Part VII: Chickens and Eggs

In which nothing really ever comes first

Hey everyone, I know it’s been a while. In between the last entry in this series and now, I haven’t been entirely idle, but I’ve been more busy in the world of music production as an outlet rather than writing. If you’d like to hear what I’ve been up to, check out my first solo album here. 

If you liked that and want to hear other things, or if you hated that and want to hear music that’s completely different, check out my linktree, where you’ll find a veritable smorgasbord of different styles of music that I write and perform, amongst other oddball things like my weird short film and another less weird and far more critically acclaimed short film. 

Beyond that I have really no good excuses for not being more regular with entries, beyond the general malaise of our times, a total computer failure that required me to get a new computer and spend a bunch of money recovering the old one, and a few trips to national parks. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading a draft of a novel that a friend wrote and it’s really good! I hope that he manages to find a publisher for it, a quirky noir-esque thriller that is very Asian-American. Anyway reading that energized me some to come back to writing this, amongst other projects I’ve let go a little bit, so if you’re ready, here comes another entry in the story of the Worst Producer in Shanghai:

Last time we visited this world,  the Worst Producer in Shanghai had, after many months of financial inertia, finally found a talking point that seemed to get his foot in the door. The serendipitous weird history of American sitcoms on local Shanghai television stations meant that the 80s-90s family show Growing Pains had been a bit of a hit, dubbed into Chinese. As a result, many younger Shanghainese, especially those with an interest in international content and English learners, knew Growing Pains very well. They were especially fans of the kids in the show. Their preferences followed seniority with Mike Seaver the favorite, Carol the second, and the long-time youngest son, Ben, rounding out the group. Even more famous was naturally the short appearance of a very young Leonardo DiCaprio, long before any jokes about the expiration dates on his girlfriends, let alone even becoming the heartthrob of Romeo + Juliet and Titanic. 

Now I can’t say that this was entirely my doing, but my vague recollection is that way back in 1996, when I taught English at the Sydney Institute of Language and Commerce (SILC) Shanghai University (shout out to our 大姐, who ran a little hole in the wall restaurant that we foreign teachers inventively referred to as the “Hole-in-the-Wall”. We went there for a lot of lunches and dinners instead of the university cafeteria, where the food was generally a lot less interesting. In my memory the building they were in looked like it was ripe to be demolished and rebuilt fairly soon, a lot of white tile, painted concrete, no air conditioning, just street noodles, wontons (Shanghainese generally prefer “small wontons” but Big Sister had “large wontons” too), and fried rice. We’d wash these doughty repasts down with glass bottles of warm 7-Up or Mirinda orange soda–it was a Pepsi joint so most of us East Coast snobs wouldn’t usually choose it–or those big bottles of beer if it was afterschool hours), we’d spend evenings trying to tune our TVs to get signal if we weren’t playing ping pong in the international students dorm where they quartered us, or just wandering the streets. I remembered one day one of us discovering Chinese-dubbed Growing Pains on the TV, I think it might have been Jerry, who later went on to become a pastor in maybe South Carolina? who clued the rest of us onto the broadcast. 

I do recall that it was in Jerry’s room that we watched the Green Bay Packers demolish the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl that year, a game that was actually competitive until the Patriots gave up a 99 yard kickoff return for a TD that essentially closed the scoring for the game. I note this mostly because for most of the last couple decades I had remembered that game as an ass-kicking from start to finish, mostly because so many of Green Bay’s points came after turnovers, or bad special teams play (really, look it up, 10 pts scored after Bledsoe picks, 8 off the Desmond Howard kickoff return, and another big return earlier in the game set up another TD, that’s 25 points). That was a pretty depressing day. 

At any rate I’m pretty sure that one day we were sitting around the office talking about Western talent that we could potentially get for low money who might be uniquely interesting on a China market play. Remember that in 2004 or so, Hollywood was starting to look for opportunities to get into the Chinese market. In just a few years you’d have a Mission Impossible movie shooting in China as well as bunch of other smaller films, and just a few years after that, Iron Man 3 would have its very interesting China debacle. So at some point I think I mentioned Growing Pains and this set off WPIS into a manic frenzy of ideation. Over the next week or so, he desperately reached out through all kinds of avenues–anyone he knew who would be tangentially connected to Hollywood circles–to try to get to Jeremy Miller, the actor who played Ben Seaver, now no longer a child but a full grown adult. 

