Entertaining China

SHANGHAI —  Here’s the script: A group of foreigners comes to an exotic land seeking fortune and opportunity. A tempestuous relationship develops with their potential partners, driven by hope, greed and mistrust. It turns into a trial of patience and punishment. The directors, cast and the ultimate ending keep changing.

This is the story of making and selling movies in China, and film producer Megan Gathercole could write the script.

When she tried to come to make a movie here in 1992, a film bureau official denied the American woman a visa. In the same sitting, he pitched her a script idea.

He’s still waiting, but Gathercole finally got her visa and, with it, a notion of China’s ambivalence about foreigners in their film industry: Beijing wants to keep out Hollywood but still be part of it. Regulations abound to protect the national culture, yet officials offered to alter the Great Wall to fit her script. While Chinese cinemas were yanking U.S. films off screens last month in a fit of anti-Americanism, China’s most nationalistic newspaper group quietly offered to be her partner in several film and TV productions.

“There are no rules,” said Gathercole, now in Shanghai about to begin filming her second feature, “Number Eight.” “Just guidelines for negotiations.”

Gathercole, executive producer with Shanghai Tong & Longfeng Film International Ltd., came to film in China because the story she wanted to tell was set here.

Her first film, “Testudo,” is about a Roman mercenary, hired to guard the Great Wall, who succumbed to forbidden love with a Chinese woman. The story was inspired by the discovery of ancient mummies of Western soldiers in the Gobi desert several years ago. Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios was to be the executive producer.

After the initial red tape, once pre-production started, officials were accommodating--in the extreme. They offered to pull down electrical pylons and rebuild portions of the Great Wall to add authenticity to the ancient desert setting. As it happened, problems with Hollywood backers, not Chinese bureaucrats, caused a delay in the film.

Gathercole, an American, compared the bureaucracy of China with the unspoken barriers in Hollywood. “Both are closed circles based on connections,” she said. “When Hollywood comes to China, both sides want to do it their way, and both think they know best.”

But the game is on China’s turf, and American studios are still learning how to play here.

One unwritten but ironclad rule is a de facto quota on foreign films--only 10 or so first-run U.S. films are allowed into China each year in an effort to protect the struggling domestic film studios. Twenty other second-run foreign titles are purchased outright each year for screening. Showing this week in Shanghai: “The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe,” a ‘70s-era French farce.

“Hollywood both helps and hurts the industry in China,” said Zheng Quangang, the head of China Film Co-Production Corp. in Beijing. “The Chinese audience likes almost everything about Hollywood films, and the quality has a positive influence on China’s movie makers. But if China has too many Hollywood films, that can be a threat to us. We have to restrict them to protect and support domestic movies.”

Only six U.S. films will actually be released in China this year, down from seven last year and nine the year before. Part of the reason for the narrowing number is “Titanic,” a giant success in China but a disaster for U.S. studios that want to sell films here.

It grossed about $40 million, or 10 times as much as the most successful Chinese film. As a result, film authorities created four blackout periods when foreign films can not be shown in Chinese theaters--the most lucrative vacation weeks and politically sensitive days such as June 4, the 10th anniversary of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

And then there is the matter of money. After giving 60% of box-office receipts to its Chinese partner, China Film, and paying various taxes, import duties, print and dubbing fees, 20th Century Fox took home only about 12% of the box office--versus about 50% in other countries.

The U.S. film industry has been lobbying for China to open its markets to American studios and theater owners and trying to create competition in the country’s distribution monopoly. On the table now in trade talks is a proposal to increase within five years the number of films allowed annually into China.

“We’re asking for gentle, modest increases,” said Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. “We’re trying to allay any fears that we want to drown them with American films.”

Screening U.S. films is also subject to political whim. In May, after the fatal NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Chinese cinemas yanked “Saving Private Ryan” and “Enemy of the State,” replacing them with Yugoslavian war movies.

They were due to be replaced soon anyway, because the Tiananmen anniversary was coming up.

American filmmakers have also found that movies that displease Beijing, even if they’re not shown in China, mean being frozen out of the market here. Walt Disney Co. and Sony Pictures got the cold shoulder after releasing “Kundun” and “Seven Years in Tibet,” stories about the Dalai Lama that Beijing considered unfair to China. The retaliation even extended to famed Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who was not able to perform in China until this year after contributing to the soundtrack of “Seven Years in Tibet.

Actress-turned-director Joan Chen shot her first film, “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl,” in Tibet without permission from the Chinese government. The result: a $100,000 fine and a one-year ban on working in China.

So with all the restrictions and so little revenue, why bother with China? Until the movie and cinema markets open, the potential audience of 1.3 billion Chinese remains a dream for Hollywood.

“The day when we can participate in China the way we can in say, Europe, is years away,” said one studio executive. “By then, all the sucking up we’re doing now will be a faint memory.”

But in the meantime, more and more large studios are turning to small, local co-productions as a way to learn about the Chinese market. By cooperating with a local studio, foreign companies can avoid the import quota and many of the taxes, raising their share of the take to 30% to 40%.

Take the example of Imar Film Co., a small, independent company based in Beijing that partners with Xian Film Studio. Their first film, “Spicy Love Soup,” outperformed every U.S. import but “Titanic” at the box office last year. And it cost only $350,000 to make.

When the film was eschewed at first by local distributors, Peter Loehr, a 32-year-old New Yorker, flew to 11 cities to personally show it to them. After 40 long, liquor-soaked lunches, he had signed 40 distributors. It turned out to be a hit.

“The problem is this system shouldn’t be totally based on personal connections,” said Loehr, now wrapping up his third film. “The reality is that it is.”

Disney learned the hard way that films are taken personally here, after offending authorities with “Kundun,” a tale about Tibet. Now back in relatively good graces after making an animated version of the Chinese classical folk tale “Mulan,” Disney is preparing a joint film tentatively called “Shanghai Noon,” an historical drama.

Universal Studios last week announced it has started shooting its first joint production with China, a small picture called “The Women’s Pavilion,” starring Willem Dafoe and Chinese actress and producer Yan Luo, about a woman who causes an uproar when she gives her husband a concubine on her 40th birthday and ultimately falls in love with an American missionary (played by Dafoe). The film is set in 1937.

Luo, like all producers in China, had to submit a script to Chinese film authorities before shooting, and must have a rough cut approved by a board of censors before wrapping the film.

Although film regulations prohibit such subjects as homosexuality and extramarital affairs, Luo and other filmmakers have managed to include taboo topics by setting their films before the current government took power in 1949.

After reading the script, the Film Bureau “did have comments and advice, but it didn’t feel like official censorship,” Luo said. “It was more like a friendly discussion, and some of their comments were quite good.”

Luo rewrote one character’s part to make him seem less “depressing.”

At the same time, Universal made their own suggestions, causing changes in the script. “They want to show the reality of China” before it was consumed by war, Luo said. “And they said they love happy endings.”

* OUT OF REACH: Hollywood is fixated on China, but success remains maddeningly out of reach in the world’s most populous nation. A1