Part VIII: A New Director, and a New Investor

The rollercoaster continues inching up the starting uphill incline

Today if you go down by the Xinzha Lu Line 1 subway station in Shanghai, you emerge out into a developed area with greenery and garbage receptacles. That wasn’t what it was like in 2004. No, 20 years ago it was a motley, dusty, sweaty assortment of hardware, lumber, glass, electrical wiring, and plumbing stores, in a heavy construction area that felt both full of people and also strangely empty of life at the same time. 

Just one block up from the station you would come across a small bridge that connected the south bank of the Creek over to the north bank. Pass that and you would be on a narrow path called Nan Suzhou Lu, South Suzhou Rd. Back then in its undeveloped state, it was just a glorified alleyway, but it you could see the potential for a fantastic riverbank area, once the construction of everything around it settled in. In any case right at that corner, where Nan Suzhou Lu was about to meet the bridge, stood a big, whitewashed old warehouse, built around the turn of the century (for you youngs out there, to me that still means around 1900, not 2000), all aged timber and concrete. 

This was Steve Wang’s Warehouse. It’s still there now, one of the great pieces of historical architecture in Shanghai, and one of those magical places you could feel the weight of history when you entered. Steve Wang managed and ran the warehouse as his work space, which he maintained in three floors, each with spectacularly high warehouse ceilings and incredible light. The first floor was for administration and storage. The second floor was given to office space, and he would rent out space there for creative enterprises. The third floor was separated into two main very large event spaces. The front room was perfect for dance parties, art exhibitions, corporate shindigs, small concerts. The back room was set up as a chill space with a pool table, couches, and Steve’s working nook. 

Who is Steve Wang, you’re now wondering. Good question. 

Steve was a film and commercial director of some minor repute, having won Bronze at the 1995 Tokyo Film Festival for his feature film 《阿爸的情人》Daughter-in-Law (also nominated for a bunch of Golden Horse awards), a provocative indie film set in the mountains of central Taiwan (if you’ve never been, go there, it’s phenomenally beautiful, and also there’s a lot of roadside oilcan roast chicken that you can tear apart with your hands, it’s so good) in about 1965 that was an investigation of family, masculinity, patriarchal power dynamics, really a good piece of work. In the decade or so since then, Steve had moved to Shanghai and somehow gotten the relationships to take over this historical warehouse, out of which he worked, mostly now in television commercials, shooting for mostly Taiwan TVCs, as far as I could tell–a lot of KFC, Taiwan Beer, all the good stuff. 

Steve was slim but not athletic, casual but fashion-conscious, tall for Taiwan, with a sense of calm and humor that he carried off most of the time. He was a great story-teller, who loved to stand around by the marble bar in the main event room, playing Stan Getz on his transparent Harmon Kardon stereo system, sharing bottles of red wine while he regaled you with stories of, really, just about anything. He seemed to be one of those guys who just knew things about everything, and had opinions about all of it too. He had been Ang Lee’s classmate, and one of his roommates, apparently, at NYU Film School, and had watched his now famous friend’s struggle to break in to Hollywood. 

Remember that Ang Lee didn’t just come out of film school like a meteor of success, rocketing through the firmament. No, he graduated and unlike his classmate Spike Lee, Ang Lee found the world of American film extremely difficult to break into. After a couple of years, he re-strategized and went back to Taiwan, where he was finally able, with government support, to raise funds for his first feature film Pushing Hands, which was very successful in Taiwan, garnering 8 Golden Horse nominations, which in turn generated momentum for Ang Lee to make his second feature, a script he’d written roughly during the same period as Pushing Hands. The Wedding Banquet went on to international acclaim that drove the next film, 1994’s Eat Drink Man Woman to break through, and afterwards Ang Lee got his foot in the door to Hollywood, where he has been able to continue making big prestige dramas, huge successes not just related to China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) or Chinese-Americans, but also Sense and Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain, and Life of Pi. 

Steve had also, in the years since NYU, had a difficult time breaking into the world of feature films, and by the time I met him, it was nearly a decade since the feature he got to make, which was a good movie but didn’t generate enough heat for him to leapfrog up to the next level. Steve was looking for a project that would get him back in the game. 

Our forever main character, the Worst Producer in Shanghai, was an inveterate attendee of every and any fashion event he could find, partially for the networking of meeting people in the fashion industry who might sponsor or invest in his film, but also because, as he would put it to any room of men, leeringly, “a man’s got needs.” WPIS was fairly well-known on the fashion events scene as someone you wouldn’t necessarily want to talk to if you were a model. He’d use the “I’m a movie producer” line, with promises of screen time and casting, to try to score with any woman he came across. I don’t think I ever saw him succeed, though, whether during the months I worked for him or in the subsequent years. 

