Editor's note: This is a nostalgic theater.
"You are so shy, you dig your face, you are looking for a pillow when you are sleepy. God does not care, the earth does not take care of you, you have to bear your own sins..." Accompanied by Banhu Xian's surprise, the theme song of "Tomb Path" Qin Opera style suddenly People have been pulled back to the Loess Plateau, and also to the first ten years of the new century. Now it seems that there is no shortage of earthy TV dramas.
As the forerunner of domestic tomb robbing dramas, " Tomb Path " did not create much of a stir when it premiered in 2007. However, in recent years, it has been repeatedly mentioned by fans of the drama, and even received a high score of 8.3 on Douban.
"Tomb Passage" poster
Speaking of which, the plot of the play is not complicated: the Guanzhong area has always been rich in cultural relics, and was once the hardest hit area for tomb robbing crimes. Qin Anping, captain of the cultural relics investigation brigade, and Song Ruoxu, a clerk at the local cultural bureau, are relatives, but they have embarked on completely different life paths. One fights crime, and the other rampantly steals and sells cultural relics.
"Real life scenes, real characters, real humanity, perhaps limited by the shooting cost, it almost faithfully restores the life of a real tomb robber." Regarding "Tomb Path", a top comment on Douban said In response to the opinions of viewers who are fans of this TV series, "As the first domestic TV series about tomb robbing, I personally feel that this is the right way to open up the tomb robbing theme - no special effects, no fresh meat, and no gorgeous picture effects. Use Tell stories using documentary techniques.”
The Paper reporter contacted screenwriter Li Guanghan and director Wang Mingjun. Although the two creators have never been involved in film and television creations with the theme of tomb robbing after "Tomb Passage", they have heard that young audiences are increasingly pursuing this TV series, which invested less than 3 million yuan back then, and they are willing to use their creations at that time. The background and shooting experience are all revealed.
Let’s start with the “original script” of this drama.
The Legend of Guanzhong
At the beginning of the new century, Xi'an's film and television companies successively invested in "Guanzhong Bandits" (2003), "Guanzhong Swordsman" (2003), " Guanzhong Secrets " (2004), " Guanzhong Women " ( 2005) and other TV series, have become popular one after another. The "Guan Zhongfeng" on the screen is not difficult to think of Chen Zhongshi's "White Deer Plain", Jia Pingwa's "Abandoned Capital", Jing Fu's "Eight Miles of Love", Cheng Hai's "Love Destiny", Gao Jianqun's "The Last Huns" was unanimously published by five publishing houses in Beijing, and then the "Shaanxi Army's Eastern Expedition" phenomenon became quite lively in the domestic literary world.
From the "Shaanxi Army's Eastern Expedition" in the literary world to the "Guanzhong" storm in the theater world, Shaanxi people's "Eastern March" in different art categories shows the profound local cultural heritage.
Most of those TV series with the prefix "Guanzhong" are produced by Xi'an Guangzhong Film and Television Co., Ltd. The company's bosses, Zhao An and Zhao Jun, were brothers. They had a precise analysis of the Chinese TV drama market at that time: they generously admitted that Shaanxi's film and television companies themselves were not fashionable, and that filming fashion dramas and idol dramas was not the way to go. On the contrary, the stories of family ties, cops and gangsters, and legends rooted in the countryside were filmed in a precise and smooth manner. In 2006, Zhao Jun, the second boss of Guangzhong Film and Television, said in an interview with the local media "Huashang Daily" that storytelling is their strength. "All our screenwriters and directors here can tell stories."
《 "12·1 Shooting Case" poster
Speaking of which, the first TV series that brothers Zhao An and Zhao Jun invested in was "12·1 Shooting Case". It became popular all over the country after it was broadcast at the end of 1999, and its Douban score is 9.3 so far. . The extreme documentary style of the show is also eye-catching today. Almost all the police in the show are local criminal policemen involved in solving crimes in Xi'an. Wang Shuangbao, who plays the villain Dong Lei, has become the most exciting film and television drama of the same genre in the future. One of the "ruthless people" who has lingering fears. It is worth mentioning that the narration of the play is none other than Luo Jingmin (1956-2023), a well-known actor from the Xi'an Theater Theater who would later play the role of Yang Guaiwa in "Tomb Passage".
