Chapter 473: How can I feel tired? This is so refreshing
"Link, I heard there was an accident last night. That's so unfortunate."
Under the awning in the directors' area, Ovitz had a stern face and a heavy tone, not daring to show a trace of gloating.
"It was a small accident, but fortunately it didn't have much impact."
Link's expression was calm, and it was hard to tell whether he really didn't care or was just pretending.
Ovitz thought it was the latter. He said with a frown, "Be careful next time when you shoot a scene on the sea. Spend the money where it counts and don't be too frugal."
Link smiled and said, "The Caribbean is so far away, how did you find time to come over?"
"I came to see you guys. It's very hot today and you guys are often filming outdoors. It must be very hard."
Ovitz wiped the sweat from his forehead and spoke with emotion.
The Caribbean Sea is located in the tropics, with a hot and humid climate throughout the year and plenty of sunshine. Tropical storms and continuous heavy rains often occur from June to August.
The climatic conditions can be said to be very bad.
It would be very hard to shoot a movie here.
Being active here feels more like torture than sitting in a comfortably heated office.
Link is a guy worth tens of billions, ranking fourth on the Forbes list. With his status and assets, he could have just stayed in a villa and enjoyed a wealthy and decadent life, but he chose not to do so.
In order to make a movie, he was willing to give up his comfortable life and come here to suffer.
Ovitz sighed inwardly. Although Link was an annoying person, sometimes one had to admire his professionalism. He was more diligent and more hardworking than his peers in the entertainment industry.
It is only right that such a person can succeed.
"Although it's a little hot here, the scenery nearby is pretty nice. You can go and see it if you have time."
"I will. It's beautiful here. It would be nice to have a vacation here."
Ovitz asked, looking at the blue sky, sea, golden beach and white sailboats floating on the blue sea outside the studio, he couldn't help feeling refreshed.
Link smiled. He was busy filming and had no time to receive Ovitz. He handed the reception task to producer Mike Statham and continued filming on the island.
In order to prevent the accident from happening again, Link and the crew were more cautious during filming and modified the shooting plan, moving more than a dozen sea scenes to the giant tank in Rosarito, Baja California.
The Rosarito Aquarium was one of the filming locations for Titanic.
When director Cameron was filming the scenes where the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, he built a huge pool at the site. The pool was 0.9 meters deep and could bring in 1.3 million liters of seawater. In the camera, this huge water tank was indistinguishable from the sea surface.
He filmed two scenes there while filming "The Truman Show" earlier this year.
The sea scenes of "Pirates of the Caribbean" are also planned to be filmed in a giant water tank.
After a day of filming, Link returned to the hotel to rest in the afternoon and invited Ovitz to dinner to talk about work issues.
Also present were Catherine Zeta-Jones, assistant director Yu Feihong, assistant Aishwarya, and several girlfriends who came to visit the set, including Jennifer Lopez, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts, Izumi Sakai, Shizuka Kudo and others.
When Ovitz arrived at the restaurant, he saw a table full of Caribbean seafood delicacies and more than a dozen beauties on the table, and his admiration for Link suddenly decreased a little.
He had seen Link, the billionaire, filming in the scorching sun on the crew before. He admired Link very much and felt that it was natural for him to become a top director and for his films to sell well all over the world.
After seeing these beauties, he had to change his mind.
It may seem hard for this bastard Link to be filming outside, but he gets to see beautiful scenery, eat delicious food, and be surrounded by all kinds of beauties every day. If he were to endure such hardship, he could persevere by gritting his teeth.
"Mike, come and try the giant lobsters and wild yellow croaker that are unique to the Caribbean. It's hard to find fresh ones in other places."
After they started eating, Link pointed at the three large shrimps in the middle that were over two feet long and introduced them.
"Link, your life here is quite enviable."
Ovitz smiled meaningfully.
“If you like the food and scenery of the Caribbean, you can stay here for a while.”
"Forget it. There's too much work in the company. I don't have time to rest even if I want to."
Ovitz shrugged.
"Disney's performance in the past two years has indeed been poor. The stock price has fallen by more than 30% compared to the previous year, and the annual dividend has also fallen. If you and Eisner don't find a way to improve the performance, shareholders will probably choose to sell their stocks next year."
Link dared to say this because FlashGold Capital is also a shareholder of Disney, owning 2.6% of the shares, worth more than $500 million. The profit was less than $100 million when it acquired the company four years ago, which is far below expectations. It is better to invest in other stocks.
When Ovitz heard his words, his face turned red and black. Originally, he wanted to get along with Link as a friend, but Link was unsportsmanlike and actually talked to him as a shareholder, putting the two of them in an unequal position and putting a lot of pressure on him.
