by the stories of seven or eight other characters, and the audience can't see any problems if they watch them in order.

The really serious mistakes occurred in some scenes shot indoors.

For example, when the nerdy Mark and Stacey had their first date in an Italian restaurant, in order to ensure shooting efficiency, all the frontal shots of Mark and Stacey were shot in two days.

Doing so can save a lot of lighting time, because each lighting takes more than two hours.

Shoot all the shots of Mark together, and then the next day, point the camera back to Stacey on the opposite side, relight it, and shoot Stacey's scenes in one go.

Because the actors are in different states on the two days, it is impossible for the actors to accurately recall and reproduce the emotions at a certain time yesterday. When the two actors speak to the camera separately, the emotional intensity is not at the same level.

The dialogue shots shot over two days were edited together, and the faces of the two people were switched continuously, so the audience could immediately find the mismatch.

Ronald himself, because he already knew the ending of the story of the two people, had a fixed image of the two characters and subsequent development in his mind, but he did not find this mistake during editing.

After being exposed by Director Coppola, Ronald was really embarrassed no matter how he thought about it. The interior shots of the whole movie were full of holes from beginning to end.

Fortunately, when shooting in the department store, the director of photography Matthew used a special lighting system, so that the dialogue shots shot on the other side did not need to be re-lit.

So fortunately, a large number of the interior scenes of the mall in the first ten minutes, and the over-the-shoulder shots of the two people's dialogue, were all shot on the same day. The actors can still remember the intensity of the performance when they just shot the shots, so this problem of emotional mismatch is not so serious.

Otherwise, the audience would start to run away absent-mindedly as soon as the scene started.

Ronald, who couldn't think of a solution, had to go to bed and started sighing as soon as he lay down.

"Hey... Hey..."

Half an hour later, Ronald was still tossing and turning thinking about his worries. When filming "Rock High School" in the New Century, Jim Cameron was smarter than me. He followed the directors every day to see how they directed the performances. He must have noticed this problem on purpose at that time.

I participated in various technical links and learned all kinds of professional knowledge that directors need to know to make movies. But there is still a chance to learn these professional knowledge. The director's arrangement and guidance of performances, so that the later emotions are unified, is not so easy to learn.

Where can I find another director to learn on the spot?

Huh?

Ronald got up from the bed. Didn't Coppola agree that the Directors Guild would send an apprentice director to follow him for internship? This time, I must seize the opportunity to learn from him.

Coppola was going to shoot SE Hinton's "The Outsiders". Ronald remembered that Diane Lane had given him a set of Hinton's collection as a gift.

He squatted on the ground and rummaged through the unpacked cartons for a long time, and finally found this one. He took it out and read it attentively, and a breath of youth came to his face.

Half an hour later, Ronald hurriedly finished flipping through it and uttered a lament: "What the hell is this about?"

The plot is not complicated.

In Tulsa, a small town in Oklahoma, there are two rival youth gangs. The "Greasers" composed of poor Italian children, and the "Socs" composed of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon children (Socs, the abbreviation of Socials, originally means social, and extended to mean a young man with a social life).

The Young Man Gang has cars to drive and ice cream to eat. The Greasers Gang can only take a few cents out of their trouser pockets to watch an old movie. For some ridiculous reason, the two gangs were at loggerheads with each other and started fighting after class.

There was an orphan in the town who belonged to the Greasehead Gang named "Ponyboy". He had a second brother named "Sodapop" and their eldest brother was named Darry.

Ma Zi and Soda Water are not their nicknames, but their real names given by their illiterate father. Don't laugh, Oklahoma was such a backward place at that time, and the father didn't even have the ability to name his son.

After paying a middle school teacher to give his eldest brother a decent name, his father started drinking heavily and randomly named the second and third eldest children.

It is written with Ma Zai as the protagonist. The Youtou Gang they belong to, and a girl nicknamed "Cherry" from the Gongzi Gang were watching a movie at the drive-in theater. Ma Zai and Cherry had communication.

After the Gongzi Gang discovered this, they beat Ma Zai and his friend Johnny while they were alone, and even drowned Johnny in the fountain.

Johnny stabbed a member of the Young Boys Gang to death with a knife. With the help of another young man from a good background, Dally (not Ma Zai's brother), Ma Zai and Johnny took refuge in an abandoned church out of town.

