Diary of a Mad Old Me
Part 2: Got Milk?
NB: After some consideration and consultation, I’ve decided to anonymize some of the names of people and their related companies in this account. I recognize that anyone who’s not even particularly motivated will be able to figure out the people involved, but I guess that’s an occupational hazard for writing memoir.
NB2: The positive response I’ve already gotten from the initial posting has been really nice, thank all of you for it; I hope that as this goes on, those of you who were there will help fill in blanks or correct my memory if it went astray. Or maybe even say things I can’t. And add more perspectives on that time, which really was nuts in a lot of ways.
NB3: I have looked really hard and I don’t have photos until starting in like 2007 or so so you all are going to have to endure a few years worth of recounting before I get to including my own photos about things. For now I’m trying to get a few borrowed photos with attribution off ye olde internette.
And now, the story continues….
Part 2: Got Milk?
I had less than 10,000 kuai in my bank account, no place to live, no more career; I had blown up my entire life in the space of just a few months. I needed a job.
Back in 2004, wifi wasn’t ubiquitous, it barely existed, and definitely was nowhere to be found in Shanghai. The Nokia 3310 was still a cool cell phone to have. There were internet job boards, but the China ones for Chinese people weren’t going to be of any use to me. So, I did the only thing I knew; I went to the classified ads in the newspapers and English magazines.
One thing I’ve known about myself for a long time, ever since I once tried to be a door-to-door discount perfume salesman in the months after high school—if I don’t want to do something, I just won’t. The only reason I stayed in that job for two days was that I also hate failing, so I wanted to prove that I could make a sale. Once I made one sale, I was gone, much to the happiness of the Filipino kid who was my assigned road partner. He knew I wouldn’t last, and he was much more motivated to make his paper than I ever would be.
Even back then, the classified ads were already not a great way to find jobs, but one listing caught my eye. “Seeking bilingual production assistant for independent film.” That ticked a number of boxes for me. After almost a decade in graduate school, working in academia, and developing that career path, I honestly just wanted to make things rather than critically evaluate them. I had gotten adept at deploying the academically popular language of all the post-s, postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, etc. and had come to the conclusion that the scholarly career I had envisioned just wasn’t likely to be the career I wanted. What I wanted was to be creative, to get down to the gritty details and get my hands dirty.
So I answered the ad. What I didn’t know what that not only would answering that ad completely change my career path, it would also put me smack dab in the center of a strange drama that I wanted no part of.
I had an appointment to meet the film’s producer at the China Film Scam ( name changed, heretofore CFS) offices in the Novel Building, an office complex that was in the same building as a mall at the corner of Huaihai Zhong Lu and Maoming Nan Lu, right in the heart of Shanghai’s shopping district, and right on top of a Line 1 metro station. I had no idea what to expect, really. I’d never been in a film studio, or a production company, or involved in any way with film or television before. The most relevant work I’d done up to that point was some stage work, most recently with Emerald Rain Productions for the second run of their show Young Zombies in Love, written by my college roommate Damian Hess (more commonly recognized as the 579th Greatest Rapper or the Godfather of Nerdcore Hiphop: MC Frontalot), and music directed by his high school buddy, my former bandmate Gaby Alter (whose music you can check out under his moniker Yes Gabriel). And on that production, I was the pit guitarist, not a director or producer or anything. But I was ready to do something different, and was ready to start at the bottom.
The office itself was an ex-bank office, with the public-facing long countertop and a little gate to get to the back. The walls were mostly bare but for a few cheap movie posters. It was pretty nondescript, just typical office furniture, a couple of computers and not much else. There weren’t even any people really, just one young Chinese woman, still in university (her English name changed several times but I remember her as Fiona), and a fairly round, stocky man in the back. This was the Worst Producer in Shanghai (heretofore WP).