Also, why has Disney’s performance deteriorated in recent years? Doesn’t Link know?
Link knew that all too well.
The reason lies with him.
If the film industry had not grown too fast and its films had not performed too well at the box office, how could Disney's performance have declined? How could MGM go bankrupt? How could the shareholders and management of the remaining five film companies be so anxious about the box office that they even developed mental illnesses?
Link, that bastard, knew this, yet he still blamed them for mismanagement, which led to Disney's decline in performance.
This is really too much.
Ovitz took a big bite of the lobster, and the resentment in his heart was even greater than his athlete's foot. If he hadn't considered that Link was a shareholder of the company and an important partner of Disney, he would have thrown the lobster at Link and pointed at his nose and scolded him.
"hehe!"
Ovitz laughed dryly and said with an expression that was three parts embarrassed and four parts helpless, "In the past two years, Eisner and I have racked our brains to improve Disney's performance, and we have lost a lot of hair.
But guess what, the film industry is too powerful. It produces good movies one after another, and releases several movies with box office revenue of over 100 million yuan every year, which eats up most of the profits in the film industry and makes it difficult for Disney and other film companies to survive.
But even so, we did not give up. After our unremitting efforts, Disney's box office revenue in the past two years, although not as good as Guess What, is still better than the other six major film companies."
Finally, he made a joke in a humorous tone, "Link, if you let Guess What Films take a year off, the performance of our Disney company will surely soar."
Link smiled lightly, "Guess What Pictures competes fairly with its peers in the film market, and winning or losing depends on one's own ability. If Disney can only develop if Guess What Pictures gives in, this is nothing short of contempt for Disney.
Disney is the world's largest animation film production company, with countless IPs worthy of adaptation, and has great potential in this regard. As long as you can deeply tap Disney's potential in the field of animation films, you will have the opportunity to surpass Guess What at the box office."
Ovitz curled his lips secretly. Anyone can say such words, but the key is to do it well.
In the past two years, he and Eisner have also made animated films the focus of the company's development to avoid competing with Guess What Pictures in live-action films.
However, the production of animated films is relatively troublesome, with a long cycle and high costs. Such films have a fixed audience, and although they rarely suffer huge losses after their release, the profits will not be too much either.
In addition, computer animation companies represented by Pixar Animation Studios have developed rapidly, competing with Disney Studios' hand-made animation in the animation field and snatching away a lot of market share that originally belonged to Disney.
Now Link actually advised them to focus on developing animated films.
This advice sounds harsh.
If Link wasn't a shareholder of the company and hadn't treated him to dinner today, Ovitz really wanted to scold him severely.
"Okay, let's stop talking about work and continue eating."
Link greeted.
After dinner, Ovitz took out a script and asked him to read it, which was also the reason why Ovitz came over.
The new script is called "Pearl Harbor". It tells the story of a pair of good friends, Rafe and Danny. They learned to fly planes together when they were young and worked as pesticide spraying pilots in their hometown. After the outbreak of World War II, Rafe and Danny joined the army and met the field nurse Evelyn in the army.
Rafe and Evelyn fall in love. Later, the United States mobilizes elite troops to go to the European continent to assist European countries in resisting the invasion of Nazi Germany. Rafe volunteers to go to the war and entrusts Evelyn to Danny's care.
On the European battlefield, Leif's plane was unfortunately shot down by the German army in an air battle, and his life or death was unknown.
Evelyn and Danny were deeply saddened after hearing the bad news. They encouraged and comforted each other, gradually sparks of love emerged and they had a one-night stand.
When the two were in love, Leif returned from Europe, and the three of them faced the torture of love and friendship.
Just when the three didn't know how to face each other, the Japanese Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War broke out, and Rafe and Danny participated in the bombing of the Japanese mainland.
After the bombing was successful, Rafe and Danny successfully landed the plane at Dongda.
They just had bad luck.
Danny was attacked by Japanese soldiers and died trying to save Rafe. Before he died, Rafe told Danny that Evelyn was pregnant.
Rafe brought Danny's coffin back to the United States and hugged Evelyn, sadly remembering the dead Danny.
A few years later, Rafe and Evelyn, Danny's son, live happily together.
Link had seen this movie before, but when he read the script, he still felt that the story was a bit melodramatic.
This script draws on the selling point of "Titanic" and "Saving Private Ryan", that is, it integrates the stories of small people into real historical events, uses the small to see the big, to explain the impact of the macro historical background on personal destiny, while also praising certain highlights of human nature of ordinary people against the big background.
The subject matter of the movie is very serious and the background is grand.
It’s just that the screenwriter of this movie is not very good, and the love story is not touching enough.
This also makes the quality of the entire movie much worse than that of Big Ships and Big Soldiers.
(End of this chapter)
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