Red Carpet, page 29
I got a firsthand look at how China’s politics shape Chan’s life when I briefly met him in Salt Lake City in early 2019. He was there to promote his environmentalism initiative, and a local museum had mounted an exhibit of art pieces made of recycled components; Chan spoke at a podium under a copper dragon with teeth made out of nails and a tail of frayed wicker branches. Before he arrived, assistants with earpieces scurried around like a head of state was due.
I was scheduled to sit down with Chan at 10:50 a.m. for twenty minutes, at which point he would move on to a general press conference. I’d assumed we would meet in a boardroom away from the others but was instead ushered to an art gallery surrounded by surrealist pieces inspired by Chan. I sat near Jackie Lisa, an appropriation of the Mona Lisa with a grinning Jackie Chan face implanted in place of Mona’s enigmatic smile. Chan arrived with a team of fifteen handlers, all wearing puffy jackets with “JC Stunt Team” embossed on them. He was surrounded by photographers and multiple cameramen who documented our entire interview. To be around Jackie Chan is to be part of a roving, constant documentary.
Chan’s responses to my questions were relentlessly on message: He wanted Chinese kids to toughen up like he did. He wanted young men to avoid nightclubs. He wanted Chinese actors and movies to travel the world so people can come together and understand one another’s culture. After the conversation, I realized the more telling moment had come in the seconds before I sat down with Chan, when one of his staff members—until then a friendly and accommodating coordinator of the chat—pulled me aside. Chan, she said, was not to be asked about certain topics or mentioned in any way that related to them. U.S.-China relations, Tibet, the Dalai Lama—these subjects were radioactive, and he could not be near any such topics.
“He is our national treasure,” she explained.
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Eighteen months after Fan’s arrest and disappearance, prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong drew the world’s attention to the province and to Xi’s crackdown on dissent and free expression. Young people taking to the streets adopted a namesake from Western entertainment, calling themselves the “cursed generation” for having grown up in Hong Kong when they did, a moniker derived from Harry Potter. According to “Xi Jinping Thought,” a political philosophy named for the leader and encoded in the constitution of the People’s Republic, the city would be subject to national reunification. Xi’s power had undeniably reached Hong Kong.
It had also reached America, where corporate interests overruled most objections to the government’s power grab. As protests intensified, Daryl Morey, general manager of the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets, tweeted, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Though he quickly deleted it, that single tweet immediately jeopardized decades of business-building the NBA had done in China, where players already sold millions in sneakers, jerseys, and bobbleheads, and where a few games were played each year. CCTV stopped airing games, and Tencent, which had just signed a $1.5 billion deal with the NBA, was no longer allowed to carry them on its streaming platform. As many in Hollywood could have warned Morey, a single tweet that opposed Beijing policy would cost the league and its athletes hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now any stance that Xi disagreed with—such as a prodemocracy movement—was off limits for businesses that wanted to keep making money in China. Morey’s colleagues in the NBA, a league typically willing to speak out on social issues like racial equality, took a collective vow of silence. LeBron James, its most visible star and advocate for social justice, said Morey was “misinformed.” The NBA said it was “regrettable” to see the tweet had offended their “friends and fans in China,” and when the league’s statement was translated into Mandarin, it went even further in criticizing Morey for saying what he did. “We feel greatly disappointed at Houston Rockets’ GM Daryl Morey’s inappropriate speech, which is regrettable,” the statement read in Mandarin. “Without a doubt, he has deeply offended many Chinese basketball fans.”
The involvement of Tencent, which had partnered with Disney’s ESPN to air NBA games in China, presented an issue for Disney CEO Robert Iger. Just as Kundun had threatened his company’s theme park plans, tensions in one division of Disney were threatening the entire portfolio. An executive usually unafraid to weigh in on political matters—and who had even toyed with running for president himself in 2020—Iger shut up when it came to any question about China or the prodemocracy movement challenging its sovereignty. In an interview shortly after the Morey tweet, as captains of all industry were being pressured to comment on China and its treatment of protesters in Hong Kong, Iger talked about taking a public stance against a Georgia law that made it more difficult to get an abortion and Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. He stood up for the immigrants who worked for his company and had seen their status threatened by Trump-backed legislation. But when it came to China, Iger said he had a fiduciary duty to stay silent.
“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Iger said. “We’ve learned how complicated this is . . . and I think the biggest learning from that is that caution is imperative, meaning to take a position that could harm our company in some form would be a big mistake.”
The journalist interviewing Iger, Wall Street Journal editor Matt Murray, asked if a change in circumstances could necessitate a public stance. “I don’t know,” Iger said. He then made it clear that the China line of questioning was over.
The NBA’s effort to defuse the situation in a series of statements that both distanced the league from Morey’s comment and defended his right to make it sparked outrage in China and on both sides of the U.S. political aisle. Democratic and Republican lawmakers lambasted the league for not standing behind Morey and the opinion he’d tweeted, turning China’s quashing of free speech into one of the very few issues that Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed on.
