Chapter 147 Awakening

For several days in a row, Lin Ming Yang was agonizing over this issue, and when he was in the living room, he was usually wrinkling his brows and tightly closing his lips. The number of times Green Nutter and Billy Olsen fought significantly decreased, they were both afraid that they would disturb Lin Ming Yang's thinking.

"Still having a headache over the script?" Grim Nath poured Lin Mingyang a cup of coffee and sat across from him, holding a book.

"I'm a bit lost right now, I don't even know how I should deal with the identity of the protagonist. Novels are written about stories that take place on campus, there aren't too many specific story clues, all there are are anecdotes that can make people laugh their asses off. And as a movie, it needs plot and clues!" In Lin Mingyang's original concept, he was going to "encapsulate" the novel in a journey of search and remembrance, where the stories that took place on campus became one episode after another.

In the original novel, those fragments of stories are knitted together to form a force that seeks to change people's commonly held misconceptions. In the screenplay, these fragments not only have the funny character of the original, but also have a layer of "social judgment". Influenced by his memories of "The Three Stooges", he could not find a suitable place for the protagonist, Rancho, in American society.

"According to my understanding of the novel The Five Point Man, I don't think it's Rancho's poor boy background that's most important." Green Nutt put down the book in his hands as he realized that Lin Mingyang had walked into a misunderstanding.

"In that novel, the author added a lot of commentary on the current times. For example, those on education issues, those on love issues, and those on institutional issues. It can be said that although this is a literary work with a campus theme, the author still added a lot of romanticism and idealism into it. In the face of the chaotic and complicated society outside, he hopes to establish an equal space in this relatively closed and simple environment. It can be said that this novel is the author's commentary on the society, which has too many mistakes, and he hopes that there will be a person like Rancho in the novel who dares to speak and act. I think the most important theme that is focused on in the original novel is not who Rancho is, but what he does!"

After saying this, Grim Nath closed the book in his hand, stood up, patted Lin Mingyang's shoulder, and decided to go back to his bedroom to read in order not to disturb Lin Mingyang's thinking.

Lin Ming Yang, on the other hand, seriously recalled Green Nutter's last words, Green Nutter's reminder was like a lighthouse in the dark night, helping him to clear the fog and pointing out a brand new path. Thinking back to his previous thinking traps, Lin Ming Yang suddenly realized that all the thinking obstacles were set up by him for his own. He had been thinking of adapting the novel on the basis of respecting the original, but unbeknownst to him, he had shackled himself to the novel's content and was unable to break through, so much so that he was unable to innovate effectively while grasping the thematic ideas.

Having figured this out, Lin Mingyang felt a warm current rise from the bottom of his heart and permeate his entire body. Joy invaded his body, reaching every pore at once. This joy of enlightenment was so overwhelming that he was so excited that he rushed into his bedroom and couldn't wait to open his laptop, his fingertips flying across the keyboard leaving a string of residual shadows.

In Lin Mingyang's script, Rancho was no longer a poor boy, he had a genius-type father, but because his father's thinking was too forward thinking, no one was willing to accept it. During the weekdays, his father is so busy with scientific experiments that he never tidies up the compound, and Rancho has grown up under his father's influence, and his thoughts are very different from normal people. While other people's houses had beautiful lawns and neat flower terraces, Rancho's house was overgrown with grass in front of his door.

Ever since his mother's death, the family has been classified as oddballs by the surrounding neighbors, who rarely socialize with them. Despite being ostracized by others, his father taught Rancher the most important thing of all, which is to ignore the eyes of others, pursue excellence, and success will chase you without pants.

Along these lines, Lin Mingyang's finalized script basically broke free of the original's background setting, retaining only the thematic ideas. He sent the finished script to Chittan Barnhardt, who read it before realizing that for $200,000, Lin Mingyang had simply purchased only one of his story ideas and some of the novel's hilarious passages that took place on campus. Lin Mingyang's background conversion is very successful, Chittambahat got the script has no traces of Indian culture, living is a picture of life in American society.

Billy Olsen finally found a Mexican student of pure Indian descent to play the role of Razu in the movie, so that the three "idiots" in the movie were all together.

Because it was a small budget non-commercial movie, the preparation of the movie was very simple, only the female lead Blake Fleury was considered a real actor in the entire cast, and the other roles were all "cameos" by college students in the Boston area. However, the actual situation after the start of shooting was not as simple as we expected, the first set of shots of the movie, the shooting encountered almost insurmountable difficulties.

In this sequence, Farhan, played by Billy Olsen, receives a phone call before the plane takes off, and after 10 years of missing his best friend, Rancho, finally has news, he pretends to have a heart attack, fooling the crew and forcing the flight to land just before takeoff, and escaping on his way to the hospital.

It wasn't difficult to get footage of the plane taking off and landing, but since 9/11, security measures at U.S. airports have been tight, so the crew couldn't film in a real airport. The trade-off of this set of shots made Lin Ming Yang hesitate for a long time, this was not a commercial movie, he couldn't possibly build a location just for a set of shots.

In the living room of the H33 dormitory, a discussion about the trade-offs of this set of shots was going on. Green Nutt insisted that this very creative beginning should be preserved somehow, while Billy Olsen, from a practical point of view, thought that it was not very realistic to complete this set of shots.

"They don't allow filming in airports, but Hollywood movies still abound with footage of airports, so how did they get it?" Glyn Nutt tried to give examples to support his point of view, "Spielberg also made a movie last year, Happy Endings, you all still remember it, right? Starring Tom Hanks, that movie was about him during a coup in his hometown on his way to the United States, where the government was overthrown, and the documents he held were not recognized by the US immigration authorities, and he was denied entry but not allowed to return to his home country, and he was forced to be stranded at JFK International Airport."

