Exploiting Hollywood 1980

   Chapter 188 The call of the distant mountains

   The two Israeli filmmakers had no hope of winning awards, and they would only be caught by reporters asking embarrassing questions when they stayed in Montreal. Instead of waiting for the film festival to end, they changed their tickets and went to America in advance.

   Before leaving, Minahan and Ronald had breakfast together and exchanged contact information. In the conversation, he knew that Ronald's script was valued by Jane Fonda and sold for a sky-high price, and immediately invited Ronald to the Los Angeles Cannon Films to talk about his "Intersection" script.

   "Ronald, let's work together, we're going to win an Oscar, and we're going to make him a remake of the greatest Hollywood family movie of the past two decades, which is about to hit Hollywood right now."

   "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 who brought a black boyfriend back to her parents' house for dinner, then understood each other and finally reconciled.

   However, he was very afraid that his "intersection" script would be made into a musical in which Chinese and Italians dance together by Meinahan, and declined his kindness because he needed to polish the script.

Minahan has just entered the game field of Hollywood, and he will not let go of an insider who sells high-priced scripts, "Anyway, you have to come to Cannon Pictures to talk to us, you are a talented playwright, and I am a talented director. , our cooperation will be a great success.”

   Well, Ronald only promised to go to Cannonball Pictures. He also doesn't want his script to be made into a movie that will be directed by the audience.

  Film festival entries were screened at a rate of about one a day, and Ronald started his career as a real film buyer. Roger Coleman didn't give him a movie purchase index, but suggested that if there was a good movie and the price was right, he could contact New World's Gale.

  So Ronald just picked some movies he was interested in to watch, no matter if it was a new movie or an old movie.

  For example, Hitchcock's daughter, brought two films to pay tribute to Hitchcock. Ronald watched both "RearWindow" and "Vertigo".

  Although both films are Hitchcock's masterpieces, Ronald missed it. I've never seen that movie theater rerun in America, not even Scorsese's movie appreciation class.

It turned out that Hitchcock knew that his daughter was of average qualifications and had no future in the film industry, so he bought the five color films that he was most satisfied with, including these two, and The Killing of the Murderer, The Dead Corpse, and the Reaper of Souls. Copyright, leave it to my daughter.

   With the copyright of these five films in hand, the daughter's family is enough to live and breathe.

   These two films are well conceived, and the cinematography is very good. Ronald, as a movie fan, watched it once and wanted to watch it several times to ponder his skills. Especially in "Rear Window", the close-up of Grace Kelly that fills the big screen becomes her appearance in the whole movie, which is very amazing.

When "Vertigo" was shown when Jimmy Stewart was going up the stairs, a sliding zoom (DollyZoom) appeared, creating an effect where the male protagonist did not move in the camera while the background moved quickly, which was used to show that the male protagonist was afraid of heights Dizziness.

   At this time, the audience applauded and cheered collectively, it seems that they all know what to do. This is the technique of sliding zoom, which appeared on the big screen for the first time in film history, and was later used by Spielberg in "Jaws".

   In addition to satisfying his own curiosity, Ronald's main energy is still on non-English exhibition films. The competition for English films is too fierce.

"The Stunt Man," starring Peter O'Toole, for example, has been bought by Twentieth Century Fox and is showing in America. Even the bids for the second round of screenings sold well above Ronald's budget.

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

   Even if Ronald had the buyer's badge, it took a lot of trouble to enter the field and find a seat in the back row.

   Most of the people who came to see it were movie insiders and movie fans attracted by publicity.

  This movie is about a mysterious location that seems to have alien relics, and the stalker is a guide-type character who takes others through this mysterious location. Some people want to travel through the mysterious location to get riches, some people want to get artistic inspiration, some people think it is evil and want to blow it up.

   Others, like Ronald, found themselves hypnotized.

  The rhythm of the film is unusually slow, and Ronald falls asleep from time to time. After two hours and forty minutes of fighting the Sandman, the screening finally ended. A head of the Souvelle Union National Film and Television Committee (Goskino) was being interviewed and asked questions from the audience.

   "Yes, the film has a very slow pace, and Goskino gave the same advice to director Tarkovsky to speed up the pace and shorten it.

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

  The whole film does show a completely different technique from commercial films, and you can feel the strong personal style of the author and director. In the middle section, the protagonist Stalker also quoted the words of Lao Tzu, a philosopher in China, "When a person is born, he is soft and fragile, and when he dies, he is hard and strong." This gives the film a philosophical temperament.

   However, Ronald looked around, most of the audience were under a sleep spell, and the quality of sleep was pretty good. No one dares to buy this kind of movie America and release it on a large scale.

   Ronald saw that most of the buyers had left, and the head of the National Film and Television Commission seemed quite lonely, so he went over to talk to him through an interpreter.

   He told Ronald that in order to promote cultural propaganda, the Alliance gave a lot of subsidies to the export of the film, and the film was shown at several major film festivals. Hope to be seen by the people of America, not just profit.

   For this purpose, Goskino is willing to sell the film screening rights at a relatively low price, if you are interested, you can contact the cultural counselor of the Soviet embassy.