“While it is easy to defend freedom of speech when it costs you nothing, equivocating when profits are at stake is a betrayal of fundamental American values,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
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One of the Hong Kong residents watching Xi’s moves with trepidation was Sophia Shek, a local filmmaker who had been an assistant director on Transformers: Age of Extinction several years earlier. She was one of Michael Bay’s half dozen assistant directors charged with various tasks that included prepping the main cast for the day’s work, explaining to star Nicola Peltz how to use a crouch toilet, or escorting Kelsey Grammer to his dressing room. Shek had been born in Scotland to Asian parents and moved to Hong Kong in 1999 to work in entertainment, mostly drawn to the cinema scene that flourished there. Transformers was a bit of a shift, but she enjoyed it. Bay’s responsibility—essentially a $200 million business with hundreds of employees—was far beyond the scope of her usual productions. And the movie was given all sorts of allowances that would never have been granted to local filmmakers, like the day they shot a scene that involved blowing up the local Hong Kong government office.
The movie was on her mind when I caught up with her in the summer of 2020. Beijing had recently passed a national security law that made dissent illegal in Hong Kong, turning the activism that had defined the city’s streets and character in recent months into offenses punishable by up to a lifetime in jail. Dissident groups dissolved and members rid their social media accounts of any evidence of prior support.
I asked about that scene that came toward the end of the Transformers movie, the one that Paramount executives had rewritten at the request of authorities in order to secure the Chinese release date that led to those record-setting Chinese grosses. When she’d gone to see the film in 2014, Shek had little idea the scene was in the movie. The plot had been kept top secret even on set, and she saw only the pages of the script for scenes she was working on.
This is what she and viewers around the world saw as they sat in the darkened auditorium: In the final chapter of the film, Hong Kong officials watch in terror as skyscrapers crumble around them. With their city on the brink of total annihilation, they arrive at only one solution.
“We’ve got to call the central government for help!” one of them proclaims.
Cut to a hotel in Beijing, where the Chinese minister of defense is told that “there’s a crisis in Hong Kong.”
The defense minister is resolute.
DEFENSE MINISTER
The central government will protect Hong Kong at all costs. We have fighter jets on the way.
In the Transformers universe on-screen, as in the world China wanted to will into existence off-screen, Hong Kong officials know there is only one logical place to go for protection. As she sat in the theater, Shek realized she had been working on “one of the first films that made Hong Kong completely a part of China. . . . It was the whole package.” To Shek and her friends, Transformers now feels like a sneak preview, a movie in which Mark Wahlberg says, “Sweetie, hand me my alien gun,” becoming an unlikely vehicle in an escalating campaign of aggression. Rob Moore and the other Paramount executives who had approved the scene were fired or left the studio years before that motivation came into focus on the streets of Hong Kong. It all felt like another reminder of a maxim passed through Hollywood: American studios think in stock-market quarters. China thinks in centuries.
Today, Shek fears a loss of the strong identity that once defined Hong Kong filmmaking. “It’s very difficult to finance any film. Hong Kong is a tiny market. It doesn’t even register on the box office. If you can get one movie released across mainland China, you’ve made it. But if I wanted to make money, I would not be in this industry.” When we spoke in the summer of 2020, she told me she worried about a censorship board being installed that would operate like the one in Beijing. “There’s an urgency to document as much of Hong Kong as possible,” she said. Less than a year later, the Hong Kong government announced it would ban films it believed were undermining national security and called on officials reviewing movies to “safeguard the sovereignty, unification, and territorial integrity of the People’s Republic of China.” Shek’s fears were coming true. Age of Extinction means several things to her now.
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Hollywood’s reaction to events in Hong Kong followed the trajectory of its attention to Tibet, where once-vociferous support grew silent as China’s influence over the entertainment industry grew. No one paid the price for that support like Richard Gere.
Though hardly anyone saw Red Corner, Gere’s career and activism didn’t immediately slow down, and for a time he was permitted to blend the two. He was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1999, the same year he reunited with Pretty Woman costar Julia Roberts in the hit romantic comedy Runaway Bride. He tap-danced as the lead in Chicago in 2002 and continued his specialty as the tortured leading man trying to navigate love and heartache in 2008’s Nights in Rodanthe. Through it all, he wore his Buddhist prayer beads on the red carpet and hosted the Dalai Lama at events around the world.
His unapologetic and ceaseless criticism of China eventually caught up with him. As studios realized they could not do anything to jeopardize getting their movies onto Chinese screens, Gere became unemployable.
“There are definitely movies that I can’t be in because the Chinese will say, ‘Not with him,’” he said.
