Rebirth of Chinese Entertainment from the Oscars

October 23, 2000, three days after the test screening of "Night at the Museum".

Su Chen didn't take a break. He slept for a full twelve hours in his Los Angeles hotel room—from the early hours of the morning after the wrap party until that afternoon. When he woke up, the sunlight filtering through the curtains had turned from white to gold. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling for three minutes, then got up, picked up the script Jason had left on the table, turned to the title page, and saw a line written in black marker: "Juno, Diablo Coty. October 2000."

He washed his face, changed into a clean T-shirt, stuffed the script into his backpack, and went downstairs into the dry, warm afternoon sun of Los Angeles autumn. Jason's car was already waiting by the roadside at the hotel entrance, the engine still running, the window rolled down halfway, and Jason poked his head out. His hair was still the same messy look he'd had in Cannes, worn down by countless trivial matters, but the light in his eyes was more stable than in Cannes—the look of someone who had already seen the road ahead.

"How many times have you read the script?" Jason asked.

"Three times." Su Chen opened the car door and sat in the passenger seat. "The female lead hasn't been decided yet?"

"We turned down several candidates, but the producers felt they weren't quite right. This role was too difficult to cast—it's about playing a sixteen-year-old high school student who has an unplanned pregnancy, but she can't be portrayed as a victim, nor as a naive and innocent girl, nor as a typical rebellious teenager. Among young actresses in Hollywood who can portray this age group, there are very few who can simultaneously be intelligent, stubborn, humorous, and vulnerable."

Su Chen didn't speak. He leaned back in the passenger seat, watching the palm trees and car exhaust fumes flash by outside the window. In his previous life, he had seen *Juno*—the 2007 film that won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Ellen Page, with her baby face and eyes that could deliver the most outrageous lines with unwavering conviction, made Juno one of the most unforgettable teenage characters in independent film history. But now it was 2000, and Ellen Page was only thirteen, still in middle school in a small Canadian town. He couldn't wait seven years.

The car turned into the neighborhood where Light & Shadow Studios' new offices were located. Calling it an office was a stretch; it was actually a small, rented co-working space in an unassuming three-story gray building in Burbank, three blocks away from Warner Bros. Studios. Jason had converted a corner room on the ground floor into a makeshift casting studio—the walls were covered with storyboards and character portraits, and the table was piled with actor profiles and audition tapes. When Su Chen walked in, the casting director was flipping through a stack of new resumes. Seeing Su Chen, he immediately stood up and handed him the top few documents.

"We've shortlisted six people, and today's auditions start at 2 PM. Here are their profiles."

Su Chen took the documents, sat down, and began flipping through the pages. His fingers stopped on the third page.

The girl in the photo has a face that's instantly memorable—not just pretty, but brimming with "spirit." Her gaze at the camera carries a mischievousness that's hard to describe, as if she's mocking the photographer, or perhaps mocking herself, or maybe neither—a genuine feeling that everything before her is quite interesting. That vibrant energy, untouched by the pressures of life, is Juno's gaze. Her profile lists her name—Emma Stone, seventeen, from Arizona, who moved to Los Angeles less than six months ago, and whose previous work consisted of only a few gigs and one independent short film that didn't make it to theaters.

Su Chen glanced at the document for a few seconds, then placed it on the table. In his past life, he certainly knew Emma Stone—a future Oscar-winning actress—but now she was just a seventeen-year-old girl who had just run away from Arizona to Hollywood to pursue her dreams, with a resume that could be counted on one hand. It was a strange feeling—you know what kind of person someone will become, but right now she's sitting in the hallway outside your office, drinking instant coffee from a disposable cup, waiting for an audition that could change her life.

At 2 PM, the auditions began. Su Chen sat in a folding chair with a monitor in front of her, and Jason and the casting director sat beside her. Six actresses entered one by one to perform the same scene—the line Juno utters to her best friend at the convenience store entrance when she tells her friend she's pregnant. Su Chen didn't give many hints, only a brief description of the scene on the audition notice, allowing each actress to perform it according to her own understanding.

The first actress overacted, portraying pregnancy as a catastrophe. The second actress tried to incorporate comedic elements, but her expressions and tone lacked naturalness. The third actress was good-looking and had a good presence on screen, but her "intelligence" was acted out, not the innate intelligence of Juno.

  

The fourth person to enter was Emma Stone.

She wore faded jeans and a dark green hooded sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up above her elbows, revealing a section of her tanned, light brown arms. She wasn't wearing makeup, and her hair was casually tied back, a few stray strands clinging to her forehead, as if she had ridden a long bicycle ride. She stopped in the center of the room, her gaze sweeping around before settling on Su Chen.

"Do you need me to sit or stand?" she asked. Her voice was a little hoarse, a combination of the instability of her vocal cords typical of adolescence and the habit of overusing her voice since childhood.

"Whatever," Su Chen said.

"Then stand." She put her hands in her jeans pockets, tilted her head slightly at the empty air in front of her, as if sizing up an imaginary best friend. And then she began.

