Part 5: A Reset in the Making

Setting the stage for the idea that would change everything

Back to the Worst Producer in Shanghai (movie edition, hereafter WPIS)—when last we saw our foolhardy expat production company, I was deep in the muck of trying to rewrite a terrible script, the director was basically an absentee force, the putative child star of the film was at best a reluctant participant who mostly wanted to be left alone to grow up on his own, but the biggest problem was there staring all of us in the face every day: you can’t make a movie without money. 

Basically the avenues that the WPIS had to go down were personal investment, investment from distributors, funding from government, investment from other production companies, grants, and corporate sponsorship. Often independent films are funded via some combination of the above, and the holiness or unholiness of that combination has also often been the stuff of legend. Robert Rodriguez famously filmed El Mariachi for $7,000, and made over $2 million at the global box office, plus later revenue in the form of DVD rentals and sales, TV deals, and the like. Of course those kinds of successes were outliers, rarest of all birds, yet crucial to the sales pitches we would give. While a budget of $7,000 was astronomically low, and could only be achieved by a group of passionate friends who were willing to bend a few rules and call in favors, a reasonable assumption for a decent independent film coming out of China in 2004 or so would’ve been an investment of say $300,000 for a return of about $2 million globally. It wasn’t necessarily likely, but plenty of other films had done it. The logic being something like, oh China is cheaper to produce films, so that $300k is like spending $3 million, and Billy Elliot, another movie about a boy dancing ballet, spent about $5 million to make $100 million, so it’s a good risk. 

Unfortunately the pitch wasn’t super convincing for a number of reasons. First of all, WPIS did not actually realize that film production in China was not actually that much less expensive than anywhere else. Sure you had savings from the lack of unions and labor protections, and certain lower costs, but if your goal was international recognition, you needed quality, and top quality anywhere costs real money. Secondly, the cast. Given the fact that WPIS was not actually trying to score top-tier name recognition from the cast, he thought he could keep the budget under control, but every meeting with anyone always ended up with who’s the cast? And the fact of the matter was that no professional film investment entity, and certainly no commercial sponsor, wanted to take a risk with a film of no-name actors. The biggest names attached at this time were Hou Honglan, the prima ballerina of the National Ballet of China, and Sherwood Hu, the erstwhile director. But neither of them were 100% committed to stumping for the project. Hou Honglan was in an early stage of trying to cement her brand (remember when people were just starting to get on the personal brand tip and trying to diversify it?), especially since the longevity of prima ballerinas was much like that of other top athletes—many retired due to injury before their 30s, and the ones who managed to survive at the top of their game to make it to 40 were few and far between. So from her perspective, if the film happened, great, it’s an opportunity to give herself another career. But if it didn’t, no skin off her highly trained back. 

Sherwood was in a similar situation. Since his acclaimed film Warrior Lanling, he’d mostly been teaching while trying to get his own project, The Lord of Shanghai, off the ground (that film was made, about ten years later, and even got a sequel), so again he was in the position that if WPIS actually got the money together, he’d be happy to take a shot at it and his fee, but he wasn’t particularly passionate about the film. To be fair, basically no one was except WPIS, and he was more passionate about the idea of being a film producer and having a famous son than actually doing the job. 

The third major roadblock was the material itself. Ballet and fashion, so clearly just smushed together, felt random and not logical. Being a puzzle solver myself, I thought of myriad ways to try to explain away the logical dissonance by appealing to the emotional connections within the story—boy misses his mother, the ballet is the connection; ballet dancer misses her father, the fashion is the connection—but it was just unwieldy, hard to explain. And honestly, at most of these meetings, the other side feels that they are not there to help you, you’re there to help them make money, so they will find any gap in your story and shoot you down—which is fair, that’s not just their prerogative but their job. 

WPIS focused mostly on corporate sponsorships and personal investment because he found out early on that any film production or distribution company doing investment would want to do things like have control over the production and keep the accounting, and that was a hard redline for him. At the time I didn’t understand why. He would protest that in filmmaking, the budgets need to be flexible, and yes, that’s true to a degree, but also these were also professional, experienced film industry companies, so I thought, perhaps naively, that they would also bring a level of collaborative understanding to the project, and WPIS certainly was barely more experienced than myself—who at the time was not at all experienced in filmmaking—so more professionals couldn’t be a bad thing, right? 

It was also about this time that WPIS decided that Sherwood wasn’t stumping hard enough for Milk & Fashion. He needed help bringing home the bacon, as it were, and he wanted new blood. WPIS also had a habit of meeting filmmakers at events, talking them into the “just needs one final push over the cliff” readiness of his project, and then getting them temporarily embroiled in the film until they just realized nothing was happening. One of these was a film editor by the name of Cheng Long (if you look him up, start with IMDB, otherwise the internet will probably give you a bunch of Jackie Chan, who has a similar enough name [Chen Long] that it confuses the internet). Cheng Long had edited Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers and would go on to edit Curse of the Golden Flower as well—but at the time he was looking for a project to fit in between the big Zhang Yimou movies. He had a fluid sense of action and was pretty good at his job. He also had ambitions to write and direct his own movie, and so naturally once WPIS decided to move on from Sherwood, he asked Cheng Long if he’d be interested in writing and directing. 

Of course Cheng Long said yes.

So he battened down to work on the script, and I became his sounding board. What I realized quickly is that a lot of his best ideas, he wanted to save for another script he was working on for his first priority—his own project that was a romantic comedy about a woman and man whose parents each ran competing businesses across the street from each other, one a coffee shop and one a teahouse. The endgame of this script was that they would get to their happy ending by inventing the yuanyang beverage, which is a Hong Kong specialty that is basically half coffee and half tea. It may seem like a trite and maudlin concept, but also remember, this is also what people thought would sell to Chinese film distributors at the time—and they weren’t necessarily wrong. Light romantic comedies were all the rage in the industry in 2004, everyone was trying to come up with an idea for one, especially in the wake of 《如果爱》， Perhaps Love, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro ( 金城武), the Taiwan-Japanese heartthrob who was already internationally known for his turns in House of Flying Daggers and more importantly, Wong Kar-Wai’s masterpiece Chungking Express, and Chinese indie film darling Zhou Xun, who was looking to move into more commercial, mainstream films. 

But within a few months, Cheng Long realized what I was also realizing, which was that WPIS had no good avenues to raising the investment for the film, which he had currently pegged at $2 million, USD, based on budget figures that he kept a fairly tight lid on. Cheng Long’s interest flagged the more that WPIS put pressure on him to help raise funds, which he considered to be not his job, which it wasn’t necessarily, but what drove WPIS nuts was the idea, probably true, that Cheng Long didn’t want to blow whatever investment connections he might have on this film. He wanted to save his one chance to get funding for his own film, a choice which made sense to me and I respected, but to WPIS, this was tantamount to betrayal. 

I think it was around this time that WPIS got the idea that he needed another star. He was constantly flitting about the expat scene, meeting people, doing lunches and dinners and drinks, and talking to anyone who would listen–for all of his faults, you could not fault the man’s commitment to hustle. The feedback he kept getting was that no one trusted a unknown producer to produce a film by a first time screenwriter and first time director with first time actors, none of who had any kind of track record for drawing attention whatsoever, especially not for a film that had not one cultural focus but two: ballet and fashion design. 

In the next segment, I’ll go through my memory and experience of the idea that spurred several changes in the whole situation and started accelerating the project to a new level. We found a star, which spurred investment, a new director, and the first attempt at starting production.