Part 3

Early Days in the Novel Building

When I wrote earlier that the script was awful, I was being kind. I felt bad, because The Enabler had written the script, and he personified affability.  But when I read the script, I felt it was very superficial and the story didn’t really know what it wanted to be. It went more or less like this: 

A boy loses his beloved ballerina mother at a young age. As a result, his well-meaning professorial father will not allow him to dance ballet, because he is afraid it will hurt the boy psychologically, even though dancing ballet is all the boy actually wants to do. As the single father has a job teaching at a Chinese university, he and his son have moved to China, and so the boy has grown up speaking Mandarin Chinese. At school, the boy is observed dancing out his frustrations, Footloose-esque, by a teacher who used to be a prima ballerina but has been forced to retire due to injury. However, although she teaches dance, what she really wants is to be a fashion designer. Because he’s white, he takes on the nickname “Milk” and her dreams give her the nickname “Fashion.” In the end she manages to pull off a fabulous fashion show of her own original designs, modeled by Milk and his ballet class friends, who incorporate ballet dancing into the show. Everyone wins. 

I told you it was a mess. 

Recognizing it was a mess was a first step, but then when I went to Worst Producer in Shanghai (WP) with a laundry list of issues and notes about the script, most of the major ideas got shot down. Milk & Fashion had to be kept because he claimed to be close to deals with a dairy company. At the time Yili and Mengniu were the two largest dairy companies in China, and Mengniu had just done some major film sponsorships with Feng Xiaogang’s latest hesuipian, the new tradition of the Spring Festival movie, A World Without Thieves, so WP was banking on Yili wanting to make corresponding moves into the film sector. Additionally, he spent a lot of time setting meetings with big foreign fashion brands, from luxury brands like Louis Vuitton to the more pedestrian Ports. “Milk” and “Fashion” were going nowhere. 

I had a script meeting with Sherwood in which I tried to pitch some of my ideas that would flesh out the stories of the surrounding characters, reducing the father character that WP would “not-joke” about playing himself, and trying to find logic in the story of the boy himself. Sherwood, who was a well-known professor at the Shanghai Theater Academy whose last film, Warrior Lanling, was received reasonably well, insisted that the core of the story was about a boy longing for his mother. He was right about that, but I knew that there were limitations clearly present. The main limitations were that Son wasn’t a very good actor, a mediocre ballet dancer, and his Chinese wasn’t particularly outstanding–he could communicate but it wasn’t like he had startlingly good pronunciation or command of the language for his age. 

This is not intended to be a knock on Son, who was a great kid put into a very difficult position. On the one hand he really wanted to please his dad, who was a huge figure in his life, and he seemed mostly to just have his dad and his Romanian adopted sister, who was a few years younger. On the other hand, he was already starting to enter his teens, no longer the very young boy that Jay had originally envisioned the film starring when he began the project a couple years earlier, and as a result, the tone of the film needed to change, I felt. The kid who is cute at 10 isn’t necessarily able to carry that off at 14. For Son, that awkward age was compounded with growing up in a bubble with his family in China, where WP kept him in private international schools, and the pressure of knowing his dad wanted him to be in this film. 

I spoke to Son several times, trying to get a feel for his personality. It was tough. He was a good kid but somewhat shy, feeling that he had to do things because he was told to. Although I’m sure he would’ve enjoyed being a star, he was not actually ambitious in that direction. He just wanted to be a regular kid. Not only that, but even though WP was steeping in the belief that the movie would get funded and be in production any day now, Son didn’t seem particularly engaged with any of the three things the movie would theoretically hinge on: his ability to speak Chinese, his ballet dancing, and his acting ability. It didn’t seem to me that he took any of those particularly seriously, preferring instead to spend his time playing basketball or baseball. 

I had very real doubts that Son would really be able to carry the film. I brought up my concerns to Enabler, who had the office next to WP’s at China Venture Films. Enabler understood my concerns and shared that he agreed with them. But we both knew WP was not of a mind to hear that his beloved son might not be an international superstar actor without, shall we say, a lot of help. 

From the moment I walked in the door, there was always pressure to get everything together. Pressure to finish the script, pressure to lock cast, pressure to budget the film, pressure to do everything–but the main pressure was getting the movie funded. Although the offices were for WP’s China business consulting firm, there didn’t seem to be a bustling clientele demanding his time. He seemed to have just a couple of clients on projects that were not demanding. No, it was quiet and empty most days, with just WP, myself, Enabler when he felt like it, and a revolving door of Chinese assistants, usually young women fresh out of university looking for their first job. The assistants had it probably the worst, because they didn’t seem to have much to do in terms of getting real world international business experience, rather they were personal assistants for WP and his kids. 

You might remember I mentioned a book in the last post, Scotty’s Dream, which he had commissioned from a writer or three just a few years prior. It turned out that Scotty’s Dream was actually the first film project, one with a strikingly similar story to Milk and Fashion, without the fashion complications, and involving more soccer. WP was oddly cagey about that whole project, and in what should have been a dead giveaway, would always say that we had to get funding for M&F and finish the film in order to get the committed funding for Scotty’s Dream. He would say he had a committed investor who believed in the film but needed him to make a smaller film first to show that he could do it, as he had not made a film before. This was just another of the things that he would say that should have gotten him, if not laughed out of town, looked at with extreme skepticism. 

All I knew was that I needed work while I figured out my life. I had no savings, I had nothing. My life back in San Francisco was over–I had asked my former roomates to help divide up and store or get rid of my stuff (Stanford students who rifled through all my books before some of them were saved by a grad student friend, who shipped them to my mother, you’re welcome). I needed rent money. I needed a break. And so I decided I would make the most of the opportunity until something else came along. Honestly, I have never been very good at the hustle. I’m good at doing things–if I have a specific project to do, I will get it in my teeth and not let go, I can get slightly obsessed with it. But the hustle–networking, small talk, backslapping and working your way up a social food chain until you get yourself ensconced with the power players? Not my thing, never has been. 

One summer in high school I answered a classified ad in the local paper for a job, which turned out to be going door to door at different businesses selling knockoff perfumes. I lasted a day. First of all because I was bad at it. A little shy, cold calling or talking to strangers has never been my forte, especially when they’re already aware that you’re selling and don’t want to be bothered. My inner sense of politeness doesn’t even want to disturb them because I know it’s an intrusion that would annoy me. Couldn’t do it. We were in a buddy system and my Filipino buddy just thought I was sales cancer–he was 100% right. 

Over time, I did get better at talking to people in meetings and such, but mostly what I was good for in the early days was being a respectably arty looking Chinese face with a good educational background standing next to WP. I’m sad to say that there’s a pretty good chance that if I had left as soon as I felt the job wasn’t that great, a lot of what followed might never have happened. 

Over the next couple of months I redid the pitch deck, met various potential corporate sponsors with WP, and started to meet others in the expat indie film scene in Shanghai. In the next part, I’ll introduce you to some of the people who were around at the time. In context of that whole scene, WP didn’t even seem THAT crazy.