When Ronald returned home, he was not too 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 clearly in just a few words.
In 1980, Pitchford saw a news story. In the small town of Elmore, Oklahoma, dancing had been banned 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 is a lyricist, and he also wrote the lyrics for all the interludes expected to appear in the movie 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 loosen the feet 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 turns before they collide will lose.
"Len'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 triumphantly stepped on the accelerator and continued to move forward. Lun, who had no way out, had to
He also stepped on the accelerator, but it scared Chuck so much that he jumped out of the car."
This was divided into several scenes that could be shot, and Ronald began to plan the entire scene. The words on the script had to be filmed. How to get a close-up shot of being stuck in the clutch? How to try 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, and changed the shoelace to be entangled by lifting the pen. In this way, when he lifts his foot to jump out of the car, he can get close to a shoelace that is entangled by the clutch.
With the close-up, 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 he went to Paramount first, then to Beverly Hills. After returning home, he sent Demi to the hospital. Ronald could not open his eyes.
"Let's 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.
"Bengcacaca, bengcaicaa... bengcaa, bengcaa." 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 wearing 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 away these evils from the ground. 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 popularity of evil, obscene, depraved rock music that is currently popular?"
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 is good. After the main theme is stated in the opening, the first plot that appears after the black screen is 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 stunts. She didn't care that the men and women in the two cars were screaming for her to get out, and
He smiled maniacally and continued to stand to welcome the big car coming from the opposite direction.
The boy driving the pickup truck seemed to be the girl's boyfriend. The other three girls in the opposite car were her best friends.
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. He is so ugly to star 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 standing 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 was she chosen? Maybe it was related to his father?
Ronald has read the script and knows that Ariel is the protagonist, so he is not very worried that something will happen to her. However, the editing of this section is very good. The audience who watches it for the first time will probably be led into the feeling of worrying about the girl.
In emotions.
At the critical moment, Ariel, played by Lori Singer, got into her boyfriend Chuck's car and narrowly avoided the truck. The pickup 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 record player, and drove the tractors to compete with the accompaniment of the music.
Lun tried to escape several times, but his shoelaces were wrapped around 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 a 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 decorated with glittering ribbons and stickers.
"Aoaoao..." 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 jumped in front of each other.
The camera focused on their shoes for a close-up. The high heels raised sparkling powder, and the picture was very delicate.
Ronald curled his lips as he watched it. It looked like something from 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 display.
The dance form is ancient, and the dance steps are also a bit old. The disco is also mixed with some old-fashioned tap dance styles, which makes the floor snap.
Finally, the two rows of students began to retreat, and the male protagonists Len and Rusty's boyfriend began to stand in the middle of the dance floor and dance solo. It was still a mixed dance that combined ancient dance and modern disco, but it was better than before.
The girls also started to dance solo, flipping up their long hair, kicking their thighs, and finally had some professional dance moves.
Then the boys performed one by one, robot dance, noodle dance, and a gymnastic Thomas spin on the floor. It was like the black break dance that Ronald would dance.
"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 dance steps that require systematic training, and are not very popular now. How can these students who were born in a small town who have not danced for 80 years know how to dance?
Fortunately, Rusty's boyfriend's dance steps are relatively immature and clumsy, which fits the character's image. He dances silly. The expression on his face is a bit like Sean Penn in "Fast Pace", 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 and saw that it was not dawn yet. He had only slept for a few hours.
Ronald got up, and while his memory was still warm, he wrote down a few scenes in his dream. As a director, he wrote a large piece of evaluation on a piece of paper.
"The camera is slow and unsuitable for the modern audience in the 1980s.
There is a problem with the choreography. The choreography is very old-fashioned, and the actors' dancing is either too bad or too good.
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 a bit contradictory.
The filming of this movie is very strange. In some parts, it looks like a very experienced director who has been making movies for decades. In other parts, the filming is very jerky, like when I was filming "Fast Pace", I was a fledgling film director.
Also, is this a high-concept or low-concept movie?
As far as actors are concerned, none of them are famous, so they should be considered suitable for 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 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 the people's lives are not much different from those a few decades ago. They go to church on weekends to listen to pastors' sermons, 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 used some old-school editing techniques. Those small-town youths, probably like his hometown in Staten Island, would have to wait a year or two before they could see "ET" and "Fast-paced Alien".
A deviant movie like "Chimon High School".
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?