Gere has not made a movie with a major studio in a decade, instead starring in independent movies made at firms with no parent company ties to China and with no financiers worried about threatening their other holdings in the country. Several years ago, he was attached to star in an independently financed movie that was to be directed by a Chinese director who had no plans to show the film in China. Two weeks before shooting began, the director called Gere on a secure line.
“I can’t do it,” he said. If he made a movie with Gere, the director and his family would never be permitted to leave China again. The director’s own career would dry up, he said, as if Gere’s situation were contagious.
Contemporaries like Michael Douglas play supporting roles in Marvel Studios movies like Ant-Man, and even Mel Gibson finds big-studio work after making homophobic and anti-Semitic remarks. At Warner Bros., an actor like Gere might be considered for the role of Superman’s counselor or a politician in Gotham City, roles that have gone to older actors with gravitas, like Gary Oldman. But it comes down to a matter of risk: If swapping in Jeremy Irons doesn’t torpedo the movie creatively, then why chance it? For his part, Gere says he prefers making the smaller, character-driven stories. “I’m not interested in playing the wizened Jedi in your tentpole,” he said.
Some studio executives have been skeptical of Gere’s insistence that his political stance against China has cost him jobs. One told me Gere was difficult to work with and not worth the trouble. Another said he was getting John Travolta’s hand-me-downs even at the height of his career. But Gere is actually correct. He has been blacklisted. According to a casting executive at Warner Bros., the studio that had hired him as recently as 2008 in Nights in Rodanthe, Gere became radioactive as China’s market power grew.
With him, the rule became: “If you could have somebody else, then get somebody else,” this person said.
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The outcry in the U.S. over the treatment of Hong Kong, and the fact that international calls for information on Fan Bingbing’s well-being were met with silence, contributed to a view held in both countries’ film industries that Xi was impervious to criticism or pressure. In March 2018, Xi transferred oversight of his nation’s movies from the expansive State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television to the Ministry of Propaganda. The shift put Chinese movies under the control of a Communist Party overseer that would prioritize the messaging of cinema, as opposed to the previous authority, where growing the market was a top concern. Depending on the film’s plot, several other government entities that are essentially police agencies—from the Ministry of State Security to the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Justice—might have to issue an approval.
The crackdown many feared was solidified eight months later, when Ang Lee and actress Gong Li presided over the 2018 Golden Horse Awards, the most prestigious evening in Asian cinema, at a ceremony in Taipei. It was a banner year for mainland China, whose movies accounted for more nominations than Hong Kong or Taiwanese ones—a sign that the mainland was developing into a bona fide filmmaking force. Before Beijing-based producers left for the ceremony in Taipei, they were warned by authorities to be on guard. Officials feared Taiwan’s government, Beijing’s rival for territory with even more sensitivity than Tibet and Hong Kong, might try to sabotage the proceedings as a political statement against Xi.
It felt like a family reunion in the auditorium that night, a gathering of executives who had been in China from the industry’s earliest days and the new filmmakers who were building an exciting market. The evening was going well, with text messages exchanged about which after-ceremony parties everyone was attending, when the winner for best documentary was announced. The award went to Our Youth in Taiwan, about young people’s attitude toward political advocacy.
One of the winners, Fu Yue, took the stage. From their seats, the audience members could see she was shaking and sweaty. She looked nervous, and those watching her stand at the microphone grew anxious, exchanging the current of anxiety that’s invisibly transferred in modern-day China between people when a political third rail appears to be in proximity.
“I really hope that one day our country can be treated as a truly independent entity,” she said.
To outsiders, it might have looked like any politically tinged acceptance speech—unremarkable in a world where Michael Moore and Brad Pitt go after the sitting president when they accept their Oscars.
In China, where leaders are easily angered by suggestions that Taiwan is not a part of their country, it was a ten-second bomb blast.
Ang Lee’s face went gray. Executives and filmmakers sat frozen in their seats. Phones started vibrating in the pockets of attendees. They were text messages sent by the authorities monitoring the ceremony from Beijing—with instantaneous instructions.
Do not show emotion.
Leave the ceremony quietly.
Cancel your after-party.
Get back to China as soon as possible.
After the ceremony, attendees gathered in a suite that was supposed to have hosted a party. It had the air of a wake. Fu’s statement would not have surprised many in the audience, but making such a remark on such a stage was professional suicide—and reacting positively would jeopardize anyone’s livelihood. The optimism of those early days in China’s new film business had been replaced by creeping dread.
The response spoke to a central irony of working in today’s Chinese entertainment industry. It is a collection of producers and directors who believe in film’s power, in its ability to change lives and perspectives through persuasion or empathy. But it is also an industry that knows such power is limited by the terms of storytelling imposed by the state—and that if anyone violates those rules, it could all go away.
The absorption continued. In the summer of 2019, the Central Commission for Deepening Overall Reform, led by Xi, distributed new guidelines for the Chinese entertainment industry that a state-affiliated news outlet said made it clear the Communist Party considered the entertainment industry to be under its domain.