"Felix isn't Spielberg, Newman isn't Tom Hanks, and we're making a small-budget, non-commercial movie!" Billy Olsen shook his head. A movie with three names like Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones is naturally not to be underestimated. And in fact the movie Happy Endings itself did require huge production costs.

Because the screenwriter of that movie happened to be Andrew Niccol, the director of "King of War", Lin Mingyang had some inside knowledge of the filming of this movie.After 9/11, the security measures of the American airports became increasingly stringent, and wanting to really shoot an entire movie at JFK Airport was tantamount to a fool's errand.

In order to shoot this movie, Spielberg designed and built a real airport in California with the same size, full-featured airport, most of the filming work in this simulation of the airport to complete, and a small portion of the filming in Montreal, Canada, Mirabel Airport, in order to cooperate with the filming, the crew even borrowed a real Boeing 747 from United Airlines, so expensive production costs are a non-commercial film can not be. The cost is too high for a non-commercial movie to bear.

Although the silence shown by Lin Mingyang was already very telling, Green Nutt argued with reason, "All we need is a shot, they can shoot in the airport, why can't we?"

Lin Ming Yang's eyes lit up, Green Nutt's words once again inspired him, it was difficult for the crew to set up a scene in a real airport, but the crew of Happy Endings had built a permanent airport set in California still.

Normally, sets are built for movie shoots for the sake of appearances, and there's no need to pay attention to engineering issues. But in "Happy End", due to the construction of the airport must have due function, so the art department to complete each drawing must be subjected to professional engineers carefully review, even each simple welding joints have not been ignored. Spielberg's pursuit of a perfect set provided Lin Mingyang with an excellent shooting scene.

The seemingly insurmountable difficulty was finally solved in a very simple way, as Lin Ming Yang and Billy Olsen took a trip to Los Angeles and easily completed the shooting of the set.

The movie opens with this flashback, where Farhan suddenly receives a phone call and then learns of Rancho's news, and he excitedly asks Raju to go on a journey to find his best friend.

The camera then pans out as Farhan begins to reminisce about his first encounter with Rancho in college, and immediately following the plot shift, the actual filming returns to Boston. The Kirkland dormitory sells itself well from the outside, but inside it's a bit more dilapidated, and with the heavy rains that hit the entire city late in the movie and flooded the streets, it was inevitable that the building would be clogged with water and flooded during filming, so it's assumed that this dormitory, which is the oldest in Harvard, wouldn't be able to withstand such a tormenting from Lin Ming Yang.

And in the Kirkland dormitory shooting, the approval process is also exceptionally cumbersome, not only to obtain the consent of the Harvard University, and the entire filming process has to be reported to the local historical building protection organization, the other side has to assess whether the filming of the "cultural relics" of the building damage, in short, a whole bunch of troublesome issues, so that Lin Mingyang had to give up in their own In short, a whole lot of problems, so Lin Mingyang had to give up the intention of shooting in his "lair".

In addition to the dormitory, another important location in the film, Harvard's library is "tightly guarded", in this issue and the school simply do not have room for discussion, Harvard's library has always been all kinds of film shooting in the forbidden, want to be here to take the scene is tantamount to a mirage.

All these factors made Lin Mingyang finally give up the intention of filming at Harvard, and they found a private engineering school in downtown Boston. All of the film's campus scenes were shot at this school. Only in the shooting of the school gate, the crew made a simple set to cover the original school logo. The sparrow has turned into a phoenix, knowing that the North Harmon Institute of Technology in the movie is one of the top universities in the United States.

Lin Ming Yang's new movie had attracted media attention at the beginning of the shooting, and even though it was a non-commercial movie without stars, there were always a lot of reporters sneaking around every time the crew was shooting. Although the public concern and media hype was only about Lin Ming Yang as a person, it invariably brought a publicity effect to the movie. In the end, it made it so that all people knew that Lin Ming Yang was making a movie called Three Idiots.

The news about Lin Ming Yang's new movie was not only the talk of the town for American movie fans, but it also caught the attention of some Hollywood studio executives. In Santa Monica, California, the headquarters of Lionsgate Pictures, on the desk where President Gusto and Director of Distribution Moore were sitting opposite each other was a copy of the Harvard Crimson with a Ginny interview with Lin Ming Yang.

"The Three Stooges, sounds like a comedy by the name."

"You're interested in this movie?" Moore guessed his boss's mind from the contents of the newspaper spread out on his desk.

Gusta nodded, "Felix Lin is an interesting person, although his main identity is an actor now, but in the future his greatest potential is not in acting, perhaps in a few more years, Hollywood will give birth to a young outstanding director."

Moore had also paid attention to the movie at the very beginning. But as the media continued to expose it, he realized that the film was really just following the standards of a college student's movie production. Lin Mingyang himself took on the roles of screenwriter, director, and cinematographer, and the film was shot so casually that reporters were free to come and go from the set, and the actors were all amateur cameos. Slowly, Moore, like many others, really take this movie as a "game" when Lin Mingyang was bored, not yet in-depth understanding, most people have already chosen to give up.

"How much do you know about that movie?"

"According to my understanding, there is not much difference between the real situation and the media reports, all the inputs of this movie should not add up to half a million dollars, it is estimated that Felix Lin just wants to practice!"

"Is it really as simple as just practicing?" Gusto shook his head, then gently tapped the newspaper on the table with his finger, "Think back to the movies he has directed before, would Felix Lin be a director who can't afford to spend money? Regardless of the fact that he went ahead and made that movie himself, and regardless of what the media said about it, all I know is that he bought the rights to adapt an Indian novel for $200,000, but all that was used in the script in the end was one of the other party's ideas. I suggest you read this before you jump to conclusions."