Wang Shuangbao, who played the villain Dong Lei in "12·1 Shooting Case", conducted extensive interviews and research, and wrote "Guanzhong Tomb Robbers"
According to the production process of a TV series, screenwriters who can tell stories are often the first to "appear". Li Guanghan (pseudonym Li Jun) was born in 1956. His ancestral home is Luoyang, Henan. During the Anti-Japanese War, his parents moved to Baoji. He himself was born and raised here, and he still lives and works in Baoji today. As the current chairman of the Baoji Writers Association, Li Guanghan's experience is similar to that of the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s. He went to the mountains and countryside, and later joined the army in Qinghai. After the reform and opening up, he began to engage in literary creation. In the 1980s and 1990s, He is a well-known local writer.
He told The Paper that he came into contact with Russian literature in middle school, and his creative orientation still followed the path of realist literature. In the 1980s, when modern Western literary thought entered the mainland, he also created the novel "Send to the Lazy Woman" based on the structure of Kafka's "The Castle". Due to his familiarity with rural life and the writing skills of stream of consciousness, his subsequent folklore novels such as "White Nose", "Ghost Wedding" and "Three Painted Faces" can be said to be both down-to-earth and trendy.
After the 1990s, with the establishment of the market economic system, the entire social trend of thought began to turn, and the previous domestic literary craze quickly cooled down. Li Guanghan has been writing novels for many years, and he also knows many directors from Xi'an Film Studio, so he naturally turned to copywriting for film and television dramas. Around 2003, the TV movie "The Fifteenth Day of the First Month", written by him and directed by Shaanxi director Yang Jiansheng, won the Lily Award (a TV movie award sponsored by the Program Center of CCTV Movie Channel, selected once a year). The latter struck while the iron was hot and took Li Guanghan and asked him to write the script "Guanzhong Tomb Robbers".
Screenshot of "Tomb Passage"
The title of the drama sounds like it is in the same line as the Guanzhong TV series launched in Shaanxi at that time. At that time, Yang Jiansheng introduced in an interview with the "Chinese Business News", "The land in the Guanzhong area contains the ancestors of the Thirteen Dynasties, and there are cultural relics everywhere. This drama is actually a portrayal of the gray life of a tomb robber. I I want those who are robbing tombs to stop robbing after watching the drama, and those who are planning to robbing tombs to give up the idea of robbing tombs, and let those who don’t know the inside story of robbing tombs know how important it is to protect cultural relics and protect resources."
in "Tomb Robbery in Guanzhong" During the script creation stage of "Thieves", in order to collect materials, Li Guanghan visited almost every staff member of the cultural relics inspection brigade from Baoji to Xi'an. He also interviewed some tomb robbers in custody, and even had some contact with tomb robbers. Shaanxi is a province rich in cultural relics, and was once the hardest hit area for tomb robbing crimes. After Li Guanghan mastered a large amount of material, he was more willing to present a strong regional color and the complexity and degradation of human nature behind the incidents of tomb robbing and catching thieves. "Actually, the stories I wrote all happened on the Loess Plateau. Some of them happened on the Loess Plateau. Rich historical accumulation and humanistic characteristics."
Guanzhong area is located in the central part of Shaanxi Province, including five cities and one district: Xi'an, Baoji, Xianyang, Weinan, Tongchuan, and Yangling. Qishan County and Fufeng County on the north bank of the Weihe River are the birthplaces of the Zhou Dynasty. There is a saying in "Guoyu Zhouyu", "When the Zhou Dynasty flourished, the birds (another name for Phoenix) sang in Qishan." That's why there are so many bronzes. The relics will be remembered by the unscrupulous descendants of later generations. From this point of view, why most bronzes from the Zhou Dynasty and Qin Dynasty appear in scripts and TV series? The historical basis behind them is actually long-standing.
Screenshot of "Tomb Path"
The soil and water support a person. The folk customs in Guanzhong are simple, and people tend to be polite and restrained. Even the local farmers’ courtyards are kept very tidy. In terms of living habits, he is relatively frugal and conservative. When he has money, he builds a house, marries a wife and has children. According to Li Guanghan's research, even landlords in the old society rarely ate lo noodles. "They just ate dry noodles, drank thin noodles, and saved every penny to build houses and land. There is such a tradition." In addition, Guanzhong The fertile fields are thousands of miles away and are rich in wheat. Even if they dig food from the soil, they can mostly be self-sufficient, so there are very few people going out to do business. After the reform and opening up, people in Guanzhong rarely venture abroad, and their local sentiment is deeply rooted.
If you know people and judge the world, it is not difficult to understand the spiritual background and behavioral logic of the big and small characters in "Tomb Passage". In the TV series, after Song Ruoxu and Yang Xiu had an affair, in order to make up for the guilt of killing Yang Xiu's father, it can be seen that he first helped the Yang family build a new house. Many scenes of rural life in the play are also easily captured in Li Guanghan's writing.