I sat down in his office, where he gave me a copy of a book, Scotty’s Goal, and he explained to me his situation. He was trying to make two independent films, for which he had gotten some financing already. One was based on the book, and another was a new idea called Milk and Fashion (I considered changing the name here, but honestly, a) you will all figure it out anyway and b) after a lot of thought only the actual name conveys the full wtf-ness), which in the Shanghai expat film community today is a mythical horror. WP pitched Milk and Fashion to me. It was a movie that would attempt to ride the coattails of Billy Eliot, featuring a pre-teen boy who loved dancing. In this case, the boy would dance ballet, despite the desires of his friends and family. And his best friend would be an older Chinese former prima ballerina who, due to an injury, could not dance professionally anymore, instead teaching ballet. The trick of it was, she really wanted to be a fashion designer, so in the end these two dreamers would band together to help fulfill both of their dreams. He was Milk. She was Fashion.
It was awful.
But when WP asked me what I thought, I said that maybe it could work. I was desperate for a job. And WP was desperate too. He was willing to give me an associate producer credit, and a better credit too if I could bring in money. I was certainly happy with that arrangement; at least I would have some modest income until I could find something better.
People have often asked me, and many others who were involved with the Milk and Fashion debacle, why they got involved in it at all. I think most of us have similar answers which usually fall into two categories. The first answer is, I was young/inexperienced; I needed a job—a sort of excuse based on need, because everyone has been in the situation where you need a job and want to get a start in a new industry. People like WP took advantage of that combination of youth, naiveté, and hunger to get talented newcomers on board, which made them look better.
The second answer is much more cynical. In a world where guys like Harvey Weinstein and a whole host of others were the most successful movie producers, there was a pervasive acceptance of a certain concept of the sleazy movie producers. Jay didn’t seem like someone who knew what he was doing, but that didn’t faze most people, because lots of people in independent film didn’t know what they were doing. While most of the actual filmmakers were people with a passion for creativity, they also primarily weren’t that fussed about where the money came from—often they didn’t even want to know. The fact is that the money and investment side of independent filming is a morally murky world to begin with, and most filmmakers were used to working with shady people, up to a point. WP didn’t necessarily seem any more shady than any number of other wannabes. And then there’s the fact that you never really know which movies are going to be successful. Sometimes the project you worked on that you thought was a total dog had some breakout performance in it, or some element that just somehow managed to hit at the right time in a perfect tsunami. It was some combination of these thought processes that kept WP able to associate himself with talented filmmakers in Shanghai, which he needed to keep his viability with potential investors.
WP hired me on the spot and took me to lunch, where I met the scriptwriter for Milk & Fashion, an affable, tall, paunchy fellow, who we’ll call The Enabler. The Enabler was a friendly guy who didn’t seem to take much seriously, and was content to sort of float through life. He had a previous credit though, as a writer on Luo Yan’s film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s novel, Pavilion of Women, starring Willem Dafoe with Luo Yan, and a young John Cho. I’d never heard of the film even though it had come out just a couple years prior; it was only years later when I looked up Pavilion of Women that I discovered it had a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
WP and The Enabler were like a demented version of the Blues Brothers, at least they seemed to feel that way about themselves. For all the time that WP would spend trying to put together investment proposals and materials, he refused to rely on Powerpoints as much as he believed in his ability to talk. And while he could talk a lot, over time everything he was saying would come undone, because he basically did not understand the story, did not understand the film industry, and essentially thought of the Chinese as rubes that he could convince to invest in him just by virtue of being a foreign man.
The story WP told about himself was inconsistent, as it would depend on the audience and how he was trying to impress them. The general outline of the story he told me that lunchtime went something like this:
He was from Baltimore, and would often comment about the size and meatiness of Baltimore’s ocean crabs in comparison to the Shanghai taste for the sweet, green and gold hairy crabs from Yangcheng Lake. In a sense, this was the perfect metaphor for how he thought: quantity over quality. WP claimed to be an international lawyer, having practiced in San Francisco for several years, he eventually started doing legal consulting work for companies trying to open branches in China. He had a son, heretofore Son, who had been learning Mandarin Chinese in school in San Francisco and studying ballet. He was divorced from Son’s mother, and somehow he had custody of Son as well as an adopted Romanian girl. The three of them lived in a Luwan District apartment not far from the office.
