Chapter 6: Playing Dirty!
Strictly speaking, all three academies were the same. During the school year, freshmen and sophomores weren’t allowed to take acting jobs outside; it only started becoming acceptable in junior year, and only seniors were really expected to be out there taking on lots of roles as internships.
But Beijing Film Academy didn’t play by the rules. Because it had so many beautiful girls on its side, it opened every convenient door it could. After all, BFA was where they trained leading ladies, and they didn’t put that much emphasis on acting skill, so it was the first place to break the rules.
First, they specially admitted Liu Yifei, who basically had no academic record worth mentioning and had bombed her college entrance exam, and called it a special enrollment, dressing it up as, “making room for talent.”
That kind of talent poaching is one thing, but then when the Condor Heroes project started up on the Bearded Guy’s side, and they heard Liu Yifei was being cast as the female lead, they went even further and played dirty again, letting Liu Yifei, who hadn’t even finished her first year, take the role directly and opening every green lane possible. That was what made her famous as the “Fairy Sister” and the “top campus beauty of the three schools.”
Now that Liu Yifei had set that precedent, the other students at BFA, across every grade and class, naturally started getting restless too. A whole batch of outstanding talent emerged, and before long they’d even put together a list of the top ten campus beauties.
That kind of rule-breaking naturally hit the other two schools hard. We’re the ones who play by the rules and respect the system, not letting freshmen just run out and take roles. But over there, you straight-up stole the entire post-'85 generation from us. By the time we let our students out to film according to the rules, where would there even be room for them to survive?
So BFA’s recent two classes had very high quality. It had the most stars currently studying there, the loosest environment, and the biggest name of all. It was even called the “dream factory for female stars in Chinese entertainment,” and it instantly widened the gap for good.
That put a lot of pressure on Tang Guoqiang, who was the dean, so he had no choice but to lay down a hard rule: no taking roles in freshman year. He held the line at sophomore year too, which counted as a pretty decent attempt to keep the other two schools from getting too riled up.
Cai Yinong, who had always paid close attention to Guli Nazha, also felt there was no real point in signing her right now. She might as well wait until Nazha started sophomore year and do it then, just as her husband said. After all, Yang Mi and Tang Yan were cheap. If they were replaced with Hong Kong and Taiwanese actresses instead, setting aside whether they were any good to use, the budget would shoot way up immediately. Not much value for money there.
Tang Yan and Yang Mi were in the same class, both from BFA’s Acting Department class of '05. They were already in their junior year. Compared with them, Liu Yifei was one year below and younger by age, but the gap between them was already impossible to measure. Liu Yifei was filming a major Hollywood production now, working with Jackie Chan and Jet Li, with a budget of a hundred million... dollars!
“So? Are you really planning to sign with Tangren?”
“How could that be? I’d only be playing a third female lead. Forget the third lead, I might not even want the female lead. What year is it now? They’re still trying to pull the old TVB trick on people. I’d have to be crazy to agree.”
Just after Tang Yan finished complaining, she noticed Yang Mi didn’t look too good, and asked curiously, “Mi Mi, what’s wrong? Did something happen?”
At first Yang Mi didn’t want to say anything, but Tang Yan was her best friend, not an outsider. And she really did want someone she could trust to talk to properly.
“I’ve got about a year and a half left on my contract with my godmother, and now she wants to renew it.”
Tang Yan wasn’t stupid. She understood instantly. This was a threat wrapped around Little Xue Baochai from Dream of the Red Chamber. Obviously it wasn’t a very generous contract. It was probably better than Tangren’s offer, but it definitely wasn’t the kind of ideal, free arrangement they all wanted.
These days, there were basically two kinds of artist contracts. One was the traditional agency contract led mainly by a film and TV company. The other was the collaborative attached contract, the kind used by celebrity studios.
The former gave you a very small cut and very little autonomy, but it came with a lot of film and TV resources, so it was relatively easier to break out. If you were lucky and survived those few years of the contract, then after that the sky was the limit. A lot of the senior women in the business, the ones everyone called “jie,” had endured exactly that way.
The latter was also a road those “jie” types had taken. After breaking out of their original contract, they made a new partnership with the old film and TV company or with a stronger backer, set up a celebrity studio, and started a new collaboration through equity and agency attachment.
But that kind of arrangement demanded connections, status, box office pull, and traffic. There was no such thing as guaranteed income. Everything depended on yourself and your team. Without some real strength and foundation, it was practically a fancy way to self-destruct.
So Tang Yan still wanted to take the first route, but definitely not with a company like Tangren. Rongxinda seemed pretty decent, but unfortunately she wasn’t one of theirs, and she also wasn’t really suited to the traditional route of period costume dramas and prestige series. She just wasn’t built for the serious leading-lady mold.
“If you don’t sign, then you can’t act?”
“That’s not quite it, but they’ll definitely replace me. I heard they’ve already picked someone else. You should know Li Qin, right? That special-admission student from the '06 prep class.”
When Yang Mi said that, Tang Yan actually had some impression of her, because Li Qin was also one of BFA’s current top ten campus beauties. The '04 class had three, the '05 class had the two of them, the '06 class had three, and the '07 class had two newly arrived Uyghur girls. In other words, the main competitors in the future would be these senior and junior girls.
Tang Yan obviously couldn’t get involved in those matters. She herself still didn’t have a landing spot. It wasn’t that no company wanted to sign her; it was that every company had something she couldn’t accept. It wasn’t that those companies lacked strength, it was that her current status and traffic weren’t high enough to get a truly good contract.
Yang Mi’s situation was a little better than Tang Yan’s, but only by a little. So now Yang Mi was seriously thinking about whether or not to sign with Tangren. Compared with Tang Yan’s sellout-style contract, her own first-sister deal was actually still acceptable.
But before the two of them could agonize over it for long, both their phones rang, and then...
Ye Yu, who had been waiting for several days, had basically come to the conclusion that Tang Yan was unlikely to come to him on her own. Either he’d have to wait until she had the role in hand before considering whether to cash in the promise, or she’d do what someone else had done before and simply choose to break the contract. Compared with the two, Ye Yu was obviously more fond of the latter.