To be scrupulously fair, being a dog is a fairly common condition amongst male expats in China, especially Americans and Europeans of a certain age, having a little money to spend, able to come off as somewhat successful or respectable. A surprisingly large number of these men were divorced, as WPIS was, but even the married family men would often come out to China for a couple years of their corporate rotation, and immediately treat Shanghai as their sex playground, going out most nights to meet women looking for a Western sugar daddy. Now most Chinese women were not of this persuasion, but the clubs and bars where they could be found were all well-known. If someone was looking for non-Chinese companionship, that was available as well–Filipinas, Vietnamese, Thai, but also Eastern European, specifically Russians, again everyone knew which establishments you could go to if you had the cash, to chat up and make arrangements with enterprising young women (sometimes not even that young). Male expat culture at that time had a lot of those discussions, inescapably colonialist, mostly distasteful “locker room talk” in the Trumpian sense. Now of course “not all expat men” and all that, and a lot of people went to Shanghai and were just regular people, but everyone knew who the horndogs were, and WPIS was definitely one of them. I don’t know how aware he was of this, but expat society certainly knew about him, and I’m sure part of the reason he generally had extremely bad luck courting potential expat investors wasn’t just that that he was a seedy, poorly dressed, obese, unclassy, poorly-spoken man, but also that he was considered quite a lecherous one as well. Again, I have to emphasize, although he definitely hung out with some guys who were quite intimately knowledgeable about that scene, I actually never saw him do anything besides talk and leer, hit on some women to universally no success, with really just one potential exception I’ll get to later. 

At any rate, it was at some fashion event held at Steve Wang’s warehouse that WPIS met Steve, was mesmerized by Steve’s endless tales of celebrities and film industry personages that he knew personally, impressed with his event space and knowledge of fashion, wine, all of the finer things in life. And as I mentioned above, Steve was looking to get back into feature films. He didn’t have any scripts himself for some reason, and WPIS hit Steve with his usual line–he had most of the funding, and just needed a few hundred grand more to finish and get started filming. 

That’s how, on one steamy, bright morning, I went to the Xinzha Road subway station and walked around a bit (remember this was before GPS, you just got bad directions from people and wandered around until you found stuff) and went up to the warehouse to meet Steve, as a screenwriter and associate producer of the film. 

Once I found it and went in at the big glass front door that looked out onto the bank, security buzzed me through and I went up to the third floor to meet Steve, standing at the marble bar as he always did, futzing away at a Macbook that played soft jazz on the stereo that filled the space. Steve immediately offered me a glass of red. It was a new vintage that he’d just gotten in, so tasty and wonderful, on a such a great deal that he got because he knew people. I asked him about his background and he told me. He wasn’t particularly that interested in my background, but he did have lots of stories about the warehouse itself, which was once a site for smuggling opium before it became a key location in WWII as a weapons depot, where the Chinese army would stage up before sorties against the Japanese. Later on it was used as a place to smuggle in guns by the resistance fighters. Steve was using the space for events but he had plans as well to do art exhibitions and more fully exploit it as a culturally iconic building. 

What this is mostly to say is that we talked for hours before the subject of the film itself actually came up, and really all I had to do was give him the script as it was. I was told to come back in a few days and we could talk Steve’s impressions of the script and his ideas. I got the sense even in that first meeting that Steve didn’t entirely take the whole project that seriously but if he could get a film credit, get his name back out there, not have to spend a penny of his own money or use his social capital, and not have to do much of the leg work, he was in for that. I couldn’t fault him; that’s what pretty much everyone else associated with the project was doing as well. 

Steve definitely had skill as a storyteller, but what became rapidly obvious was that his favorite subject was not just himself, but his own erudition and insight, which he always positioned as beyond that of anyone else around him. Almost any subject that he held on would eventually come around to how something related to it showed off his extraordinary acumen. Because he was the boss of the place, certainly no one there would contradict him, and it was an easy thing to fall into and accept–most of the people working for him called him shaoye 少爷, the term “Young Master” was a carryover from the days of Chinese landowning aristocracy. 

I don’t know that Steve thought much of me at first, to tell you the truth. Those of you who’ve known me for a long time might not remember this about me, but it usually takes me a little while to get the gauge of other people and how I want to communicate with them. I’ve never really found small talk that easy, not since high school probably, and that certainly has had some effect on my career, in that a lot of people, and I don’t fault them for this, don’t have patience for the quiet person, they’re looking to see if they’re going to get blown away by some aspect of you immediately, and I’m probably not that guy. I’m the person who’s going to give you what you give me. Over the next couple of months though, we would get to know each other well enough.

