Hollywood Road

"I have previously obtained special survey statistics from several professional companies."

In this period of time, Murphy was not blindly choosing such a film. Just as the six major Hollywood companies do certain market research before each project is promoted, he also has certain data support, "From the end of the sixties From the early 1970s to the present, the divorce rate in American society exceeds 40%. Those who have been hurt by marriage, as well as the grown-up children who have been hurt by broken marriages and broken families, will become our potential. Audience group."

In fact, everyone knows that some value propaganda is one thing, ordinary people accept it is another matter, even if these people agree with the so-called mainstream Hollywood values, they will not reject the views of marriage in the film.

Carla Faith was lost in thought, and after a while, he said, "According to you, marriage is too scary. It is too wise for me to choose to be single."

Murphy shrugged. "Maybe it won't take long before you meet someone who wants to marry and think that these words of mine are nonsense."

Cursing his lips, Carla Faith said nothing.

"Let's go back to movies." Murphy brought back the offending topic. "I also got another statistics. The divorce rate in Hollywood movies is even more alarming. The divorce rate on the screen is as high as 90%. Fives."

"Is that high?" Carla Faith was a little surprised.

"Only high and not low, this is also caused by another trend in Hollywood movies." Murphy explained in detail, "There is also an anti-family and anti-emotional selling point in Hollywood films."

Carla Faith asked, "Like our movie?"

Murphy nodded, "In addition to playing the warm family card, Hollywood screenwriters are also good at writing marriage and family into'horror movies.' While a large number of screenwriters rely on their families to make tears, there are also many screenwriters who tear down the stage. They said This kind of "family tragedy" was filmed for the post-70s, post-80s and 90s."

He reminded him, "These people are now the main force in the film market. Nearly half of them have experienced the breakdown of their families and marriages."

Carla Feiss found that Murphy's work was done too carefully, almost more than the market research department of Twentieth Century Fox did. No wonder he always gets high returns at a small cost.

"It's late." Murphy looked at his watch. "Let's go."

The two continued to talk about these topics about the movie, walked out the gate of the warehouse studio together, got in their respective cars, and left the small city of Venice.

On the way back, Murphy is still considering the previous dialogue with Carla Firth. In fact, there is an extremely important point in choosing "The Lost Lover". Most of the Oscar-winning films in the past, he was only confined to watching, not like Generally, I have studied it carefully, and I have seen it and regarded it as academic research. They are completely two concepts.

The former will definitely be forgotten after a long time. How many people can remember the specific scenes of a movie that they watched a few years ago? The latter is much more impressive.

Because of personal preference, Murphy has studied the most and deepest films with a distinctive black style. This is also the film route he is taking now, and the style he is best at.

It is impossible for him to put away what he is good at, and run to get those works that have been produced by the Oscar industrial assembly line.

There is also a difference between Oscar's Best Director and Oscar's Best Director. Some directors who have ulterior motives deliberately apply the Oscar model to shoot and produce films to win awards, undoubtedly have limited influence and ranks that can improve themselves.

Since he did not grow up in this country, Murphy does not have a high degree of recognition for the things advocated by the Oscar model. Originally, he has not studied this type of film. On the contrary, he has a deeper understanding of the few films that have been nominated or won awards for their heavy black style films. Research.

Frankly speaking, these noir films are more likely to be handed down classics than works produced by the Oscar industrial assembly line.

This is not Murphy's own view, but later recognized.

Since the end of the 1990s, not only Hollywood commercial films have completely entered the assembly line production model, but also films that compete for Oscars.

In the past two years, when the North American film market went to see all kinds of movies released every October, it was more of convergence than difference. A new type of film was born, which can be called it. For the "Oscar contest film."

In the early years, Thanksgiving to Christmas in North America was a pretty good term. It could make fans who like independent films cheer up with professional media, gearing up to look forward to some different movies. After the intensive film festival in early autumn, those from Venice The film festival will go through the Toronto Film Festival and finally return to the New York Film Festival for independent production, allowing Hollywood to temporarily put down the summer commercial visual blockbusters and adjust them to another channel to let people see another ecology of Hollywood movies.

