Text | Xiang Rong
Edit | Du teng
Produced by | Tencent News Lichun Studio
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The first time I knew what Hengdian looked like in spring was in Hui Xiangyi's circle of friends.
In those short videos, he holds a guitar and sings by the stream, with a coffee table by the water; or drinks tea in the mountains, the sky is on the grass, no one is around, and the birds call to calm people's hearts.
As the sun set, he set off for home. After a 20-minute drive, he returned to Hengdian and had to face a more realistic world: rents, employee wages and a not-so-optimistic business turnover. He has a bar called "Jianghu", just on Hengdian Main Street.
In the more than 3 years since the outbreak of the epidemic, there have been various news about Hengdian circulating on the Internet: some said that the crew started vigorously, resulting in a shortage of group performances; some said that the film and television industry was short of funds, and could only use the elderly and dummies to replace group performances; some said that the number of hengdian group performances registered grew rapidly, and more and more people went to Hengdian to pursue their dreams... These contradictory messages paint a vague picture, and the experiences of those who make a living in Hengdian are highly summarized in a cookie-cutter manner.
Most of the media people who want to go to Hengdian to find stories will appear in Hui Xiangyi's shop; and his name has appeared in many reports about Hengdian. He is not a "Hengdian worker" in the standard sense, he has been here for 20 years, and he has the multiple identities of an actor, director, producer, bar owner, and innkeeper. He is more like a kaleidoscope with many facets, can observe multiple sides of the hengdian, and can combine these observations into a more three-dimensional feeling.
Hui Xiangyi (Image courtesy of the interviewee)
His bars and inns, like the capillaries of the huge film and television industry, although only at the end, can also feel the contraction and struggle of the entire body under the dual influence of the epidemic and the ebb and flow of capital. He told me that he had received so many media people, not to make a splash, but to be willing to convey the stories of the city and the people who lived here to the outside world.
Here's what he had to say:
Hengdian's group performances are certainly not as much as before. Last year, the number of registrations for group performances exceeded 100,000, which is a cumulative number that will only increase, not fall. I remember that four or five years ago, the media came to interview and said that this number was about 70,000 (Note: According to public information, the number of registered actors in Hengdian Actors Guild in 2018 was 68,000).
The number of registered extras has increased, but this does not mean that Hengdian is still the same as it was at its peak. The concept of the crew preparing and shooting on the Internet is very vague. There are a lot of preparations, and there are indeed crews in the filming, I remember watching more than a dozen of them a while ago, but it includes big plays and small plays - the kind of 1 million production is also a play, and tens of millions, hundreds of millions of productions are also a play. Now there are few big plays in the whole Hengdian, and there are many small plays.
A person with a dream of acting can come here and try it for a month, two months, three months, or five months, but he still has to go if he can't survive. He used to earn 5,000 yuan a month, but after the group was less, he earned less and less, and there was not enough life, and he would leave. Of course, there are also many new people coming. I'll make an analogy, just like going to school, this year graduated, and the new one came in.
There are a lot of actors who have been in Hengdian for a long time recently left, went home to develop, or found another job. I have also heard that actors who have developed elsewhere in the past, in the past two years, they have not received dramas, so they will go to Hengdian to find opportunities, at least they can make money, and they will not starve to death. But after they came to Hengdian, they caught up with the epidemic and were particularly depressed.
I also heard that many people have persevered on the road of acting for several years, catching up with the good times of previous years, and have also had good results, and there has been no drama in these two years, and their families have urged them to go back to their hometowns to find a job. They are caught between the pressure of their families and what they want to do.
There are also some people who have a deep foundation in this industry and are not so easy to change careers. In the epidemic environment, it is difficult to start a business from scratch, and you can't always go to the construction site to move bricks. So even if you don't make money, you still have to do it in this line. If you can make money, you can make more money, if you can't make money, you can wait patiently, wait for the epidemic to end, and wait for this market to become better. A lot of people I know have that mindset. Hengdian people no longer have the anxiety of the beginning of the epidemic, there are emotions, but there is no way to solve it, then digest the emotions yourself.
I saw a widely circulated still on the Internet, and the group performances were all 60 or 70-year-old people. It should be an anti-Japanese drama, but I don't think it was recently filmed, and in recent years, there have been no anti-war dramas in Hengdian. It is a joke, do not need to be serious, and now Hengdian does not lack group performances to the extent that they want to go to the top of the elderly, but many group performances have no work.
You say there are stills that use dummies instead of group performances? I didn't notice that. But I don't think it's a common phenomenon in the industry either. Get a fake model or something, it's similar to a person's artificial, right? There is no need for this.
At present, the production methods of various crews are not particularly different from before the epidemic, and the epidemic requires restrictions on the flow of crews, can not be replaced at will, and the impact on group performances is not so great. Now the group performances are required to do nucleic acid once every two days, and you can't go to other places casually, go to medium and high-risk areas and come back, you may not let you shoot.
The most difficult place is in raising funds. In the past two years, it has obviously felt that there is a lot less money in the market. Many of the people who did online movies in Hengdian earlier experienced similar things: tourists or people who came to see them directly proposed, "I give you 200,000, can you let me play the male number one?" "At that time, private capital was very strong, and people generally had money. Now it is almost impossible, now as long as there is a capital, everyone's eyes are too red to do it!
In the past, Hengdian had 100 plays filmed at the same time, which was very lacking. In 2010, actors with a little ability had a lot of scenes, and many people could earn one or two thousand a day, and even bump into the slot. After the epidemic, everyone's workload and income have been reduced.
My bar is still open, occasionally shut down, and my income has shrunk by 60%. Before the epidemic, 12 tables could be filled almost every night, but now, it is obvious that everyone's spending power has declined.
Group performances don't come to bars. The consumption here is still a bit high, and the cheapest bottle of wine is also twenty or thirty yuan. Generally speaking, there are more special actors with higher incomes, or the producers of the crew, fu huadao, and behind the scenes, whose incomes are relatively stable. There are very few locals, and when it first opened, there were some tourists, but now there are basically none.
My inn opened in 2015. 2015-2017 was the most glorious time for Hengdian, with the largest number of tourists and a sharp increase in the number of inns. After the 2018 salary limit, the crew was much less overnight. In 2019, I opened a bar, and the inn was no longer operated, and it was directly rented to the group. However, after the epidemic, the number of crews has further decreased, and more than a dozen rooms in the inn can be fully occupied, and now less than half of them are occupied.
I don't have much work now, I have a lot of time, I basically go out to the top of the mountain in the afternoon to drink tea, sometimes with friends, there is a ride without a ride to talk, occasionally singing, to alleviate the depressed emotions, bitter music. In recent years, it has also been very depressed, since 2018 to the present, first the impact of tax reform, followed by the epidemic.
When I came home in the evening, the bar was open, and I went to sit down and help. There is certainly no escape from reality, it can only be hoped that the epidemic will soon pass, the crew will be a little more, and the business will be better.
This year I'm going to organize some people, set up a rescue team, and do what I can. When you are busy, you should shoot dramas, you should live and live, and you should do something meaningful when you are idle, and I think this is also very good.
Everything I do now, acting, directing, singing, opening bars, I don't use them as a means of making a living. If I want to make money, maybe I'll choose to do something else. I have been planning to stay in Hengdian, and I have this plan since then, but it has not changed so far. But what the future holds, I don't know.
I have feelings for Hengdian, and I hope Hengdian develops well.
(Source: Tencent News)
* Some images are from the internet