"Okay, I have to tell you—I'm pregnant." Her tone was as if she were saying, "I just stepped on a piece of chewing gum outside the convenience store," a calmness tinged with absurd self-deprecation. It wasn't that she didn't care, but rather, "Crying won't solve anything, so I might as well vent to you first." She paused for a beat, waiting for her imagined best friend's shocked reaction, then rolled her eyes. "Not yours—duh, not yours. It's that guy's. Yes, that one. I know, I know, you don't need to repeat his name." As she said this, the corner of her mouth twitched slightly. It wasn't a smile, but a more subtle arc, somewhere between awkwardness and self-deprecation—only someone who had truly experienced this "unspeakable yet necessary" moment could make that arc so natural.

Then she was silent for a few seconds. During that silence, her hands were still in her jeans pockets, but her eyes changed—the lazy humor from before vanished, revealing something beneath. It was thin, almost invisible, but it was definitely there—a vague, well-suppressed fear.

"I don't need you to tell me how bad this is, okay? I know. But this terrible thing has happened to me. And what I need to do is handle this in a way that doesn't feel like a tragedy. Because I don't want to be the tragic heroine."

Her voice rose slightly at the end of the last sentence, turning a statement into half a question—not out of a lack of confidence, but because she was imagining telling this news to her best friend, and also to herself. Then she returned to her lazy expression, pulled a hand out of her pocket, made a "okay, that's it" gesture in the air, and ended it.

The room fell silent. The casting director turned to look at Su Chen. Jason's pen slipped from his fingers and landed on his knee. Su Chen stood up from behind the monitor and looked at Emma Stone. She nervously put her hand back in her pocket, but her chin remained raised; she waited for his reaction with a defiant air—not that she didn't know she was nervous, but she didn't want others to see it.

"Ms. Stone," Su Chen said, "this role is yours if you'd like."

Emma Stone opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. Finally, like someone whose lines had been stolen, she covered her face with her hands, peeking out an eye through her fingers: "That's it?"

"That's it. You weren't just acting Juno, you *were* Juno. By the way, did you used to play basketball?"

Emma paused for a moment: "I played it for a year in high school."

"That athletic, subconscious trait hasn't completely faded from you. You walk with a slight sway in your shoulders, and your posture is a bit pigeon-toed. Don't change it, leave it in front of the camera. This role needs it." Su Chen turned to Jason, "The contract is due today. Filming starts in a month."

After Emma left the audition room, Su Chen heard a low scream in the hallway, followed by the sound of running—not high heels, but canvas shoes on the tiled floor, clattering away. He glanced down at a line of shorthand he had written on the margin of the profile page: "A lazy sense of humor; fear can be seen when she stops; plays basketball." Then he circled the last stroke.

In November 2000, the first film using the Blumhouse model, *Juno*, officially began filming in Los Angeles. The total budget was strictly controlled at three million dollars—a fraction of what a mid-range Hollywood production would cost. It was filmed entirely on location, without special effects, large-scale scenes, or the massive soundstage of Warner Bros. Studios. The crew was only a quarter the size of *Night at the Museum*, with a core team of fewer than forty people. The cameras were two rented 16mm film cameras, and the combined power of the three main lights in the lighting crew was less than that of a single spotlight in a Warner Bros. studio. The total budget for the art department was probably less than the set design for just one dinosaur exhibit in *Night at the Museum*. But this was precisely what Jason Statham's Blumhouse model aimed to prove—to make the smartest films with the least amount of money.

The main setting is an ordinary rented house in the suburbs of Los Angeles. A two-story house with faded pale blue exterior walls, a lemon tree in the front yard with branches reaching to the second-floor windows, its leaves dappling the afternoon sun onto the wooden staircase. The art department barely altered anything—they simply replaced Juno's bedroom with posters of 90s indie rock bands, pasted a sentence spelled out with letter tiles on the refrigerator door in the living room, placed a half-empty bottle of bourbon next to the kitchen sink, and an old guitar leaning against the sofa with one string loose. Su Chen wanted this kind of "unalterable" authenticity—because this house didn't need acting; it was a true example of a middle-class suburban American family. The hallway stairs creaked underfoot, the kitchen exhaust fan, even at its highest setting, still vented fumes back inside, and the screen on the back door had a hole the size of a fingernail, allowing a fruit fly to slip in every time it was opened. These were the art department's most prized assets because they didn't cost any money.

For the supporting roles, Su Chen didn't use any big names. Through Jason's connections in the independent film industry, he found several middle-aged actors with solid acting skills but low salaries to play Juno's parents and stepmother. The actor playing the father, Mike, was a character actor who had played supporting roles in television dramas for twenty years, with a mouth that could say three different meanings for any sentence. After reading the script, he replied to Su Chen with an email, the body of which contained only one sentence: "This father reminds me of my own father-in-law—sighing while carrying the burden of his daughter's affairs on his own shoulders. Thank you for not writing him as a fake person who only talks big." The actress playing the stepmother, Bren, was borrowed from the New York theater circle. Her hands had a rough texture, as if they had been washed too many things, and Su Chen specifically asked not to apply hand cream to her during the makeup test.