Exploiting Hollywood 1980

When Ronald returned home, he was not very sleepy yet, so he simply took out the script of "Footloose" and started reading it.

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

Screenwriter Pitchford is indeed a top student who graduated from Yale, and he explained the ins and outs of script creation in just a few words.

In 1980, Pitchford saw a news report that dancing had been banned in the small town of Elmore, Oklahoma, for eighty years starting in 1900. There was never a dance.

The last high school student in the eleventh grade challenged and overturned this law, and in the graduation season of 1980, Elmore Public High School held its first high school prom.

The entire movie is adapted from reality. The three protagonists, Lun who proposes to abolish the legal ban, Ariel, the pastor's daughter who maintains the ban, and Ariel's best friend Rusty, all have character prototypes.

Pitchford himself was a lyricist, and he also wrote the lyrics for all the interludes expected to appear in the film and attached them to the script.

For example, the opening is an interlude of the same name "footloose", and the opening lyrics are

Footloose, footloose, kick off your weekend shoes.

Please, Louise, help me take off my boots.

The lyrics are very rhyming and rhythmic. The footloose in the title actually has a pun meaning.

On the one hand, footloose is a description of rhythmic footsteps, which refers to the rhythm of dance. On the other hand, it means to relax the pace and abolish the ban on dancing.

Ronald admired the literary quality in the lyrics of Yale's top students.

However, it seems that Pitchford has never made a movie. Many parts of the script are not written in a standardized way, and some plots cannot be copied and must be reprocessed.

For example, there was a section of the plot that Ronald clearly felt could not be considered a script, and he planned to revise it starting from this section.

The male protagonist, Lun, who transferred from the big city of Chicago, had a conflict with Ariel's boyfriend, and the two met for a coward duel using a tractor.

Two people drive tractors towards each other. Whoever gets scared and swerves before collision loses.

“Len’s shoe accidentally got stuck in the clutch;

He tried to jump from the car but was unsuccessful. Ariel's boyfriend Chuck saw Len trying to escape and triumphantly stepped on the accelerator and continued moving forward. With no way out, Lun had no choice but to step on the accelerator, which frightened Chuck so much that he jumped out of the car. "

It was divided into several scenes that could be shot, and Ronald began to plan the entire scene. The words on the script must be filmable. How do you give a close-up shot when the clutch is stuck? How about trying to jump out of the car?

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

As for the emotional description of "triumphantly", it is acceptable to turn a blind eye. When the time comes, the director will provide on-the-spot guidance and the actors will give their best.

After writing for about half an hour, Ronald began to feel sleepy. Today we went to Paramount first, then to Beverly Hills. After returning home, we sent Demi to the hospital. Ronald could not open his eyes.

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

"Bang wipe, bang wipe... bang wipe, bang wipe." A drum beat started, and Ronald seemed to see a picture with a dark background appearing in front of his eyes.

There is no detailed background, nor any character's face, only a close-up of two feet on the screen, 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 sings upbeat lyrics

footloose, footloose, kick off your weekend shoes.

Please, Louise, help me take off my boots.

"This editing is good." Ronald understood that he had dreamed that he was "full of energy."

The dance at the beginning ended with the interlude, and the screen went dark, then lit up again.

A middle-aged pastor preached in church.

"God could wave His big hand and wipe these evils off the face of the earth. But He didn't do that. He designed a test for us, a test!

If it weren't for this test, how could you explain the current popularity of evil, obscene, depraved rock music? "

Among the people listening to the sermon below, a boy covered his face with his hands.

"This is probably the male protagonist Lun who transferred from school." Ronald guessed that the director's technique was good. After the main theme was stated in the opening, the first plot that appeared after the black screen was about a conservative pastor in a conservative town doing something. Conservative preaching.

Coupled with the disdain of Lun, a white boy who transferred from the big city of Chicago, the dramatic conflict at the beginning emerged.

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

"Ah..." I don't know how long it took, but a girl driving a car was screaming on the screen.

"Ah..." Then the man driving in another car driving parallel to the side screamed.

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

It turned out that there was a girl standing in the middle of two cars, with her feet on the doors of the two cars respectively, as if she was doing a stunt. She didn't care that the men and women in the two cars were screaming at her to get off. Instead, she smiled maniacally and continued to stand to welcome the big car coming from the opposite side.

The boy driving the pickup truck seemed to be the girl's boyfriend. The other three girls in the opposite car were her besties.

A girl with a big nose sitting in the back seat slapped the car door desperately, asking the girl who was doing acrobatics to get out quickly. "

"Chuck, be careful. Ariel, Ariel... come back quickly, there's a truck ahead," she shouted desperately.

"This is probably the protagonist Ariel's best friend Rusty. With such a big hump nose, he must be Jewish. How can he be so ugly to act in a movie?" Ronald thought to himself, and at the critical moment, he even gave her a shot.

"Ah ha ha ha..." The camera cut to the girl stepping on two car doors and facing the big truck bravely.

"Huh!"

Ronald discovered that he knew this girl. Wasn't it the cello player in the "Famous" TV series version of Helen Slater's last party, Lori Singer?

"She is the heroine of this movie?" Ronald was a little confused. There were only some dancing scenes in the script of this movie, but no cello playing? Why choose her? Maybe it's the father's relationship?

