America 1987

Chapter 132 Audience Issues

"How is it?"

Beside a dark coffee table with pipes and metal cups, David, dressed in a dark suit and patterned tie, rested his left hand on the armrest and asked, "Tell me, your attitude doesn't seem very optimistic."

"It's not that I'm pessimistic," Krim, sitting in the middle, explained, "it's just that I feel the market audience might not be very broad."

They had just finished watching the cut of "L.A. Confidential" and were discussing the film's release.

"Indeed, although I think it looks pretty good, the audience is not particularly wide," Quentin, who was sitting next to me, said.

Prejudice! This is blatant prejudice! Who told you that suspense films don't necessarily have a wide audience?

When "Infernal Affairs" was released in 02, it was the highest-grossing film in the Hong Kong film market that year and was hailed as a "savior" of the sluggish Hong Kong film market.

With a box office of HK$5505 million, it left the second-place film, "Hero," by nearly double the margin.

The audience for suspense films has never been narrow; only comedy films, which appeal to all ages, can truly surpass them.

Aside from the really hardcore classic mystery genre, the high viewing threshold might deter a large number of casual viewers.

So-called orthodox mystery is the most legitimate school of thought in the field of mystery. Its core is a fair and pure intellectual game. All clues to solving the case are presented to the audience without reservation, and the information obtained by the detective is completely equivalent to that of the detective. There are no hidden clues.

A story like "The End of Ten Days," where the protagonist is a mystery maker with his own secrets, hiding various clues and information from the reader until the very end, only to suddenly reveal them to solve the case, and is touted as a story of a high-IQ protagonist, does not meet this requirement.

"My film belongs to the social realism mystery genre, so you don't need to worry about the target audience —"

Traditional mystery films require viewers to invest a lot of time in sorting out clues, so they test people's patience and have a relatively high viewing threshold.

In contrast, social realism mystery novels, which focus on exposing social problems and portraying human nature, are suitable for audiences of all ages and have a wider audience.

The biggest difference between these two schools lies in their focus on the core questions. The former asks "who is the murderer and how did he commit the crime?", using a tight logical loop to explain all the doubts; the latter asks "why did the murderer commit the crime and what caused this tragedy?", downplaying the complexity of the plot design.

Chen Sicheng's "The Vanished" is somewhat similar to this. It does not follow the principle of fair clues in classic mystery novels. Instead, it creates suspense through multiple reversals in a "play within a play" format. It uses the "Mandela Effect" and the setting of a game within a game to drive the puzzle-solving process. The reasoning process serves the purpose of strong emotional impact.

Because these stories are rooted in real social contexts and address real-world issues such as family background and wealth inequality, they resonate much more emotionally.

"But there are a bit too many important characters in your movie," Quentin analyzed from a professional filmmaker's perspective. "The relationships between the characters are also quite complex, which will raise the bar for viewers to some extent." □ Hmm, that's true.

There are about nine important characters in *L.A. Confidential*, including three male protagonists, the antagonist Dudley, and the female lead.

Lynn, media broker Sid, the girl with the bandage on her nose, the former police bodyguard Baz, and Bad's partner.

With nearly ten important characters, this number is indeed a bit too much for the average viewer in a movie.

What is an important character? It refers to a character that the audience needs to remember while watching a movie.

Based on classic research on human working memory capacity, the average viewer can clearly remember about three to five important characters without making a conscious effort, which corresponds to the core cast of a typical commercial film.

Provided there is a clear hierarchy of characters and a friendly narrative pace, the average viewer can barely remember about five to nine important characters. Beyond that number, the viewer's accuracy in remembering the core plot will drop significantly by 31%, and they will easily become confused about the characters and unable to keep up with the story.

For movies like "Avengers: Endgame" that bring together more than 27 core characters, ordinary casual viewers who haven't watched the previous films beforehand simply can't remember all the characters and are likely to have a "face blindness" viewing experience.

Well, if that's the case, doesn't Project A Part II also make this mistake?

David thought about it carefully and found that he didn't, because he didn't experience the "face blindness" viewing experience while watching the movie.

Upon closer examination, there are quite a few reasons behind this.

First, the supporting characters serve a single mission. Characters like pirate remnants and Qing Dynasty envoys have simple and straightforward personalities, with only one goal (revenge/catching up with the revolutionaries). There is no unnecessary or complicated background information, and the audience can remember their stance and role at a glance without taking up extra memory resources.

