2004 was a pretty good year for Chinese movies. Fresh off the international success of his aesthetically pleasing but weird First Emperor of China apologist film Hero, Zhang Yimou released his second big blockbuster, House of Flying Daggers, starring Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro, and the redoubtable Andy Lau (Zhang Yimou’s career is always a fascinating topic of discussion, but for another time I suppose). Stephen Chow hit hard with his masterpiece, Kung Fu Hustle, filmed primarily at Shanghai Film Studios, a frenetic blend of martial arts, Buddhism, gangster films, and Looney Tunes that brought Baozhupo, the Landlady, to the global culture. Wong Kar-Wai premiered 2046, another epic masterpiece. But Chinese film wasn’t just these huge internationally distributed movies.
Films like Shower, Blind Shaft, Green Tea, Waiting Alone–there were a ton of independently produced, smaller films being made in China, some really for the domestic market, and some for the international market. It was in this environment that I came into the scene, one that felt like, a couple years into China entering the WTO, rife with possibility and hope, one where boundaries could start usefully getting pushed. Big Hollywood productions were filtering in as well, like MI:3 and Ultraviolet, and a lot of commercials. A few expats were well-positioned to take advantage of the influx of foreign productions, like Michael McDermott, whose company Gung Ho Films provided production services to a lot of these movies and TVCs, and Aaron Shershow, a line producer with excellent Chinese who became the go-to guy for almost all of the big international productions. There were also a group of Chinese production coordinators and other production crew types who ended on pretty much every international production–Lanny Dong, Miranda Zhuang, for example–as well as expats, some who were bilingual like Vicky Hung, but many who really didn’t speak much Chinese at all.
While there were plenty of expats in Shanghai who were there as real specialists in film and television, there were also just a lot of people who were more dreamers than doers. The running joke in the expat world was that many of the people running around in the scene were in Shanghai because they couldn’t make it wherever they came from, usually the US, but plenty from other places. The Worst Producer in Shanghai was one of these people, but there were many others, and always new faces coming in all the time. Like most expat scenes, Shanghai’s expat film scene was extremely transitory. Most of the people who stuck around for a long time did actually have some talent and some success. I’m thinking for example of people like Norm Wong and his business partner Eric Ransdell, who started out not really having that much experience but ended up building a production company that has done some really great work and still produces excellent commercial work today. Or Los Pensivos Films, which produced several internationally acclaimed documentaries. Later on in this, let’s call it a memoir, we’ll meet more people who were actually good and went on to become successes in film.
But the real successes were few and relatively speaking far between–mostly it was outfits like Mei Wenti Productions or Lemontree Productions, which were better at talking up game than they were at actually getting hired for good projects and producing good work. A lot of the problems were related to the usual set of expat attitude problems, mostly fairly problematic colonialist racist attitudes that were lightly painted over with a thin coat of assumed worldliness. One fellow, an Eastern European-American, used to claim that he was “bringing Hollywood quality to Shanghai,” which was a sort of funny claim for a middle-aged guy whose claim to fame was one student short film. This same fellow presented himself as a wise, seasoned filmmaker who was a mentor to the younger or less experienced wannabe filmmakers in Shanghai but rarely actually had real projects. No one seemed to want to invest in his kung fu action films starring himself as a white guy who really showed those Asians how it was done, nor were ad agencies beating down his door to have him “Hollywood up” their productions. These guys thought that Chinese people somehow couldn’t tell the difference. They were the type of people who thought that Chinese people saying “oh your Chinese is so good” meant that their Chinese was good, rather than just something polite you say to foreigners.
And yet that guy managed to stay in Shanghai for well over a decade, with his main claims to fame being that he managed to get hired as an extra for some Chinese film productions. You can see him for about half a second in the Jet Li film Fearless, in a shot where he gets taken away by the police for being a drunken foreigner, no face, no lines, no action. For years afterward he would talk about the time he “collaborated on a film with Jet Li.”
These were gentleman losers who weren’t particularly gentlemen. These were the people that WP mostly hung out with, yet who he also insulted mightily, behind their backs. He knew they were posers, wannabes, and he wanted to be so much more. He had a certain kind of audacity and shamelessness that got him closer than any of them to the thing they all desired, and that gave him a certain cachet even as all of them sniped at each from the safety of different expat bars.