However, driven by the great glory and benefits that the Oscars can bring, the long screening cycle from late autumn to the beginning of the spring has evolved into an "award file"-a long period that is not different from the summer file, and even covers the North American tradition. Thanksgiving stalls and Christmas stalls.

A new stereotyped film format has also emerged. The biggest feature of these films is that they are produced in response to the appetite and preferences of the Oscars old white judges. The subject matter and protagonist will always be controversial, and they seem to be out of style. In the end, it will return to a framework acceptable to the public, maintain mainstream values, give actors enough space to play, and emphasize quality performance. The performance of actors must be trained by methods without accident.

Also, if you want to act in a serious drama, you are not allowed to laugh.

The most representative of these is undoubtedly biographical films. The prevalence of biographical films is due to the very realistic "safety" considerations of Hollywood filmmakers, because most judges want to see familiar faces play familiar roles.

These Oscar contest films, except for a few with a strong personal style, if carefully analyzed, they are not fundamentally different from the summer film blockbuster. They are all industrial assembly line products that cater to some people’s appetites, and they are all plain. The same as plain water.

As Murphy said, in most Oscar awards, the right one is selected first, and then the others are considered.

This leads directly to the fact that the participating films must be smooth, and smooth often means plain.

How can a person with a personality like Murphy like plain movies, and if they don’t like it, how can they talk about research?

Similar to summer films that always like to use visual effects to impact the audience, most of the Oscar entries that are always produced in the taste of the middle-aged and elderly white judges of the college are not only as stable as a stereotypical essay, but also bring another consequence. , That is, like a summer file, the differences between the films are disappearing.

Oscar gradually became a propositional composition, which no one would deny.

Of course, those participating in the Oscar competition are not without exception, but most films, especially those that can be liked by the judges, are becoming more and more homogeneous.

In fact, after the new century, if you go to the three most important North American film festivals before the Oscars-Telluride, Toronto, and New York, when you look back at these film festivals, what you think of is not how many films participated in the exhibition. Most movies are similar, but it’s easier to summarize trends than to find differences.

When commercial productions and teen films are getting closer to cliché themes such as comic adaptations and heroes saving the world, the films that originally participated in the awards season competition are a kind of resistance to clichés, but after years of hard work by the Oscar judges, After all, this kind of resistance has become another stereotype.

Similarly, there are protagonists and supporting actors competing for the performance award.

On the road to the actor and actress, men are either geniuses or patients, but in short, they are not normal people. Women are suffering, all unlucky, painful, and passive, and each one needs to be rescued or self-saved.

These also form a template with terms to refer to.

Such as Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron award-winning roles, such as Leonardo DiCaprio's self-destructive image and so on.

In fact, there has long been a consensus in the North American performing arts circle that in the Oscars and the entire Hollywood selection system, the measurement of acting skills is limited to a narrow field of vision. The methodological performances of the 1960s are still the gold standard for judging acting skills.

On the road to the actor and actress, you have to play a role that looks very different from yourself, you have to transform your appearance beyond recognition, and you have to play a character who is not so normal and has behavior deviations.

It's really difficult to play a normal person to win an award, or an acting geek like James Franco to get a golden man.

To be honest, Murphy would rather see a film like "Old Nowhere" than some propositional composition.

Especially female characters, do they need to be rescued or self-saved one by one? In the direction of rushing to the awards, he thinks that films like "The Lost Lovers" that can create a little noise are rarer and more interesting.

Maybe after the film is released, some people think that putting the inner darkness and craziness of women under the microscope is probably going against the historical trend in the context of Hollywood advocating "Mother" and "heroine".

However, Murphy would like to see the noise in the cinema more than those unanimous and stable critics.

This is his Oscar philosophy.

Whether it's because he has never studied before or because of his personal hobbies, he prefers to use movies with the ultimate style to impact the little golden man, rather than the stereotyped proposition composition.

For the remainder of December, Murphy hid in the Venice studio, quietly shooting the scenes in the studio. After the Christmas and New Year holidays, the studio needed to re-set the scenes, so he took the crew to arrive. A small town in Orange County, ready to film location scenes.

There will certainly be crowds of onlookers when shooting location scenes, but Murphy did not expect that the residents of this small town were so curious about the filming. Almost half of the town’s people gathered near the crew to watch the filming, which caused considerable trouble to the filming.