Exploiting Hollywood 1980

   Chapter 288 Insomnia and Dreams

   Ronald, who put down the phone, was still upset and walked around the room, trying to calm down.

  Inconsistent performance of actors' acting skills and mismatch of emotions are full of the "fast-paced" whole film. Just thinking about it made Ronald feel so embarrassed that he wanted to call the cast and crew back for a reshoot.

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

   Thinking of a character's storyline with someone else's storyline inserted, Ronald felt very lucky. "Fast-paced" is a multi-protagonist group play. In this case, each person's plot is only one-sixth of the entire movie, and the audience is less likely to find problems.

   If your first film is a traditional story, with one main character as the main character, or a romantic comedy with two main characters opposing each other, then the intensity of the emotions before and after is wrong, which will make the audience feel obviously wrong.

Just imagine if the whole movie was about Stacy and Mark the nerd, then on the first date, Stacey was more excited than when they kissed for the first time, which would obviously get the audience out of the way .

   And now the two dating scenes of the two are interrupted by the stories of seven or eight other characters. The audience watched them in order, but they could not see any problems.

   The really serious mistakes happened in some scenes shot indoors.

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

   By doing this, you can save a lot of lighting time, because each lighting takes more than two hours.

   All of Mark’s shots were taken together, and then the next day, the camera was re-pointed to the opposite Stacey, and the lights were relit, and the scene of Stacey was shot at one time.

   Due to the different states of the actors in the two days, it is impossible for the actors to accurately recall and reproduce the emotions of a certain moment yesterday. When the two actors spoke to the camera respectively, the emotional intensity was not at the same level.

   Edited the dialogue scenes shot in two days together, and switched between the faces of the two people continuously, so that the audience can immediately find the inconsistency.

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

  After being uttered by Director Coppola, Ronald is really embarrassed about what he thinks now. The interior shots of the whole movie are 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 that were shot on the other side did not need to be relighted.

   So fortunately, a lot of inside scenes in the mall in the first ten minutes, and the over-the-shoulder shots of the conversation between the two were all filmed on the same day.

  The actor can still remember the intensity of the performance when the scene was shot just now, and the problem of emotional incompatibility is not so serious.

  Otherwise, as soon as the show started, the audience would start to run away absentmindedly.

  Unable to think of a way, Ronald had to go to bed, and started to sigh as soon as he lay down.

   "Hey...hey..."

   Half an hour later, Ronald was still thinking about his thoughts over and over again. When he was filming "High School of Rock and Roll" in the new century, Jim Cameron was smarter than himself. He followed the directors every day and watched how the directors directed the performance. He must have noticed this problem on purpose at that time.

  I have participated in various technical links and learned about the various professional knowledge that directors need to know to make movies. But there is also the opportunity for remedial learning with this expertise, the way the director arranges and directs the performance, and the way to unify the emotions in the later stages is not so easy to learn.

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

Huh?

   Ronald quickly got up from the bed. Didn't Coppola agree with the Directors Guild to send an apprentice director to follow him? This time, we must seize the opportunity to learn from behind him.

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

   squatted on the ground and rummaged through the unpacked cardboard box for a long time, and finally found this novel. He turned it out and looked at it intently, a youthful aura came over him.

   Half an hour later, Ronald hurriedly flipped through the novel and let out a sigh: "What the **** is this all about?"

  The plot of the novel is not complicated.

  In Tulsa, a small town in Oklahoma, there are two rival gangs of teenagers. The "Greasers" composed of poor children of Italian descent, and the "Socs" (abbreviation of Socials, originally intended to be social, and extended to the sons with social life) composed of wealthy Ansa white children.

   Gongzi Gang has cars to drive and ice cream to eat. The Oilers can only pull a few cents out of their trouser pockets to watch an old movie. For some ridiculous reason, the two gangs are on the same page, and they start fighting each other right after class.

  There is an orphan named "Ponyboy" who belongs to the Oil Head Gang in the town. He has a second brother named "Sodapop" and their eldest brother is named Darry.

   Horse Boy and Soda Water are not their nicknames, but their real names given to them by their illiterate father. Don't laugh, Oklahoma was such a backward place at the time, fathers didn't even have the ability to name their sons.

  After paying the middle school teacher to give the eldest brother a decent name, my father started drinking too much, and the names of the second and third were casual.

  The novel is written with Ma Zai as the protagonist. The oil head gang they belong to, and a girl nicknamed "Cherry" from the Gong Zi gang is watching a movie in the drive-in theater. Ma Zai and Cherry have an exchange.

   After this incident was discovered by the Gongzi Gang, Mazai and his friend Johnny were beaten while they were alone, and Johnny was drowned in the fountain.

  Johnny stabbed to death a guy from the Gongzi Gang with a knife. With the help of another young man from a good background, Dally (not the eldest brother of Mazai), Mazai and Johnny take refuge in an abandoned church outside the city.

   After the church caught fire, Johnny rushed into the church to save the child, 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 introversion. He started to write, and he wrote this book, "The Worldly Urchin."

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

   No wonder the plot inside is so peculiar, it turned out to be the work of Hinton when he was a teenager in high school. At that time, America was still a young America in a small town. The values ​​of young people in small towns are the values ​​promoted by officials and Hollywood.

  Hinton is a baby boomer generation. At that time, many young people from small towns flocked to big cities to find jobs, which started the largest wave of urbanization in the history of America.

  The world background in which young people in various small towns are poor in material, talk about buddy loyalty, and decide resource allocation by force, the current generation of young people has gradually become unfamiliar.

   Just a few years after the novel was published, the baby boom officially ended. The average number of children in the new generation of families has been greatly reduced, and many children born in white middle-class families in the suburbs are already very far away from the youth ecology of the jungle society.

