Exploiting Hollywood 1980

   Chapter 343 Dancing is forbidden for eighty years

   Ronald returned home, not too sleepy yet, so he simply took out the script of "Footloose" and began to read it.

  The original author, Dean Pitchford, wrote a copy of the writing story attached to the front of the script.

  The screenwriter Pitchford deserves to be a top student who graduated from Yale. He explained the ins and outs of the script creation in a few words.

In 1980, Pitchford saw a piece of news that in the small town of Elmore, Oklahoma, dancing had been banned since 1900, and the town had been for eighty years. There has never been a dance party.

   The last high school 11th grader challenged and overturned the law, and in the 1980 graduation season, Elmore Public High School held its first high school prom.

  The whole movie is based on reality. The three protagonists, Lun who proposed to repeal the legal ban, the priest's daughter Ariel who maintained the ban, and Ariel's best friend Rusty, all have character prototypes.

  Pitchford himself was a lyricist, and he also wrote the words for all the episodes that were expected to appear in the film and attached them to the script.

   For example, the opening is an episode of the same name "Footloose", and the lyrics at the beginning are

  Footloose, Footloose, kick off your weekend leather shoes.

  Please, Louise, take off my boots.

   The lyrics are rhyming and rhythmic. Footloose in the title actually has a pun intended.

   On the one hand, Footloose is a description of rhythmic footsteps, referring to the rhythm of dance. On the other hand, it said that it would loosen the footsteps and abolish the ban on dancing.

  Ronald admires the literary literacy in the lyrics of the top students at Yale.

   However, it seems that Pitchford has never made a movie. Many parts of the script are written in a non-standard manner, and some plots cannot be photographed, so they must be re-processed.

   For example, there is a plot that Ronald obviously thinks can’t be considered a script, and he plans to revise it from this first.

  The male protagonist, Lun, who was transferred from the big city of Chicago, had a conflict with Ariel's boyfriend. The two agreed to use a tractor for a cowardly duel.

  The two drove the tractor toward each other, and whoever was finally afraid to turn before hitting, whoever lost.

"Lun's shoe accidentally got stuck in the clutch, and he tried to jump out of the car, but failed. Ariel's boyfriend Chuck saw Len trying to escape, and smugly stepped on the accelerator to keep going. With no way out, Len had to Step on the gas too, but it scared Chuck out of the car."

   The score is divided into several scenes that can be filmed, and Ronald begins to design the plan for the whole scene. The text on the script must be able to be filmed. How do I get a close-up shot of a stuck clutch? How about trying to jump out of a car?

  The audience needs to understand why Lun can't jump from the car, Ronald thought for a while here, took the pen to get the shoe stuck, and changed the shoelace to entangled. In this way, when you lift your foot and jump from the car, you can get close to a close-up of the shoelace being tangled in the clutch, and the audience can also understand why the protagonist Lun can't jump off.

   As for the emotional description of "smugly", it is acceptable to open one eye and close one eye. When the time comes, the director will guide on the spot and the actors will perform.

   After writing for about half an hour, Ronald became a little sleepy. Today, I first went to Paramount, then to Beverly Hills. After returning home, I took Demi to the hospital. Ronald's eyes were a little hard to open.

   "Take a rest, and write tomorrow." Ronald struggled to get up and went to the bed to lie down, and pulled a blanket to cover it.

   "Bang rub, hop... hop, hop." A drum beat, Ronald seemed to see a picture with a dark background appear in front of him.

   There is no background of any detail, and there is no face of any character, just a close-up of two feet on the frame, dancing to the rhythm.

   Men's feet, women's feet, feet in high-heeled sandals, feet in leather shoes, feet in boots, feet in dirty sneakers, and two feet in leg warmers.

   A background voice is singing fast-paced lyrics

  Footloose, Footloose, kick off your weekend leather shoes.

  Please, Louise, take off my boots.

   "This clip is good." Ronald knew that he was dreaming "full of energy".

The dance at the beginning of    ends with the episode, and the screen goes black and then lights up again.

   A middle-aged pastor preaching in the church.