There were some avenues that even then were already mostly closed to WPIS, but a surprising amount were always open because of a common attitude towards independent film and independent filmmaking. Simply put, no one know where the next great independent film is coming from. Not even great, but just successfully making back its budget, which for most indies is a huge win already. As a result, plenty of people were not, say, actively pulling for WPIS, and his needs were never a priority, but they wouldn’t reject him out of hand, even though his film idea was terrible and he was clearly not very interested in becoming knowledgeable about film production. He was tolerated as a fringe character in the industry, someone that most people knew and didn’t take seriously, but he was basically considered harmless. Sure, his was a vanity project that was probably being forced on his son, but tellingly, it was nothing the industry hadn’t seen before, and if he managed to raise money and do his project, and it was good? Even if it wasn’t good but made enough money? Most people didn’t see the percentage in burning the bridge because they’d all seen 0.0000001% chance of success projects hit for weird reasons. 

One avenue that was pretty closed, however, was anything connected to the original lead actress cast for Scotty’s Goal, a few years before. If you will recall, I mentioned this before way back in Part 1. To recap: WPIS had decided to leverage constantly being told that his American, white son who was probably about 8 years old at the time, spoke wonderful Chinese, into a film career for said son. He had engaged scriptwriters and a novel writer to create a book and screenplay for a story about a boy and his mother, as I recall. To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember most of the actual story anymore, but I do recall that the part of the mother was essentially used as a pay for play arrangement in which WPIS somehow managed to convince an up-and-coming actress looking for a break to invest in the film, to the tune of about $75,000 or so on what at the time was a budget well under $1 million. WPIS had told this aspiring actress that he just needed those funds as starter, and that they would lead to further investment, because now he could tell other potential investors that they weren’t the first in–an old sales technique. However in this case it hadn’t actually worked, and whatever investors, real or imagined, that he had for Scotty’s Goal never materialized. What the actress didn’t know at the time, because WPIS projected himself as a successful business consultant in China (in the time I was there he only ever seemed to have one client and there wasn’t much work, so there wasn’t much to bill for. He did drag me on a couple of client pitch meetings, but he never managed to score a new client. Maybe it was me [sadface]), was that he didn’t have income, and was living off her investment, which at the time you could do for quite a while even in Shanghai, because the relative cost of living could be very inexpensive. 

Her money starting to run low was a major reason for WPIS to create the new project of Milk and Fashion, because in his mind, he could jump on Shanghai’s fashion design (cue Stephen Chow in Lawyer Lawyer) trend as a way to try to get more investment. The trick was, as I, innocent and pure as I was, being up on moral philosophy but not yet budgets, was to budget the movie MUCH higher than production costs so that he could have the actress’s Scotty’s Goal investment still in place, have money to live on, AND make the movie, which I still do 100% believe that he wanted to make and be successful. So if Scotty’s Goal was budgeted at $500,000, let’s say, he wanted to budget Milk and Fashion at $2 million. This elaborate matroyshka doll scheme is not uncommon at all in film, and as it turns out, maybe more generally in business than we’d like to pretend, and so WPIS never discussed it as such, but once in a while he would simply take a production budget I had gotten from any of the production managers who he got to help out and if the actual budget based on whatever version of the script came in at $300,000, the ask to investors was never less than $2 million, and if he could attach a name to the project, would only go up. Again, I’ll stress that this isn’t abnormal to the industry, regardless of whether it should or shouldn’t be, but from the production side, everyone’s attitude was, as long as I get paid, it’s not my business what WPIS can get from investors, and not my problem for when he has to do the accounting to them. But as someone on his producing team who was with him in those meetings, I struggled greatly with this, because it was also my face/reputation/honor on the line, especially since I was being used as a Chinese face to try to convince certain people he was totally legit and honorable. 

At any rate, the aspiring actress who was, as far as I could tell, at that time the only person who had actually put any money in to either project, eventually sued WPIS several years later because he never bothered to tell her about the second movie, and of course he never made the first movie, and she was never repaid her investment, and as far as I can tell, he never replied to her anyway. Although from my perspective, at the time I heard about her a lot because he would put pressure on everyone else in the office saying he had to do M&F in order to solve his Scotty’s Goal ticking time bomb type problem. 

In case you haven’t guessed yet from the hint dropped in the last part, which to be fair was several months ago, that aspiring actress was Jen Siebel, now Jennifer Sibel Newsom, current First Lady of California and documentary filmmaker. She and her manager were not contacted for info on how to contact Jeremy Miller. 

My recollection, and this may not be accurate, is that eventually WPIS heard something back from the agency listed on IMDB Pro for Jeremy Miller, who was naturally very interested in getting a role on a movie in the at the time opening film market of China, and happy to hear that he still had fans there that remembered him fondly. Of course he would attach himself to the project for the purposes of fundraising. Initial plans were made for Jeremy to make a trip out to China to drum up interest and show potential investors that WPIS in fact did have some real juice. The problem was that Jeremy wanted to be paid. And as you’ve likely gathered by now, there was no money. 

