Part Six: Show Me that Smile Again

Don't Waste Another Minute on your Crying

When last I wrote, I hinted that changes were coming in the world of the Worst Producer in Shanghai. Before I get into it, let me recap really quickly:

In early 2004 I went Shanghai on a temporary research trip, was super depressed and more or less spiraling out, but then met a beautiful, intelligent, strong-willed Chinese woman and decided to stay in China to try and see if that relationship had legs. I needed to get a job, so I answered a classified ad for a bilingual production assistant for an independent film, which turned out to be a project run by the Worst Producer in Shanghai (hereafter WPIS), who may or may not have been aware that his vanity project, ostensibly aimed at making a star out of his reluctant early teenage son, was pretty much dead in the water. It had a bad script, a bunch of unknowns in the cast and at director and producer, and dwindling prospects at ever attaining its presumed production budget of RMB 2 million (at the time, about USD $300k). 

And that’s when The Idea happened. To tell you the truth I don’t exactly remember who had the idea or how it came about. This might be entirely wrong but my recollection is that one day WPIS came back to the office from one of his long lunches at Element Fresh or some other expat hangout where he was “taking meetings” with “important industry figures,” where he was shocked to find out, in conversation, that Shanghainese people of 2004 loved the American 80s sitcom Growing Pains.

If you’re of a certain age, you remember Growing Pains (1985-1992), the competing suburban white family sitcom which aired on ABC to the slightly earlier Family Ties (NBC, 1982-1989), both of which were immensely popular in the US and were highly influential in different ways. Family Ties came first, the story of former hippies who had settled down, gotten married and “real jobs,”  and now had teenage kids: Michael J. Fox’s Reaganite Young Republican get-rich-quick schemer Alex P. Keaton, Justine Bateman’s ditzy fashion maven Mallory, and Tina Yothers’ tomboy centrist youngest sister Jennifer. By comparison, Growing Pains had a less clearly defined character set, perhaps a little bit more generically modeled, but still with two working parents, an older fun-loving heartthrob son Mike, played by Kirk Cameron (now famous more for his born-again Christian beliefs), the straight-laced brainy honors student Carol played by Tracey Gold, and the cute younger brother who looks up to his older brother, Ben, played by Jeremy Miller. 

As a kid, I was more of a fan of Family Ties than Growing Pains, to me the biggest difference besides the stronger premise and themes was the star power of Michael J. Fox. At the same time that his character humorously represented a kind of person I didn’t necessarily find appealing, the performances always came with nuance and understanding, and a sense that at heart, Alex Keaton was a good kid with good morals. I still remember the award winning episode “A, My Name is Alex,” an acting tour-de-force for Michael J. Fox, in which he portrays Alex suffering survivor’s guilt after the accidental death of a close friend. 

I did watch Growing Pains as well, back then the monoculture was powerful, and everyone really did watch a lot of the same shows at the same times, regular appointment television. Although to be fair, I barely remembered that Leonardo Di Caprio actually was a recurring member of the cast in the final season, in a last ditch effort to revive flagging ratings and interest (the show had already added a new kid a season or two before). It wasn’t my favorite, and also because it came on a little later, by the time the show ended I was already in college and wasn’t watching as much television as it wasn’t that convenient back then. I didn’t have a TV, and just didn’t bother to figure out with communal dorm TV was playing what on any given night—I had books to read and homework to do and guitars to play.

But when WPIS mentioned that he had met some Chinese people who knew Growing Pains, it reminded me that when I was first in Shanghai in 1996 as teacher at the Sydney Institute of Language and Commerce (SILC) at Shanghai University (then in Zhabei District on Yancheng Rd, shout out to the alleyway restaurant where we foreign teachers ate a lot of our meals, big or small wontons washed down with glass-bottled Mirinda orange soda) , we would occasionally watch Shanghai’s English language television station, where they had syndicated Growing Pains as 《成长的烦恼》, and so it turned out that now, ten years later, people still remembered the show. For many people, it was the show they watched back in the day to learn English (by 2004 that show was Friends, and ten years later, that show was Big Bang Theory. I have no idea what is it now). 

