Today is the "International Film Festival". On August 6, 1932, the first international film festival was founded in Venice, and this day is remembered.
In a film and television work, only a few protagonists can be recognized by the audience, more supporting roles, cast members, and extras at the most basic level of the pyramid. Just like Wang Baoqiang, who was 6 people squeezing into a rental house and nibbling on steamed bread to fill his hunger, Zhao Liying, who ran a dragon set for 8 years, is rare, but it is a legend that countless boys and girls dream of copying.
Behind these lights and shadows is a huge ecological circle mixed with fish and dragons.
01
Er Dongsheng's movie "I Am a Passerby" tells the story of a group of men and women in Hengdian.
Zhejiang Hengdian is known as the "Hollywood of the East". Everywhere are characters wearing heavy makeup and costumes, with different images, as if they have traveled in a thousand years of time and space.
According to incomplete statistics, Hengdian has at least 30,000 group performances, countless film and television dramas were born there, and the annual tourism revenue alone is as high as 20 billion.
The temperature in Hengdian can now reach 40 ° C, and for the vast sea of extras, the mood can also reach -40 ° C.
When each crew's minibus stops, the crowd of group performances will be blocked. This is a contest of physical strength, but also a contest of connections - the relationship between group performances and group heads is particularly important. "Quntou" is also called "drama head", which is quite a jianghu name, which is an intermediary responsible for providing information to the extras and contacting the crew.
In Hengdian, those who can persist for three months are considered senior. When the newcomers whose dreams are written on their faces have just come to Hengdian and ask the seniors how to settle down, the "old people" who have worked hard for a year or two will give a template answer:
"Tomorrow I will go to the temporary residence card bank card actor card, and I can't act without an actor card." After the certificate, I went to the old union at 4 o'clock in the morning to wait for the play. Haven't rented yet? Tonight find a 10 yuan all-night Internet café to make a night, don't stay in a hotel, don't spend money indiscriminately, and remember that the only principle of living in Hengdian is to save. ”
After graduating from a university in Hangzhou majoring in international trade, Wang Ting, a post-90s girl, became a small white-collar worker. Not content with seeing the end of her life at a glance, she resigned from her parents and dragged a box to Hengdian alone.
Her first role was in a Republic of China drama. The old man was dead, and a group of squirrels were crying bitterly, and she was one of them, and the girls were all looking down, and they couldn't see their faces at all.
Wang Ting used to have a very small appetite, but after being a group performance, she was always too busy to miss the meal, which made her completely change her personality, and she could eat two box lunches at a time, especially love to eat steamed buns, because the steamed buns were hungry.
She rented a small room for $600 a month. After living for a month, I found that the electricity bill was actually more than 300 yuan, but the only power consumption in the room was the mobile phone. Wang Ting told the landlord that there was a problem with the meter, but the landlord insisted: that is so much.
Reluctantly, Wang Ting withdrew from the house and fled with her luggage in tow.
These experiences have been transferred to "I Am a Passerby". All the lead actors are real names, and the actor is himself. There is a clip that is very poignant: Wang Ting picked a few peppers on the side of the road, returned to the rental house to prepare to fry a fried boiled bowl of noodles to eat, but the landlord smelled spicy, pointed at the nose and scolded the door, and drove Wang Ting away - stubble after stubble of young people are pouring in, she wants to take the opportunity to rent a better price.
In fact, Wang Ting's life is already much better than many of her peers. Some "horizontal drifters" are reluctant to rent a house, so they set up a tent on the big square of the film and television city to live.
Everything is expensive here, except for salary; everything must be saved, except for effort.
02
In Hengdian, there is a well-known price list:
"Working 8 hours a day, 48 yuan a day (this is the price of previous years, which has reportedly risen to 80 yuan in the past two years). Shave your head with blood, be beaten in the rain, carry a coffin draped in linen and filial piety, lie on the ground with water, the subsidy ranges from 5 yuan to 30 yuan; the red envelope of the dead person ranges from 1 yuan to 10 yuan; the salary of playing a prostitute who has physical contact with people is doubled..."
Excellent group performances can be upgraded to special group performances or special actors, and the income will be higher, and the highest reaches more than 1,000 yuan a day, and there are very few such lucky people.
There is a boy named Wei Xing in "I Am a Passerby", and the "coffee position" is much higher than that of ordinary group performances, because he has played the male lead in a micro-movie, and since then he has drifted away, and he is no longer willing to sweat and make two or three hundred yuan a day for group performances. Wei Xing sat on the roof of the rental house every day and looked into the distance, waiting for a big director to dig himself up.
If it is not high or low, when filming, because the field workers have a sluggish attitude towards him, they fight with people, and the situation is extremely embarrassing.
Wei Xing's girlfriend Lin Chen, in order to support his dream, does not hesitate to run dinner, accompany people to drink and even accept unspoken rules, just to help her boyfriend receive good drama.