But now with Jeremy Miller attached on paper, WPIS could now try to  leverage an accident of Chinese broadcasting history into funding for his vanity film project. He went on a rampage of new funding pitch meetings. 

First he hit up all the film distribution companies again, pulling the trick of asking the young people, usually the office girls, if they knew Ben, the character that Jeremy Miller had played as a child. But he had little success because of the simple fact that although most younger people in the Shanghai region had watched some Growing Pains, and the recognition was high, it was not a universal experience throughout China. The show had only aired on the English language channel of Shanghai local television—technically it was the International Channel Shanghai, commonly referred to as ICS. We’ll come back to them. 

The practical upshot of this was that in fact the name recognition of the show Growing Pains and its actors was only high with a very specific demographic in a specific geographical location—not really a compelling argument for international distributors. 

WPIS’ second line of attack was via private investors. There were basically two kinds of private investors he concentrated on, although of course he would’ve taken money from anyone if he could get it. The first was expats of means, of which there were more than a few in Shanghai at the time. Since the re-engagement with China that started under the Clinton Administration (surprisingly not that many years after Tiananmen), China had been very open for business, most manufacturing for export, with tons of foreign direct investment. As a result, there was a fairly diverse representation of developed countries in Shanghai, all with companies who were intent on getting factories to make them widgets. 

After a while of being in China, you kind of get used to it, the way that Shanghai has basically almost always been a semicolonial space in its history as an international city. Famously, by time the 1911 Xinhai Revolution that ended the Qing Dynasty rolled around, Shanghai was divided up into various districts, some of which were essentially run as independent fiefdoms of a controlling foreign country. For example, the French Concession was, as the name states, administered by the French, to the point that even when the Japanese occupied Shanghai in WWII, it was only in 1943 that Japanese troops were allowed in, when the Vichy government conceded the Concession to them. The International Settlement was primarily British and American, with a smattering of other Europeans mostly. Shanghai’s highly desirable Bund riverbank area housed several international banks and was the headquarters of the Sasson family’s Asian financial empire until they were forced to move to Hong Kong because of WWII. 

So Shanghai, for most of its modern history, always had high engagement with Westerners, and styled itself the Paris of the East. Hollywood often had first-run movies in Shanghai, not on the delay the rest of the world had, and there was a healthy travel circuit for American jazz musicians back in pre-WWII Shanghai. Little wonder then that when the Communist government opened China up for foreign direct investment, that Shanghai became one of the major hubs for international companies, where they would often set up offices for their expat execs to live in luxury they couldn’t afford back in their home countries, but also often a few hours’ travel away from the actual factories they contracted with to make their products.

One potential investor I remember meeting was a Frenchman who was the person in charge of Louis Vuitton for China, which mostly meant running the manufacturing, but also the distribution of products to China’s nascent luxury shopping malls, now no longer merely a reason for people to go to Hong Kong. The major cities all got LV stores, and events. I don’t remember much about the dinner we had other than that this general manager quickly but politely declined to help out. WPIS refused to hear that though, and for the rest of my time at the production, I think he thought something would eventually come of that connection. 

In addition, there were, in the wake of Clinton’s push to WTO, a lot of Western companies that came in to try to bring Western capitalist-type systems of value management and generation. I don’t just mean finance, although obviously there was a lot of that. But also with the hoped-for opening of Chinese cinema and sports (Yao Ming was coming into his own in the NBA, there were tennis stars up and coming, etc), you also got talent agencies like CAA, William Morris, and IMG moving in and setting up shop. All of these kinds of companies brought in foreign executives on big expat packages, and then hired a slew of young, eager Chinese staff to do most of the actual work. 

The third angle of attack was local Chinese investors. WPIS didn’t have a lot of access into local Chinese money. In fact, that was part of his rationale for hiring someone like me, a bilingual person with Chinese genetics. Of course to some degree the joke was on him–I didn’t know anyone, and there’s no magic secret decoder ring of genetics that means that any Chinese person knows every other Chinese person. Especially in a country of over a billion and a half people. 

WPIS desperately wanted some of these kinds of connections though he didn’t quite have an avenue to cultivate them. One day he sauntered into the office and told me that last night he’d been to an incredible party at a warehouse by Suzhou Creek, and that the owner of the warehouse was also a film director who could take over from Cheng Long. Not only that, but this director, Steve, would be WPIS’ savior–the key to finding investment. 

So a couple days later, I went out to that part of Suzhou Creek. 

Next time on Diary of a Mad Old Me: we get Ang Lee-adjacent, go to some parties, and meet the first potential savior of Milk & Fashion.

Guys I don’t really do this for new subscribers or audience-building or whatever, but if you want to spread the word, it might make my ego happy. Also feel free to comment or ask questions below, the feedback loop probably makes it more likely I’ll post again soon!