Then the church caught fire, and Johnny rushed into the church to save the child. He was severely burned and died in the hospital.

Ma Zai felt that he had to obey Johnny's last words and rush out of this place with no future and serious involution. He began to write, and so he wrote the book "The Naughty Boy".

Ronald turned to the back cover of the book, which read "First printing, April 1967."

No wonder the plot in it is so strange. It turned out to be Hinton's work when he was a teenager in high school. America at that time was still America, a young man in a small town. The values ​​of young people in small towns are the values ​​promoted by the official and Hollywood.

Hinton is a member of the baby boom generation. At that time, many young people from small towns flocked to big cities to find jobs, starting the largest wave of urbanization in American history.

The material poverty of young people in small towns, the loyalty of buddies, and the world background of resource allocation determined by force have become unfamiliar to the current generation of young people.

In the years since this book was published, the baby boom was officially over. The average number of children in the new generation's families has dropped significantly. Many children born in white middle-class families in the suburbs are already very far away from the jungle society-like youth ecology.

They are more familiar with talking on the phone and being sorted by interest in school than by birth. Sufficient demand for fast food jobs and a relatively small number of young people of working age have allowed wages to rise high enough. Working hard can even out some of the economic gaps caused by family background.

It is now 1982, and the first generation of children after the baby boom are about to graduate from high school. Will these new generations of teenagers still resonate with the scene Hinton described back then?

Anyway, this is not a problem that Ronald has to worry about.

I heard Niceta say that Coppola valued this movie very much and considered it to be a girl's version of "Gone with the Wind" and a boy's version of "The Little Godfather". It has the potential to be as box-office success as the two-part "Godfather" movies were.

Perhaps it was because he had just watched the passionate plot in "The Naughty Boy" that Ronald didn't feel sleepy at all. He, who had always had good sleep quality, actually suffered from insomnia.

Ronald wanted to get up and do some exercise. After his body was tired, he could fall asleep. But there was no gym for him to exercise in the middle of the night, and he was a little worried about safety when he went out for a run in the middle of the night in Los Angeles.

Ronald inspected the equipment in the room and suddenly discovered the video tape given to him by Jane Fonda.

"Jane Fonda Rhythm?" Ronald looked at Jane Fonda who was in excellent shape on the cover, opened the box, found the video recorder, and stuffed it in.

Several beauties wearing ballet training uniforms and leg warmers performed various stretching movements in the practice room. The camera slowly moved back, revealing a beautiful woman on the far right, none other than Jane Fonda.

"Are you ready for some fucking?" Jane Fonda yelled into the camera.

All the beauties responded “Yeah!”

"Let's start with simple movements. Stretch your feet slightly wider than your shoulders, raise your head, lift your chest, and tighten your abdomen... Then start stretching your head, left... one or two, behind... three or four, right... five or six …”

Ronald was also on the floor in his pajamas stretching his neck in the style of Jane Fonda.

"one two three four."

One, two...three, four, it’s not difficult. Ronald felt that this was a bit easy for him, so he picked up the remote control and fast forwarded half an hour.

"Let's kneel down first, bring the knees together, lift one knee, and make the leg parallel to the body, one, two, three, four, two, two, three, four..."

This was okay. Ronald thought it was interesting to do this kind of action on his own, but it became quite tiring after a long time.

"Then it's stretching. Spread your legs as far as possible, hold your ankles with both hands, and then squat down with your knees parallel to the ground. Stretch your inner thigh muscles, one, two... three, four..."

"Oh, Shxt, I will definitely have soreness in my inner thighs tomorrow." Ronald followed the video for forty-five minutes and finally couldn't bear it any longer. Women are better at this kind of aerobic exercise than long-distance runners.

I'm a wrestling practitioner who focuses on explosive power, but I'm not good at it, I'm not good at it...

"The last step is to organize activities. Hold your ankles with both hands, head down as far as possible, inhale...exhale...inhale...exhale..."

The rhythm of Jane Fonda's teaching movements became slower and slower. Ronald felt sleepiness coming over him, so he quickly took a shower and jumped into bed.

"Breathe in...exhale...inhale...exhale..." Ronald, lying on the bed, was still breathing in the rhythm of Jane Fonda. Slowly, his heart became calmer and calmer, as if he had arrived in a space without any living creatures and fell asleep sweetly.