Ostensibly his business consultancy was successful, and he plastered photos of himself with different famous people over his office as bona fides, in lieu of awards or certificates of achievement. His favorite was a photo with Bill Clinton at some Shanghai American Chamber of Commerce event. To be fair, it wasn’t so much a photo with Bill Clinton as a photo in which Bill Clinton appeared; WP was a world class photo bomber before the term had even begun to think about entering our global consciousness. He also had a photo with the then-mayor of Shanghai that he would often point to when meeting new potential clients/investors. WP was not at all subtle in his quest for trustworthiness by association.
As soon as I started working in WP’s office, I realized that his pitch packet was woefully underwritten. WP was consumed with the idea that the Chinese would go bonkers for the idea of a white kid speaking “perfect Chinese” and dancing ballet. As a result, the entire presentation was designed around that element. How did he get this idea? And how would he cast it? Good questions. The movie was a vehicle for his son, who apparently learned Chinese from an early age, and also studied ballet. Now it started to make sense. Son’s picture and information were all over the pitch packet—you might not know what the movie was about, but you sure knew Son was in it. There were a few other people listed in the packet, such as Hou Honglan, a lauded soloist in the Chinese National Ballet and director Sherwood Hu, whose major splash had been the 1995 martial arts film Warrior Lanling. That was all there was: a title, two lead cast, and a director.
Within a couple of days, we had a couple of meetings with potential investors that Jay had found from his endless attendance at networking events in Shanghai. But the feedback was always the same. While people didn’t want to reject the story out of hand, they wanted to know what the projected revenue for the movie would be. Jay would start to press. Perhaps he thought he was doing a good job of talking people into his point of view, but as far as I could tell, he would say nothing with a lot of words, and no one was falling for it.
So I started doing comparative research into other independent films with similar premises in order to generate ROI projections, basically our best guesses into the potential return on investment from the film. Because investing in filmmaking, especially independent filmmaking, is an inexact science, a lot of the projections are based on how similar films performed in the marketplace. But, you might ask, what makes one movie similar to another in the marketplace?
The arcane formulations are a witches brew of how much money was made by movies of a similar budget, with a similar level of director, at a similar point in their career, with similar actors, with a similar key elements of the storyline, in a similar genre, at a similar budget point, with similar co-stars—if this ends up sounding like too many disparate ingredients to actually create a predictive formula, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Comparative ROI projections can be nothing more than a best guess to worst, middle, and best case scenarios because every film happens in a unique set of circumstances. And that’s before you even get to the mathematics of distribution and marketing. A wise friend once explained to me that for independent film marketing, if you don’t spend $35 million to market nationally, you’re better off spending the money on targeted online niche marketing, because anything less won’t move the needle enough to make it worthwhile. That is, if you only have $5 million to spend on marketing, most of the time the same number of people will see your movie as if you spent nothing on marketing, and definitely not enough to make it worth it.
The good thing about doing these projections is that they do help you make some basic decisions. If the best you can do is Billy Elliot, then you are in some pretty good company, a small indie feel-good film about a boy who overcomes the forces keeping him from his dream of dancing that made 20 times its budget. The worst case scenario is of course that the film never sees distribution, but you would never put that in an ROI projection. Since there weren’t that many other films about kids dancing, we put in Sherwood Hu’s movie, which didn’t really make much money, but got some international exposure and even an award or two. It was good enough to get Sherwood Hu a teaching position at the Shanghai Theater Academy, where he was able to make a living while trying to get his next movie made.
As the pitch packet started to improve, I turned my attention to the script. I needed to find something compelling in the story to make the pitch stronger. I had no illusions that it would ever be really good, but it was my job to try.
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Look out for part 3, where you learn more about what was famously the worst expat movie ever made in Shanghai.