Then there's the clear differentiation of the five groups of people. Each of the five storylines is highly identifiable: Ma Rulong's police force storyline, Zhen Sanhuan's corruption storyline, the revolutionary party storyline, the pirate revenge storyline, and the Qing Dynasty assassin storyline.

Each group has completely different goals, attire, and behavioral logic, making it easy for viewers to distinguish between factions and avoid character confusion.

Finally, the film concludes with the classic "hidden person inside the house" scene. The entire film uses a classic sequence from Maggie Cheung's home to bring together five groups of people in one space at once, quickly clarifying the positions and relationships of all the characters through intensive interactions.

Viewers can connect all the previously scattered clues by following this scene, without any gaps in the plot.

The final battle at the factory completed the loop of all the clues.

All the characters enter the final abandoned factory scene, and the remaining conflicts of the five clues are resolved in this melee. The Qing Dynasty experts are all subdued, the corrupt practices of Zhen Sanhuan are exposed in public, the revolutionaries successfully retain the donation list, and Ma Rulong completely consolidates his control over the security of Xihuan. All the foreshadowing laid earlier is resolved, and no clue is left unfinished.

Impressive, truly impressive. If Jackie Chan hadn't been an actor and focused on writing screenplays and directing, and had further honed his ability to create multi-narrative stories, his achievements in this area might not have been inferior to Nolan's or Kenny Bee's.

"How's the character development?" David interrupted.

"Yes, that goes without saying. The three main characters are all very well-developed and memorable, and the other supporting characters are also quite good."

A fixed memory point —

Although film length limits the ability to deeply portray all characters, it is still possible to leave memorable moments for each character, which directly determines whether viewers are willing to watch the film a second time.

Of Jackie Chan's God Armed Trilogy, he watched the second one, "Armour of God," the most. After watching the first one, "Armour of God," and the third one, "CZ12," once, he had no desire to watch them a second time.

"Chinese Zodiac" is understandable, after all, it was already the 10s and Jackie Chan's creative peak had long passed, but he did not expect that "Armour of God" with a Douban rating of 7.6 would be so poorly made.

In "Armour of God," apart from the protagonist played by Jackie Chan, almost all other characters were relegated to functional supporting roles.

Alan Tam's character, the second male lead, is constantly clowning around and causing trouble. Judging from the plot structure, director Eric Tsang probably wanted to make a film with two male leads.

However, Alan Tam is clearly not Sammo Hung; he doesn't have much comedic talent, and when he acts alongside Jackie Chan, he can't capture the feeling of Wang Baoqiang and Xu Zheng.

At least not in this movie. The dialogue in the scenes is poorly designed, the interactions between the characters are stiff, and the so-called comedic scenes are mostly nonsensical and deliberate slapstick, without being deeply connected to the characters' personalities.

The two female characters, Rosamund Kwan and Laura, are also standard "flower vases" (meaning pretty faces but lacking independent action). Their main role seems to be contributing two kissing scenes with Jackie Chan, allowing him to indulge in his kissing desires.

The plot progression is also rushed and abrupt, with numerous obvious plot logic loopholes. The "God's Armor" is used solely as a core prop to advance the treasure hunt, and the ending is also very abrupt, failing to explain the subsequent fate of the characters, resulting in a serious lack of narrative integrity.

The only thing I remember from the whole movie is the "evil money cult" joke, and it still has a 7.6 rating on Douban.

David didn't understand this at the time, so he looked up the behind-the-scenes information of the movie and discovered the story of how Jackie Chan came closest to death.

This is somewhat reasonable, considering that the lead actor was seriously injured and hospitalized during filming, which greatly compressed the filming schedule. In order to meet the deadline, the dialogue scenes could only be rushed through, and the focus was placed on the high-difficulty special effects and action scenes, which is the same approach taken by "Mr. Nice Guy".

Are there any memorable supporting characters?

Sitting in the middle, Krim asked, somewhat confused, "Which supporting character?"

"Do you remember the mother of the girl with the bandage on her nose, the one who only had a few lines?

"Ah, I do remember that, mainly because of her reaction in the morgue—"

When asked how to make a supporting character in a movie memorable, the answer is to focus on and vividly portray a particular trait.