   "God could wipe these evils from the face of the earth with a wave of his great hand. But he didn't, he designed a test for us, a test!

   If it weren't for this test, how would you explain the popularity of the wicked, obscene, depraved rock music that's going on right now? "

   In the crowd listening to the sermon below, a boy covered his face with his hands.

"This is probably the transferred male protagonist Lun." Ronald guessed that the director's technique was not bad. After the theme was pointed out at the beginning, the first episode that appeared after the black screen was the conservative priest in the conservative town. Conservative preaching.

  Added the disdain of the white boy Lun who transferred from the big city Chicago, and the opening dramatic conflict came out.

   But Ronald was too tired today and started to sleep again.

   "Ah..." After an unknown amount of time, a girl driving a car was screaming.

   "Ah..." Then there was another car driving in parallel next to it, and the man driving was screaming.

  "Beep..." A whistle sounded, and the camera cut to the big truck on the opposite side.

   There was a girl standing in the middle of two cars, her feet were stepping on the doors of the two cars, as if she was doing stunts. Regardless of the men and women in the two cars screaming for her to get off, she laughed wildly and continued to stand to greet the big car on the opposite side.

   The boy who drives the pickup seems to be the girl's boyfriend. The other three girls in the opposite car are her best friends.

   A big-nosed girl sitting in the back seat slammed the car door desperately, making the girl doing acrobatic movements get down quickly. "

   "Chuck, be careful. Ariel, Ariel...Come back, there's a truck ahead" she cried desperately.

   "This is probably the protagonist Ariel's best friend Rusty. With such a big hump nose, she must be a Jew. She's so ugly to act in a movie?" Ronald thought to himself, and gave her a shot when it was a close call.

   "Ahahaha..." The camera cuts to the girl who stepped on two doors and bravely faced the big truck.

"what!"

   Ronald finds out he knows this girl, isn't it Lori Singer, the cello performer from the TV version of "Famous" from Helen Slater's last party?

   "Is she the heroine of this movie?" Ronald was a little puzzled. There are only dancing scenes in the script of this movie, and no cello playing? Why choose her? Possibly a father relationship?

  Ronald had read the script and knew that Ariel was the protagonist, so he was not very worried that something would happen to her. However, the editing of the footage in this section is very level, and the audience who sees it for the first time will probably be brought into the mood of worrying about the girl.

   At a critical moment, Ariel, played by Lori Singer, got into her boyfriend Chuck's car, narrowly avoided the truck, and the pickup stopped on the side of the road. The **** the other side drove the car into the ditch.

   "Hmm", Ronald fell asleep again.

   "Uh...uu..." After an unknown amount of time, Ronald woke up again with the sound of two engines starting.

  On the two tractors, one is the protagonist Lun, and the other is Ariel's boyfriend Chuck. The two honked the loudspeaker tape recorder, and with the accompaniment of music, drove the tractor to hedge.

  Lun tried to run away several times, but the shoelaces got tangled on the clutch pedal and couldn't jump out of the car. In the end, Chuck was forced to turn the steering wheel, and the tractor drove into a nearby canal, and fell into it himself.

"The editing of this section is not very good." Ronald thought to himself, "a bit too cumbersome, as if the audience could not understand the tension that Lun couldn't escape, and the close-up of the clutch pedal, shoelaces, and Lun's panicked expression came up. Cut back several times."

"Why is there such a big difference between the editing levels before and after?" Ronald didn't quite understand. "At the very beginning, the close-up dance of various shoes was very creative. Later, the thrilling scenes of driving and facing the big truck were also very creative. Okay, but this tractor showdown clip seems to be down a notch."

   The feeling of drowsiness kept coming, and Ronald was awakened again in a daze.

   "Hey hey...what are you doing? I heard this is a party, let's dance!"

  Lun dashed into a prom decked out in glittering streamers and stickers in a gown.

   "Ouch..." The men and women began to shout to the strong rhythm of the theme song "Footloose".

  A pair of boys and girls, still inviting each other, rushed onto the dance floor and began to dance a dance that mixed disco moves and old-fashioned swing dance steps.