So as I remember it, I told WPIS that this made sense to me, I had personal experience that led me to believe that Shanghainese would remember Growing Pains and its cast very fondly. During this time, the Boston Red Sox were also making their run towards redemption for yes, 86 years of championshipless frustration, but more specifically for the heartbreaking Game 7 loss in 2003’s ALCS to the hated Mother Fucking Yankees, as a message board I frequented would refer to them—MFY. I know what you’re thinking, Mo, you have an incredible ability to bring Boston sports into anything, don’t you. In fact, I do. 

What people may not remember when they talk about Moneyball these days is that Oakland GM Billy Beane’s basic insights were based on the insights of people like stats guru Bill James, who by the early 2000s worked for the Boston Red Sox. The new at the time ownership group led by John Henry, Tom Werner, et al. were big believers in the concept of finding under-regarded assets in the marketplace and being able to exploit those gaps to field teams that would perform better that their price tag. Except unlike the Oakland A’s, a team that was struggling to fill seats so much that I spent a lot of 2002 and 2003 going to Dollar Wednesday games because I couldn’t afford to go to a lot of SF Giants games, the Boston Red Sox were a top tier budget team that could also afford to pay and retain top talent like Pedro, Nomar, Manny, Johnny Damon, and go get proven warriors to fill needs like Curt Schilling (thanks for the World Series wins, don’t let the door hit you on your government money scamming, business fraudulent, morally horrifying ass on your way out) and clutch hero Bill Mueller. When the Red Sox didn’t convince Billy Beane to be their GM as in the movie, they hired wunderkind Theo Epstein, gorilla suit and Pearl Jam enthusiast, to be their younger, cheaper, less proven but possibly more energetic version of Billy Beane, along with the stats teams and scouting to back it all up. And the Red Sox won the World Series for the first but not last time in 2004, just two years later, beating the hated MFY by being the first MLB team to ever come back from 0-3 down in a a seven game series. 

Now besides the obvious gloating that I’m doing, which has possibly alienated a good portion of the potential audience for this series, there is an actual point, which is that I was already primed to thinking about things in terms of finding market inefficiencies and exploiting them, which is exactly what was needed for an independent film project that had no money. WPIS had certain weird needs for this film project, even though I believed that this project could and should be made easily for much less money than he budgeted for, he said he needed to get new investment of RMB 2m. So I suggested that we exploit the market inefficiency and get one or more of the kids from Growing Pains to be in the movie. They might not be the biggest draw in Hollywood or even in Europe, but they would hold a unique attraction in Shanghai, and potentially for the greater Chinese market. 

You hear how ludicrous it sounds, but also, how it could theoretically work? It would need research to back it up, none of which was really done, outside of casual asking around of people in bars, Starbucks, on the street—hey do you know Growing Pains? In Shanghai, the answer was often yes, and especially so for anyone who was an English student. At the time, WPIS was desperate, and that desperation seeped into everyone else in the office. We knew that despite the fact that the first character anyone in Shanghai remembered was Mike Seaver, Kirk Cameron’s character, that he would be unlikely to want to be in a rom com in China, and also that Chinese censorship might have some wee problems with his evangelical fundamentalist Christian faith. We discussed Tracey Gold also but one recurring comment caught everyone’s attention. 

“Oh yes, Ben, he’s so cute.” Ben, the youngest son, played by Jeremy Miller, was the second-most remembered character in our informal focus group research. And Jeremy’s contact information was readily available on IMDB Pro. 

You know what the crazy thing was? As soon as WPIS started pitching people with the Jeremy Miller angle, he started getting smiles. He’d go into a pitch meeting at some company, or meet a new prospective investor, and he’d ask any random younger Chinese person around if they knew who Ben was. And they always did. And they always smiled.

Look out for the next part, coming soon, in which Jeremy Miller’s agent flips out, WPIS arranges some investment, and yet another new director joins the team. Bonus Gavin Newsom content!