One thing Steve and I agreed on was that that script still needed work. It was a strange puzzle because there were certain elements that had to be kept. Some things made sense, like we weren’t supposed to make changes that would fundamentally alter the budget level of the film. However, WPIS was unwilling to change the central narrative that he had stuck in his head, and he kept saying that he had to keep several elements because he had made promises to “the initial investors”, none of whom had ever materialized (I’m pretty sure Jen Siebel wasn’t consulted). Strangely enough, many of these had to do with keeping his son as the lead character in a Chinese-language movie where he wanted to dance ballet but could not due to his widowed father’s inability to get over his ballerina mother’s death. Never mind that the son was torn between that he personally didn’t really want to do all that but also wanted to please his father, and never mind that his Chinese was good enough to get by socially as a kid in expat Shanghai, but not really to act. Never mind even that the kid wasn’t really that interested in acting–sure he liked the idea of being a movie star, but he never showed any real interest in the craft, or any of that. And most importantly, when the story was initially conceived, the son was around 10 years old or so. He was now 14, and growing rapidly, which meant the sort of cute kid tropes and Billy Eliot of the original script needed finessing. Steve had lots of ideas, most of which he would forget ever saying by the next day, but I had written them all down, and I was not really looking forward to playing the game of Telephone with WPIS to see what he would agree to. In any case, Steve wanted to have at least one more writer to work with–I was raw and self-taught at that point, with no real experience. WPIS agreed, also because with a new director on board, he was energized to try to land another investor. 

And that was where American Marketing Exec (hereafter AME) came into the picture. I don’t recall now how they met, maybe it was in fact at an event at Steve’s warehouse. She was a Chinese-American expat for a name brand American firm that came to China to capitalize on marketing Western (American and European) sports and acting celebrities to this huge new audience, and she’d been in Shanghai on a full expat package for several years at this point. She had a long term boyfriend who was an Australian businessman, I think, and she was really interested in doing something artistic and creative. AME was older than me but not by too much, I think, but had done reasonably well for herself financially. WPIS was so happy the day he came in the office to tell us that he’d met her. She wasn’t going to be willing to invest the total amount of money we’d estimated we needed to shoot the movie, but this didn’t concern WPIS. He wanted to get her foot in the door because he believed that once she started investing money, she would definitely help him get the rest of the money in order to ensure that she’d have the chance to recoup her investment. 

AME had requested that she wanted to meet me, which surprised me at the time. I later came to understand that she had asked around about WPIS and his project, and most people had given her the standard, rational response when she told them she had met WPIS and was thinking about investing in Milk & Fashion: “Fuck no, stay the hell away from that guy, he’s a creepy scam artist.” But WPIS had sold her on the concept of me, a “serious artist” type person, along with Steve Wang, an award-winning feature film director who was Ang Lee’s classmate, and she’d met Steve so now she wanted to meet me and see her comfort level with the team. 

I felt all kinds of pressure. This was the job I had, and even if it was going to be a horrible film, it was my foot in the door of a new industry. I didn’t think I’d sell anyone on anything–remember my experiences as a high schooler trying to sell knockoff perfumes? I’m not a hard-talking sales person who will convince you to buy something you don’t want. I am the person who will tell you what things are, IMO, and if you’re going to buy it, you’ll feel more comfortable, possibly. So I knew there was a giant possibility that I would be asked questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer satisfactorily for my boss, or for the investor. I didn’t want to go. 

I went anyway. 

Longtime Shanghailanders may remember the restaurant Mesa Manifesto, on Julu Lu. Owned by Australians, as I recall, it was an upscale Western bistro, wine bar and all. AME, WPIS, and I met for dinner. She was herself a brash, big talker. I soon understood what had happened–she had already talked herself into investing in this project. I brought up some of the problematic elements of the story of the film, but she’d already redpilled herself–the ballet would be beautiful, WPIS’s son could be coached off-camera, etc. She believed that with the right team, the film would be a success, and so she was there really to see for herself if she thought we were the right team. To this day I don’t know how she had convinced herself that WPIS had a great project. I certainly never felt that way about it, but at the same time hey, everyone also worked on stuff they didn’t believe in. I tried to walk a line in that meeting, avoiding my concerns about the project and just talking about the intended solutions–rewriting the script, getting in a solid production team, working with Steve to fulfill his vision of the story. AME was impressed with my personal history, educational background, my story of how I ended up staying in Shanghai, my love of film, and the fact that I spoke and could read and write Chinese at a functional level, which she could not. Most other Chinese-Americans in Shanghai at that time, those who were ABC and grew up in the US (as opposed to those born in China or Taiwan who moved to the US later), mostly could manage some basics, but I could read contracts and suggest changes. AME looked me in the eye and told me that she didn’t 100% trust WPIS, but that she trusted me. She would make arrangements to transfer money that week.

I headed home in a taxi that night with a head full of Australian red wine and the concern that I was going to be in for more than I bargained for. 

I was right.

Next time on Diary of a Mad Old Me, I think I’m going to do a little aside about how we were living at the time in Shanghai, and how we met our first dog.