In his dream, it seemed as if someone was saying something to him. Ronald vaguely saw someone put a shiny round plastic object with a hole in the middle on a saucer like a teacup holder, and then pressed a button, and the teacup holder shrank back with a click.

Then a screen like a computer monitor appeared in the field of vision, but it was a picture of colorful blue sky, white clouds and green grass. With a squeak, a picture like a video recorder panel appeared on the screen, with play, pause, fast forward, etc.

With a tick, a white arrow clicked the triangular play button, and a picture jumped out.

A melodious music sounded, and a nice male voice was singing in the background.

"Seize that moment, long ago

In one breath, you will be there

So young and carefree

You will see again

That place in time, so golden."

An old photo that seemed to fade appeared on the screen, showing six young men with shiny slicked hair. The picture was shrouded in the golden color of the sunset, and the title appeared on the screen from right to left.

"The Outsiders"

"Damn, I really dreamed about it." Ronald talked in his sleep.

Accompanied by the golden color of the sunset, the title and various cast and crew lists began to appear. But the list was white and not very clear against the golden background. Only the last director's name occupied the entire screen. Ronald saw clearly that it was "Francis Coppola".

The opening music gradually stopped, and a boy wearing a hoodie and jeans walked out of the cinema. He was chased by a group of "Young Masters" in a car and wanted to beat him.

The hoodie boy ran away desperately, crossed the railway crossing and came to an obviously poorer area. Several boys from the "Oilhead Gang" came out and helped the boy to drive away the Gongzi Gang in the car.

"This is the beginning of the plot of 'The Naughty Boys'." Ronald gritted his teeth and found two actors who were actors of the Oilhead Gang that he knew. One was Tom Cruise, and the other was Matt Dillon.

There were two other actors who looked familiar, but he didn't know where he had seen them. What roles did they play?

In a daze, it seemed that the movie had been playing for a long time, and Ronald found another familiar person. In the plot of the drive-in movie theater, Matt Dillon always annoyed a girl sitting in front of him and played with her hair:

"How do I know if this red hair is natural? Is it the same color as your...ah...ah...eyebrows?"

Finally, he annoyed the girl, and the girl turned around and cursed, "Put your feet off my backrest and shut up!"

A close-up of the face was given. It turned out to be Diane Lane!

Ronald felt that Diane's makeup seemed to be specially processed, making her look a little older than the real person.

The two continued to entangle in the conversation, and Ronald realized that something was wrong.

Matt Dillon and Diane Lane, the emotions of the two people talking are very synchronized. One sentence each, the emotions gradually progress. Dillon constantly upgrades his means to provoke Diane, and Diane's reaction also changes from not wanting to care, to being annoyed, and finally exploding, and then being amused by Dillon.

The over-the-shoulder and close-up shots of the two people switch back and forth, and the emotional upgrades are very consistent.

Ronald really wants to go back and watch it again. How was this shot made? Why can Coppola shoot the emotions so well?

He tried to reach out to the screen, but he couldn't reach it. The picture continued to move forward and turned into night again.

The people on both sides of the "Oil-Head Gang" and the "Young Master Gang" lined up one by one, ready to use a group fight to decide who is the righteous side. The people on both sides may be good friends, or teammates on the football team, but they are divided into two sides because of their background and hairstyle.

At a command, the people on both sides rushed up to fight each other.

Ronald was anxious. This kind of shot is easy to shoot. What he wanted to see was the dialogue shot just now. Why can the emotions be synchronized? He wanted to watch it again to study and study.

Reaching out his hand to touch the screen again, Ronald suddenly felt empty under him...

"Ah!"

He fell off the bed again.

"Mr. Coppola, how did you shoot it? Why are the emotions of all the dialogue shots so unified? Did you shoot all the shots of this scene in order regardless of the cost? Or is there any special method?" Ronald got up from the ground and shouted immediately.

Uh, Ronald woke up and was still in his room. It seemed that he had another dream, dreaming of several scenes from the movie "The Untamed".

Ronald went to the kitchen to boil water, made himself a cup of tea bag, and calmed down.

Tomorrow, I will call Niceta, and then find a way to contact the original author, Ms. Hinton, and I must go to the crew of "The Untamed" to learn how the great director solved the problem of consistency in performance.