One is not willing to be ordinary, one is touched by self-motivation to give up the bottom line, and finally the two break up after another quarrel.
This group of young men and women who make a living with their left hand chasing dreams and right hands, love is very luxurious, but it is also very cheap. There are like-minded young couples, and there are also whistling to ask for a WeChat to be ONS scenes.
Wang Ting's first boyfriend was selected by the crew, and after taking the throne, he had no contact with her.
Lost in love and frustrated, Wang Ting did not let herself fall, she refused to sneak the rules, threw a slap at the bully who harassed her, and was threatened by the gang to "ban".
Just when Wang Ting was discouraged and wanted to leave Hengdian, she met Wan Guopeng, a boy after the 90s.
03
Wan Guopeng, whose appearance and temperament resemble Thata's General Someya, came from the Mudanjiang Forest Farm in the style of "Bear Haunting", and was reluctant to return to his hometown after graduating from college, and also dragged a box to Hengdian.
Wan Guopeng is the most positive type of young people in the drift - sunny, enthusiastic, interesting, willing to endure hardships. In order to save some money, Wan Guopeng and Wang Ting shared a room during the day and at night. There were not enough beds, the two slept back to back on a bed, Wan Guopeng desperately restrained, like a sitting Willow Xia Hui.
Wan Guopeng and Wang Ting finally fell in love, but the relationship was not smooth. Several years of drifting life made Wang Ting very tired, she did not want to be red, just wanted to settle down. The rich second generation Xiao Geng, who has always had a crush on her, always appears in time when she is most vulnerable...
In the story, the most lamentable pair of group cp are Shen Kai and Xu Xiaoqin.
Shen Kai is a rare economic situation in the horizontal drift. He runs a small restaurant, and young people who can't afford to eat go to the bill. Therefore, he was regarded by this group of young people as the leading big brother, full of prestige.
In fact? Shen Kai is a giant baby in spirit, and the big and small affairs in the hotel are handled by his wife Xu Xiaoqin.
Xu Xiaoqin not only has to rush to act to make money to subsidize the family, but also to see stitches and needles to busy the work of the hotel, tired like a gyroscope. Pregnant, she stepped on the bottom of the flowerpot to play the palace girl, shaking and almost fainting during filming, and was loudly reprimanded by the female star who played the queen mother.
His wife was tired like this, but Shen Kai only cared about his ideals.
What is his ideal? Want to be red.
Shen Kai finally got a minister role in the Warring States drama, heard that Xu Xiaoqin was pregnant, insisted on asking his wife to kill, and supported him to concentrate on filming. Xiaoqin refused, and Shen Kai let out a harsh word: If you have to give birth to this child, you are destroying my life!
Heartbroken, Xu Xiaoqin slammed the door and left Hengdian in the car back to his hometown.
Shen Kai is a difficult to support Ah Dou, and when playing against Fang Zhongxin, he was in a trance, memorizing the wrong lines and taking the wrong position one after another, until he had a mental breakdown, dragging down the process of the whole play, and was dismissed by the director.
Shen Kai was crazy.
Wrapped barefoot in sheets, he staggered through the traffic of the night, chanting lines that could no longer appear on television, "The king is so ambitious and heroic that his subordinates are in awe..."
Shen Kai's encounter is a story, but it is not entirely fictional. There are really people who have not had the opportunity to get favors for many years, and they can't give up their obsessions and fall into insanity.
04
There is only part of what the film can show. Douban blogger "Confused" has revealed more secrets of the group performance industry with his personal experience.
The most difficult thing is to wear armor in the middle of summer; the most frightening thing is the explosion scene; the most uncomfortable thing is to wear dirty, smelly and wet costumes and shoes; the most need for dim sum is how to occupy the golden position close to the starring actor...
Outstanding group performances have the opportunity to become special actors. Special actors are divided into small special, medium special and large special.
Little Ted has a line. Zhongte has a plot, of course, even if you are killed by a shot, it is a plot. Date began to play consecutively, and then he may become a supporting role, start to have his own script, and achieve a qualitative leap.
In the end, it depends on skill. Some group actors can only smear black ash and blood plasma on their faces, and pretend to die on the ground, while some have become aces.
For example, Shi Zhongpeng, born in 1990, has played a Japanese ghost 200 times a year, and has "died" 8 times a day at most. Shi Zhongpeng is very popular in Hengdian, if nothing else, because of his good flexibility, a "bomb" flew in, he whizzed up in the air, the action was particularly realistic, "dead" was extremely infectious, and he became a sought-after candidate for many crews because of this unique life.
It also depends on the opportunities. For example, in "Journey to the West to Descend the Devil", the "four beauties" who carried the palanquin to the empty prince Luo Zhixiang were on fire, and many TV stations invited the four big mothers to do the program, which was really fate to natural red.
This Vanity Fair is full of dramatic foreshadowing and the cruelty of the law of the jungle. There is helplessness and sorrow, there is compromise and there is a twist. But either way, people with dreams deserve a bit of respect.