  The boyfriend of the Jewish girl with the big nose is a silly big man, and he also performed John Travolta's iconic one-arm oblique appearance in "Saturday Night Fever" that year, which caused another burst of cheers from both men and women.

  Various sparkling powders fell from the sky, the boys lined up in a row, and the girls also patted in a row, and they jumped relative to each other.

  The camera is again aimed at their shoes for a close-up, and the high heels raise the glittering powder, and the picture is very delicate.

  Ronald just curled his lips when he saw it, it seemed like some old musicals from the 1930s and 1940s. In those civil war, or period dramas of British aristocrats, there is often such a dance form in which men and women are filmed separately in two rows to invite each other.

   How can there be such a dance in modern America? It's all about personal presentation.

  The form of dance is ancient, and the steps are also a bit old. The disco is also mixed with some old-fashioned tap dance styles, which slams the floor.

  Finally, the two rows of students began to step back, and the hero, Lun, and Rusty's boyfriend began to dance alone in the middle of the dance floor. It's still the kind of dance that combines ancient dance and modern disco, but it's better than the previous one.

  The girls also started to dance solo, tossing their long hair and kicking their thighs, and finally had some professional dance moves.

   Then the boys came off one by one, robot dance, noodle dance, and Thomas, who was doing gymnastics on the floor. Like the kind of black breakdance that Ronald would do.

   "Huh?" Ronald began to feel incongruous again. The breakdance of these black people, which appeared in this movie, was jumped up by white people, which was indescribably strange.

   These are all dance steps that require systematic training, and are not very popular now. How could these students who were born in a small town that had not danced in eighty years dance?

   Fortunately, Rusty's boyfriend, the dance steps are still relatively immature and clumsy, which is in line with the character's image. Jumping silly. The expression on his face is also a bit like Sean Penn who is playing "Fast Pace", just a silly high school student.

  Lun took the lead in the end, followed by Ariel and Rusty, male and female students lined up in a column and jumped towards the camera, the theme song stopped abruptly, and the picture in the dream became a black screen.

   Ronald woke up immediately.

   He looked out the window, it was not yet dawn. Only slept a few hours myself.

  Ronald got up, took advantage of the heat of his memory and wrote down a few scenes he had dreamed of. As a director's evaluation, he wrote a large sheet of paper on the film.

   "The footage is dragged and not suited to the rhythm of modern audiences in the 1980s.

   There is a problem with the choreography, the dance steps are very old-fashioned, and the dancers are either too bad or too good.

  The camera is aimed at the shoes for close-up creativity, which is very creative.

  The opening narrative is smooth, bringing the audience into the plot at once…”

  Ronald read it again after he had written it, feeling a little paradoxical.

  This movie was made very weird, in some parts like a very seasoned director who has made movies for decades. In some places, the filming is very jerky, like when I was filming "fast pace", a fledgling film director.

   Also, is this a high-concept or low-concept movie?

   If you count the actors, none of them are famous, and they should be considered as the configuration of high-concept movies. But the plot is not high concept at all, dancing is not allowed in the town, what is the age?

   If he hadn't read the story written by the author Pitchford, Ronald would have thought it was a nonsense story.

   "Wait..." Ronald suddenly discovered his misunderstanding.

   This is indeed a high-concept movie, but it is not for young people like myself who have settled in a big city, but for tens of millions of young people living in small towns.

   They have religion, strong conservative forces, and people's lives are not much different from decades ago. Going to church on weekends to listen to preachers, there are no disco bars, rock concerts these new things.

  Dance those dance moves that combine ancient and modern, for them, it is very outrageous behavior.

   That's why the director put some old-school editing techniques in place. Those young people in the small town, like their hometown in Staten Island, will have to wait a year or two before they can see such deviant movies as "ET Alien" and "Fast-paced Richmond High School".

   They are familiar with the old and slow editing rhythms of the 1970s. Maybe some movie theaters are still playing "Singing in the Rain".

   In the end, the black break dancers are also giving them some dessert to open their eyes, right?

   (end of this chapter)