It should be pointed out that "Guanzhong Tomb Robbers" (renamed "Tomb Passage" before it was officially broadcast) is the first TV series script actually created by Li Guanghan. After "Tomb Passage" became popular on video media such as Bilibili in recent years, we often see viewers on Douban "begging" for the original novel of "Guanzhong Tomb Robbers". In this regard, Li Guanghan hopes to explain through this interview with The Paper, "Thank you to the audience for their love for the TV series, but I first wrote it according to the script. Later, although I adapted the novel myself, it was partially published in the supplement of the local newspaper in Baoji. published, and there has never been a stand-alone version of the novel "Guanzhong Tomb Robbers"."
The protagonists are all ordinary people, "they just have different dreams."
When discussing tomb robbing dramas, we should first distinguish tomb robbing from archeology. "The purpose of tomb robbery is to make money. The purpose is to take away the burial objects to see which ones are valuable and ignore the rest. During the archaeological excavation process, he has to collect any historical information. The tomb robber only takes these Valuable things are destructive plunder." Li Guanghan said that it was precisely because he was aware of the damage to historical relics caused by tomb robbing activities that the seven or eight major cases involved in the script all have real prototypes, "For example, the Chime Bell case at the beginning, Yang Xun’s tomb case, Zhuangling stone statue head case, Yan Fei’s tomb mural case, Qin Gong’s tomb case, these all have prototypes.” The character prototype of Qin Anping in the
script was based on interviews with the local cultural relics investigation team ( Now it has been merged into economic investigation) The experiences of multiple captains and the integration of multiple real character prototypes. "Xianyang is a place with many imperial tombs. There is a cultural relics investigation brigade on Erdao Plateau in Xianyang, and there is also a cultural relics investigation brigade in Baoji. Most of these captains were born and grew up locally, and they cherish and cherish the history and culture of their hometown from the bottom of their hearts. Reverent."
Qu Guoqiang plays Qin Anping (bottom row of steps, left)
Li Guanghan recalled that this gave him a psychological fulcrum when portraying the police in the play. "First of all, fighting crime is their bounden duty. Secondly, most of these policemen are the sons of farmers. They have a natural emotional bond with the underground cultural relics and an instinct to protect them. Touching the tombs of ancestors, whether it is from his professional perspective or emotional All angles are absolutely unacceptable."
The detective police are also criminal police officers. In terms of their work flow, there is of course a lag in "case occurrence and case solving". But in fact, to prepare for a rainy day, the cultural investigation police often wear plain clothes to inspect the cultural relics market. Not only do we go to public cultural relic markets, we also go to some "ghost markets", places where underground transactions take place, and we find some clues there. For another example, there are cultural relic information officers in local rural areas. The police and cultural relics bureau often send people to educate villagers on cultural relics knowledge and train activists.
Compared with the police catching thieves, the history of tomb robbing is obviously more ancient. In this industry, Cao Cao, the hero of the Three Kingdoms, and Wen Tao, the hero of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, are their ancestors. "Grave robbers have many taboos and rules before they act. They first need to find an auspicious day, and secondly, they want to worship their ancestors. Cao Cao set up an official tomb robbing team back then. The purpose was very simple, which was to steal the real treasures buried in the tombs. Gold and silver were used to subsidize military expenditures. Wen Tao, also known as Li Yantao, was a native of the Liang Kingdom (Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms). During his seven years as the governor of Yaozhou (equivalent to the commander of the Shaanxi Military Region today), Wen Tao often used his official position to steal the tombs of Tang emperors. "
Through interviews and research, Li Guanghan found that in Xi'an's cultural relics market, some owners ostensibly opened shops, but in fact they were in secret with tomb robbers in the form of "front shop and back factory", and even directly organized and participated in tomb robbing activities. "These bosses usually don't show up, and they let the second boss do the work. People like them are called 'supporters' in the tomb robbing industry, which are the people who organize and pay.On the surface, these people are sanctimonious and elegant businessmen, and their knowledge is indeed not low. Moreover, because they were born and raised here, they sometimes know more than archaeologists. It can be said that they understand both white ways and underworld ways, as well as folk Feng Shui. This is actually easy to understand. People who steal and buy and sell cultural relics are all kinds of people. If he doesn't know the business, he will be deceived. "
Yang Xinming plays Song Ruoxu