   They are more familiar with phone chats, sorted by interest at school, not by birth. Sufficient demand for fast food jobs and a relatively small number of school-age teenagers have made wage increases high enough. Working hard can bridge some of the economic gaps caused by family backgrounds.

   Now is 1982. The first generation of children after the baby boomer has almost graduated from high school. Will these new generation of teenagers still resonate with the scene depicted by Hinton?

   Anyway, this is not Ronald's concern.

   In this movie, I heard Nisita say that Coppola valued it very much, thinking that it is the girl's version of "Little Gone with the Wind" and the boy's version of the "Little Godfather". Has the potential to be as successful at the box office as the "Godfather" duo.

   Maybe it was because he just watched the blood-filled plots in the novel "Urchin Out of the World", Ronald didn't feel sleepy all of a sudden. He, who has always slept well, actually had insomnia.

   Ronald wanted to get up and do some exercise. After his body got 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 found the videotape that Jane Fonda had given him.

   "Jane Fonda rhythmic gymnastics?" Ronald looked at Jane Fonda who was in excellent shape on the cover, opened the box, found the VCR, and stuffed it inside.

   Several beautiful women in ballet training suits and leg warmers performed various stretching movements in the training room. The camera slowly recedes, and the beautiful woman on the far right is Jane Fonda.

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

   All the beauties answered "Yeah!"

"Let's start with simple movements. Spread your feet a little wider than your shoulders, keep your head up and your chest out, your abs tighten...then start to stretch your head, left...one two, back...three four, right... five six …”

   Ronald also stretched his neck in his pajamas on the floor following Jane Fonda's movements.

"one two three four."

  One, two...three or four, no difficulty. Ronald felt that this was a bit easy for him, picked up the remote control and fast-forwarded half an hour.

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

   That's okay, Ronald felt that this kind of action was a little interesting to do by himself, and it was quite tiring for a long time.

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

   "Oh, Shxt, I'm definitely going to have a sore inner thigh tomorrow." Ronald followed the video for 45 minutes, and finally couldn't stand it anymore. This type of aerobic exercise is still for women, and he is better at long-distance runners.

  I am a wrestling practitioner who pays attention to explosiveness, is not good at it, is not good at...

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

   The rhythm of Jane Fonda's teaching was getting slower and slower, Ronald felt a surge of sleepiness, and hurriedly took a shower and jumped into bed.

"Inhale... exhale... exhale... exhale..." Ronald, who was lying on the bed, was still breathing according to Jane Fonda's rhythm, and his heart gradually became calmer, as if he had reached a place without any The space of living things, sleep sweetly.

   In my sleep, someone seemed to be saying something to me. Ronald vaguely saw someone put a shiny round plastic object with a hole in the middle on a saucer like a cup holder, then press the button, and the cup holder retracted with a click.

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

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

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

   "Seize that moment, long ago

   Go in one breath and you'll be there

   so young and carefree

   you will see again

   The place of time, so so golden. "

  An old photo that seems to have faded appeared on the screen. Above it were six young people with oily hair brushed.

   "The Outsiders"

   "Damn, I did dream." Ronald said 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 is white and can't be seen clearly on the golden background screen, only the last director's name, which occupies the whole screen, Ronald can see clearly, it is "Francis Coppola".

  The opening music gradually stopped, and a boy in a hoodie and jeans walked out of the cinema. He was chased by a group of "boy gangs" driving cars to beat him.

  The boy in the hoodie ran desperately and crossed the railroad crossing to a significantly poorer area. Several boys from the "You Tou Gang" came out and helped the boy beat away the Young Master Gang who was in the car.

   "This is the beginning of the plot of 'The Outer Boy'." Ronald gritted his teeth and found that the two oil-headed actors helped the boy to recognize himself. One is Tom Cruise and the other is Matt Dillon.

   There are also two actors who also look familiar and don’t know where they have seen them. Which role are they playing?

   It seemed that the movie had been played for a long time in a daze, and Ronald found another acquaintance. In the drive-in episode, Matt Dillon is always going to mess with a girl sitting in front of him, playing with her hair:

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

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

   A close-up of the face was given. It was Diane Lane!

  Ronald felt as if Diane's makeup had been specially treated, making him look a little older than the real person.

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

  Matt Dillon and Diane Lane, the mood of the two talking is very in tune. One sentence at a time, the mood gradually progresses. Dillon kept escalating his methods to provoke Dian, and Dian never wanted to care about his reaction, until he was bored, and finally broke out, and was amused by Dillon again.

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

  Ronald wanted to go back and watch it again. How did this happen? Why is Coppola's emotions so right?

   He tried to reach for a screen, but there was no way to reach it. The picture continued to advance, and it became night again.

   The "You Tou Gang" and the "Gongzi 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 of the football team, but they are divided on both sides because of their origins and hairstyles.

With an order   , the people on both sides rushed to catch the pair and fight.

  Ronald was anxious, this kind of scene is easy to shoot, what I want to see is the dialogue scene just now, why can I be emotionally in harmony? He wanted to watch the study study again.

  Strongly stretched out his hand to touch the screen again, Ronald suddenly felt empty...

"what!"

   He fell off the bed again.

"Mr. Coppola, how did you shoot it? Why are all the dialogue scenes so unified? Did you shoot all the scenes in sequence regardless of the cost? Or is there a special way?" Ronald Get up from the ground and shout for the first time.

  Er, Ronald woke up and was still in his room. It seems that I have had another dream, dreaming of several scenes from the movie "Urchin Outside the World".

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

   Call Nisita tomorrow and try to contact the original author, Ms. Hinton, and be sure to go to the cast of "The Worldly Urchin" to learn how the big director solves the problem of consistency in performances.

   (end of this chapter)