The main strip of expat bars at that time was still a couple of blocks on Maoming Nan Lu, by Fuxing Zhong Lu, and that was one of the phrases most expats could reliably spit out. “Shifu, wo qu Maoming Lu, Fuxing Lu”—the battle cry of the expat man on the prowl. 30 some little bars stuffed into a block, streets covered in a sprawl of foreigners drunk on cheap beer and watery cocktails, some locals, street food vendors, money changers, a few enterprising hash dealers. I don’t know that anyone has done an oral history of the changing Shanghai expat bar streets/scenes, but someone should, from when it was more scattered between Malone’s and Shanghai Sally’s, then DD’s and YY’s to the infamous Julu Lu strip, Hengshan Rd, Maoming Lu, Tongren Lu, Yongkang Lu, and a few other ones sprinkled in between. These bar streets usually sprung up one at a time as major destinations, unlike places like Xintiandi that were purpose-built by developers. The charm of the bar streets lay in their Wild West feel.
The crown jewels of the block were dkd and Judy’s Too. dkd (“dance kills depression”) was one of the leaders in bringing electronic dance music to Shanghai and indeed China—less than a decade later that music would sweep the underground and become a dominant trend. Judy’s Too was the second iteration of the infamous Judy’s bar/nightclub that provided temporary companionship for the (usually middle-aged) expat male, usually of the Filipina variety, but with some Chinese women from the villages around Shanghai or nearby provinces. Judy’s would eventually move to Tongren Lu, at that point I think the 4th major move of the “expat bar street” that I was aware of in Shanghai. That was right before the government, claiming to act on noise complaints from neighbors, but in all probability more looking to crack down on what they termed “spiritual pollution,” shut the entire street down one day. When Maoming reopened, it was but a shell of its former self.
One of the other expat groups that attracted membership and attention was Meiwenti Films, an erstwhile film production company that didn’t particularly generate a lot of business for itself, as far as I could tell, and just some small ads and corporate videos, but what they did contribute was creating a hub for a community of interested expats and internationally-minded Chinese for independent film. Think of it as a film club of aspiring filmmakers, ranging from pros to hobbyists, to fans, who also involved themselves in practical filmmaking, especially with the advent of digital technologies that promised to “democratize” filmmaking.
As an aside, I have some small issues with this term, because I don’t know how much good the so-called democratization of filmmaking,or music-making, or whatever artistic production has done. Or rather, I think that the dissemination of the ability to produce higher quality images and video, digital special effects, audio, and all of that is great, but it has been, in my opinion, come with the attitude that all artistic production is worthy and good because self-expression is a paramount virtue, and I simply don’t think that’s true. On the one hand, yes, everyone should be able to express themselves any way they want to, and it’s all part of everyone’s individual journey. On the other hand, for every person who naturally has great feel for the kinds of films they want to make, there’s also like a hundred people who not only don’t really have great ideas or concepts, and limited awareness of how to execute it, they also think their stuff is amazing. And especially in a small community, if you’re the person crapping in the punchbowl as it were, it’s not always a desireable position to be in, so you keep your mouth shut, but the egoists are always loud. So, much like the American social media “news” environment, democratization so-called of the process doesn’t often lead to great results. At the same time, that’s one of the fundamental problems of our age of information technology, content curation/moderation. It’s not like the previous systems of cinema or music curation were necessarily better in every case either, they were built to repress certain types of voices just as much, but the new technology promises so much more than it can deliver that you can’t help but notice.
Anyway, MWP ran regular short film festivals, which drove film lovers to actually produce things, which, honestly, good or bad artistically, it still is always good to make things, and you can’t get better at doing things unless you do them, so I applaud them for that.
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An announcement: to try to keep myself publishing and on track, I’m going to change up the format a little bit. Originally I intended this memoir to publish once every couple of weeks and make each entry a few pages long, to make it worth it, but basically what I discovered is that I have too many pokers in the fire to write and edit and fact check, as far as that goes, and all that, and probably some of it is not that interesting. I have a list of events/topics that I mean to get through, and instead of waiting until I have things written up properly in some kind of linear temporal sequences, I’m just gonna write what I write and put it out there, to force myself into a cadence. I appreciate your forbearance and understanding.