On the basis of mastering these information, Li Guanghan created the image of Song Ruoxu, the leader of the tomb robbing gang. On the surface, he is a civil servant of the local Cultural Bureau. In fact, he is a masked man. He does not have the viciousness of a villain in the traditional sense. Instead, he appears to be cautious, aloof from the world, and even gentle and literate. "In reality, most criminals squander it in a lascivious manner after making money. But there are indeed some "elegant thieves" who have normal family lives, have studied cultural relics a lot, and have accumulated a certain amount of wealth. When they get good things, they sometimes are reluctant to sell them, and they just play with them and appreciate them. This gives you a sense of accomplishment. "Song Ruoxu's lines in the
TV series, especially the part about appreciating cultural relics, are now talked about by many viewers. Li Guanghan recalled that writing in this area mainly came from reference to historical books. "In addition, Baoji specializes in bronzes In the museum, there are inscriptions on the unearthed bronzes, reflecting all aspects of information of that era, as well as court and hunting regulations. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to turn the explanatory text recorded in the inscription into more life-like and story-like lines today. "
In "Tomb Passage", Zhao Shenzi is responsible for visiting the tomb, Ma Jianshe, the "gunner" who concocts explosives to steal the cave, Pangolin who works in the tomb, Gulu who helps lookout, and Xue Tiangui, who opens a hotel as a cover to launder money, etc. It constitutes a group portrait of current tomb robbers. In the process of writing the script, Li Guanghan deliberately separated the two businesses of exploring tombs and excavation of tombs. "In reality, some tomb robbers do not have organizational skills, but they specialize in accurately exploring tombs." Position, and then sell the information. Experts who blow holes often have experience working in fireworks and firecracker factories and know how to prepare gunpowder. In fact, many gangs combine detection, bombing and theft. The Luoyang shovel was their most basic tool, along with compasses, hoes, probes, screwdrivers, and ropes for climbing. "
Screenshot of "Tomb Passage"
The literary script is different from the documentary report. Li Guanghan has given a layer of gray to the main characters in the script. For example, between the literary detective captain Qin Anping and the tomb robber Song Ruoxu, in addition to the male-to-male relationship, " "You rob tombs, I'll catch thieves", there is another layer of kinship. Both of them are nephews of Li Guangxuan, an old thief who has the status of "godfather" in the local tomb robbing business. "At this point, it is not that I deliberately want to be dramatic, but Through on-the-spot research, it was found that some police officers and tomb robbers in Guanzhong did grow up in the same village, or were related to each other from all over the country. They may know each other, and there are even many people who are related. It’s just that I took a different life path later. After Song Ruoxu found out that Qin Anping was targeting him, he did not hesitate to rope in the latter's biological son and his own nephew. This was also a detail arranged through research in real life. If tomb robbers cannot corrupt the police officers, they will often take advantage of the latter. We set up different ways to win over people around us in the plot. "
Due to the huge profits in the tomb robbing industry, how can we avoid "rebellion in the nest"? To describe this on the Internet, there is a saying that "brothers fight, father and son go to war." In this regard, Li Guanghan talked about his findings, " 'Tiger poison will not eat its children'. After tomb robbers make money, they often hope to keep their children away from this industry, and even send their children to study abroad. On the contrary, the relationship between uncles and nephews is quite special. Folks say that 'nephew is like uncle'. Although they are not biological, they still have a kinship relationship. At least when faced with huge profits, they will not want to monopolize the black hands. It is easy to form a relationship. A pair of tomb robbers. ”
Yao Xingtong as Yang Xiu
Due to feudal superstition, there are generally no women in the traditional tomb robbing industry.Yang Xiu, who gradually turned from a female college student into a tomb robber, is the "little red in the green" among the villains of "Tomb Passage". After investigating real-life cases, Li Guanghan said that there were indeed female tomb robbers on Guanzhong Road, but their previous identities were restaurant waiters. "If a TV series is good, it must have some emotional scenes. I created the image of Yang Xiu and set her up as a college student who wanted to change her destiny against the will of nature. She wanted to change her destiny, but after graduating from college, she found that she couldn't. Her fate ended up being a drinking party in a karaoke bar and embarking on the road of tomb robbing. Moreover, the emotional entanglement between her and Song Ruoxu was also one of the reasons for the destruction of the gang. All the characters in the script did not come up at the same time. The ferocity and scheming all come from ordinary people. Whether it is Qin Anping, Song Ruoxu, or Yang Xiu, they are all very ordinary people who live their lives. They just have different dreams."