Ronald had read the script and knew that Ariel was the protagonist, so he wasn't too worried that something would happen to her. However, the editing of this section is very good. The audience watching it for the first time will probably be led into the emotion of worrying about the girl.

In the nick of time, Ariel, played by Lori Singer, gets into her boyfriend Chuck's car and narrowly avoids the truck, which is parked on the side of the road. The girl on the other side drove the car into a ditch.

"Yeah", Ronald fell asleep again.

"Woo... Wu..." After an unknown amount of time, the sound of two engines starting woke Ronald up again.

On two tractors, one side is the protagonist Lun, and the other side is Ariel's boyfriend Chuck. The two honked the loudspeaker and drove the tractors to compete with the music.

Lun tried to escape several times, but his shoelaces got tangled in the clutch pedal and he couldn't jump out of the car. In the end, Chuck was forced to turn the steering wheel, and the tractor drove into the nearby ditch, and he fell into it.

"The editing of this section is not very good." Ronald thought to himself, "It's a bit too cumbersome. It seems that the audience can't understand the tense state that Lun can't escape. There are close-ups of the clutch pedal, shoelaces, and Lun's panic expression. I cut it back several times.”

"Why is there such a big difference in the editing level before and after?" Ronald didn't quite understand. "In the very beginning, the various close-up dances of shoes were very creative. The later thrilling scenes of driving and facing a big truck were also very creative. It’s okay, but the editing of this tractor showdown seems to have been taken down a notch.”

The feeling of sleepiness kept coming, and Ronald was woken up again in a daze.

"Hey, hey...why are you standing there? I heard this is a party, let's dance!"

Lun wore a dress and rushed into a dance party decked out in glittering ribbons and stickers.

"Aoaoao..." The men and women began to shout to the strong rhythm of the theme song "footloose".

Pairs of boys and girls still invited each other, rushed to the dance floor, and began to dance a mix of disco moves and old-fashioned swing dance steps.

The boyfriend of the big-nosed Jewish girl was a silly big man, and he also did John Travolta's iconic one-arm tilt in "Saturday Night Fever", which caused another burst of cheers from both men and women.

All kinds of sparkling powders fell from the sky. The boys lined up in a row, and the girls also lined up and started beating against each other.

The camera focused on their shoes again for a close-up. The high heels raised sparkling powder, and the picture was very delicate.

Ronald curled his lips when he saw it. It looked like something out of an early musical from the 1930s and 1940s. In those period dramas about the Civil War or British aristocrats, there was often this dance form where men and women were filmed separately in two rows to invite each other.

How can this kind of dance exist in modern America? They all focus on personal presentation.

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

Finally, the two rows of students began to retreat, and the male protagonist Len and Rusty's boyfriend began to stand in the middle of the dance floor and dance solo. It's still the kind of mixed dance that combines ancient dance and modern disco, but it's finally better than before.

The girls also began to dance solo, flipping up their long hair, kicking their thighs, and finally had some professional dance moves.

Then the boys came off one by one, doing the robot dance, the noodle dance, and doing a gymnastic Thomas twirl on the floor. It's like that black guy break dance that Ronald would do.

"Huh?" Ronald began to feel incongruous again. These black break dances appeared in this movie and were danced by white people. It 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 who had not danced for eighty years learn to dance?

Fortunately, Rusty's boyfriend's dance moves are still immature and clumsy, which fits the character's image. Jumping silly. The expression on his face is also a bit like Sean Penn in "Fast Times", a silly high school student.

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

Ronald woke up immediately.

He looked out the window. It was not yet dawn. I only slept for a few hours.

Ronald got up, and while his memory was still warm, he wrote down his comments as a director when he dreamed a few scenes, and wrote a large piece of paper on the notebook.

“The camera drags and is not suitable for the pace of modern audiences in the 1980s.

There is a problem with the choreography. The choreography is very old-fashioned and the actors dance either too bad or too well.

The camera focuses on the shoes for close-ups, which is very creative.

The opening narrative is smooth and the audience is immediately drawn into the plot..."

After Ronald finished writing it, he read it again and found it somewhat contradictory.

The filming of this movie is very strange, and in some places it looks like a very experienced director who has been making movies for decades. Some parts were shot very awkwardly, like myself, a fledgling film director, when I was filming "Fast Pace".

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

As far as actors are concerned, none of them are famous, and they should be regarded as the configuration of high-concept movies. But the plot is not high-concept at all. Dancing is not allowed in the town. What era is this?

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

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

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

Religion and conservative forces are strong there, and people's lives are not much different from those a few decades ago. Going to church on weekends to listen to preaching by pastors, and there are no new things like disco bars and rock concerts.

Dancing those dance steps that combine ancient and modern dances is a very outrageous behavior for them.

This is why the director placed some old-school editing techniques. Those small-town youths, like their own back home in Staten Island, probably have to wait a year or two before they can see unconventional movies like "The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Fast-paced Richmond High."

What they are familiar with is the old and slow editing rhythm of the 1970s. Maybe some movie theaters are still showing "Singin' in the Rain."

In the end, those black break dancers should be given some desserts to open their eyes, right?

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