  Ronald was interested in low prices, but there was really no market for this film. Maybe artists in the industry will draw some useful exploratory shots from this, but the general audience? Maybe try selling to insomniacs?

   Of course he didn't dare to say that to the Goskino people. Ronald asked, "Do you have any works with strong storytelling? There are stories with twists and turns, the kind that reflect the lives of ordinary people? Movies that people watch can let American audiences know you."

The head of Goskino listened to the interpreter and replied through the interpreter, "Yes, there is a movie being shown in my country recently, which has already broken the audience record of the league. This time, I also transferred a copy to participate in the screening. You are welcome to come and see."

  Ronald hurriedly wrote down the screening time, hoping that the movie wouldn't make you sleepy.

   Another film that aroused Ronald's strong interest was from Dongying, which was the participating film "The Call of the Distant Mountains". The director was not the familiar Kurosawa Akira, but a guy named Yoji Yamada.

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

  The story is about a man named Tajima Farming, who broke into the house of a Hokkaido nomad widow on a rainy night and asked for shelter from the rain. The widow Minzi and his son Wu Zhi raised cattle and depended on each other. After accepting Tajima for shelter from the rain, Tajima asked to take a part-time job at Minzi's house.

  Minzi, considering the need for a strong worker at home, agreed. Tajima won the favor of Minzi and his mother with his down-to-earth and hardworking style. He also helped Minzi beat the peasant association cadres who came to the widow's door to play hooligans. Wu Zhi also relied on Tajima as his father's image.

   Two years later Tajima's brother came to see him and gave him some money. It turned out that Tajima was a murderer. He committed suicide because his wife borrowed loan sharks and speculated in stocks that could not be repaid. In a rage, Tajima accidentally killed the creditor who came to collect the debt at the funeral, and then fled to Hokkaido.

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

  Because of the provocative behavior of the creditor, the court concluded that Wadajima was not intentional, but a manslaughter. Finally, Tajima farming was sentenced to three years in prison.

   On the train that escorted him to the place where he was serving his sentence, Minzi brought food and boarded the same carriage. With the consent of the police, she sat next to Tajima and chatted with her fellow villagers, telling the neighbor Tajima that she had sold her cattle and was going to move to the city, and was going to wait for Tajima to come back.

The filming of the whole film was simple and smooth. Ronald felt very cordial when he saw this oriental implicit film style. The filming method of the film was a little old, but it was better than the emotional reality. The relationship between the long-term workers in the image is very touching. Coupled with the scenery and folk customs of Hokkaido, it is a movie that audiences will like.

  Ronald had the idea of ​​buying the right to show the film, and approached the manager of Dongying distributor Shochiku Films to talk about America's distribution.

  “…”

   "What? I can't speak Japanese, can you speak English?" Ronald asked embarrassedly.

   "I said, I speak English?"

  Eh, the English of Dongying people is really difficult to understand. Ronald hired an interpreter from the organizing committee to help, so that he could communicate normally with the manager of Shochiku Films.

   "What? Half a million dollars? That's not going to work. Too expensive."

   "Lorana Rudsang, but this movie is worth the price. You see a lot of people in tears."

   "Yes, I also offered to buy the distribution rights in America because of the simplicity of this film. But this film has no stars and is still a foreign language film..."

"There are no stars in this movie? Lorana Rudsang, Shochiku's manager pulled Ronald to the poster, the male lead Tajima is played by Kensang Takakura, he is the first-rate star of Toyo. The heroine Minko is Chieko Besou Play, she is a national female star, the audience will not have a good festival if they don't see her during the New Year and Obon Festival."

"I understand that they may be the stars of Dongying, but no one knows them in America, and I also like their performances, so I want to introduce America. If you can reduce the price to less than 80,000 US dollars, I can consider it in Screening in theaters in big cities, so that our people can also get acquainted with the stars of your country.”

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

  Ronald is also a little disappointed. The film is well done, but the values ​​and culture are not compatible with American audiences, and can only find a market among some audiences who like foreign films and art films.

   For example, at the end of Tajima and Minzi meeting on the train at the end, put it in America, it must be Minzi going up to communicate with the police, let the two meet and chat, and finally must hug and kiss, and the passengers on the train applaud and so on. In Dongying, it was impossible for Tajima to speak directly to Minzi. On the one hand, the police were not allowed to violate the regulations, and on the other hand, Tajima could not face Minzi.

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

   approached the organizing committee at the film festival, and sent a fax to New World Productions about his optimism and opinions on "The Call of Distant Mountains", and Ronald was ready to continue watching the film.

   "Protest apartheid, protest racism!"

   A group of people shouted slogans at the entrance of the screening hall from a distance, to boycott the movies shown here.

  Ronald suddenly became interested. Showing the buyer's badge to the staff, he walked into the empty theater with few audiences.

   Can be boycotted, isn’t it free marketing?

   In the future, the morning update will still be at nine o'clock. Eight o'clock is a bit too early for me, so I have some time to proofread the typos.

   (end of this chapter)