Red Carpet, page 9
Since Warner Bros. had released The Fugitive in Chinese theaters, the box office was still generating tiny grosses—in part because there were so few screens, in part because tickets cost so little, and in part because the movie would be pirated almost as soon as it played in a Chinese auditorium. Inevitably Warner Bros. executives would return from trips to China with stories of seeing the studio’s most popular movies—Miss Congeniality, Ocean’s Eleven, Batman Begins—for sale on the street, usually for the equivalent of one U.S. dollar. Knockoff poster art adorned the VHS covers, making the aisles of city stores resemble an off-kilter Blockbuster Video.
Ben Zhang had used the piracy shops to acquaint himself with the twentieth-century entertainment he had missed. After college, he went on a buying spree, soon owning more than a thousand DVDs he purchased from a dealer who made regular trips to his apartment with a book bag full of selections. Zhang watched a season of Friends in a day. He didn’t have access to film reviews, so he had no way of knowing whether a movie was considered any good or any actor was a notable star; “Meg Ryan was just some blond chick,” he said. Favorites emerged: James Bond, The Prince of Egypt, The Sound of Music. Zhang might have been having a lovely time, but people like him were Meyer’s worst nightmare.
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For years, Chinese officials had turned a blind eye to the piracy networks, some of which were supported by government divisions themselves. But in the late 1990s, they had a new motivation to sophisticate their country’s movie-watching habits. China was mounting a bid to join the World Trade Organization. Membership would open China up to trade deals with other world powers, another validation of government reforms that had generated the fastest-rising GDP in history and transformed an expanse of farmland into a global economic powerhouse. Private companies in China would be able to rise to the level of the state-run firms, further realizing Deng’s decision to integrate some free-market elements into his country. It was not just Zhang’s family who were suddenly able to afford to send a son to a better school or buy him a VHS player. Across China, Deng’s reforms had led to troves of Chinese citizens taking new jobs in urban areas, helping lift hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. The percentage of Chinese workers making a living in agriculture plummeted as a result, while the service and industry sectors grew. In 1960 about 85 percent of people lived in rural areas, a share that stayed stagnant until the late 1970s, when it began a sharp decline. By 2015, only about 45 percent still lived outside cities.
In order to gain acceptance to the WTO, China needed a U.S. endorsement, which meant it needed to change how it conducted business with a host of American industries. The deals and concessions that China made would eventually fill hundreds of pages of an agreement. Hollywood, like the carmakers and farmers of America, didn’t waste the opportunity. Studios lobbied for intellectual property protections that would curtail the piracy operations—and called for an increase in the number of movies let into Chinese theaters each year, then still capped at ten.
In November 1999, the U.S. and China reached an agreement that cleared the way for China’s entry into the WTO in 2001. President Bill Clinton hailed it as a transformative moment for the world economy. The agreement opened a once-impenetrable market to dozens of industries—crops, cars, telecom—eager for a share of that new Chinese disposable income. Hollywood’s win in the agreement: the number of movies permitted into the country each year would double from ten to twenty.
Chinese leaders accelerated their urbanization campaign soon afterward, making over their country from one of rural hamlets to one of shiny new cities. But new cities required new attractions if they were going to lure folks from the countryside. Grocery stores, parks, and hospitals sprang up. So did movie theaters, which Meyer decided, in an effort to get those fans of Hollywood to pay Hollywood, he was going to build himself.
The strategy had worked before. Meyer’s team would identify a foreign market with potential and seed a theatrical ecosystem to boost their overseas grosses. In Europe, for instance, Warner Bros. analysts had noticed that the prime moviegoing season was not the summer, as it was in the U.S. Why? European theaters were big boxes in city centers, often with no air-conditioning or concession stands. Warner Bros. moved in with a multiplex of its own, exporting the big-seat, big-auditorium, air-conditioned model that was sprouting up in American neighborhoods. Moviegoers started showing up—to watch Warner Bros. movies and those of its competitors. Once the better, Warner-branded theater stole business, other owners would start adding amenities to match the new competition. Soon a habit of moviegoing would form. Warner Bros. was in the movie business, not the theater business—so it didn’t mind where the films played, as long as the improved theaters increased the number of tickets sold overall. In fact, once tickets were selling at a regular clip, Warner Bros. would sell its original theater, leaving in its wake the moviegoing culture it had created.
In 2003 the studio decided it needed to build theaters in China that were appealing enough to counter the ease and ubiquity of pirated-video shops. For decades, Chinese citizens had associated moviegoing with watching a party-promoted video projected onto a screen in a field, surrounded by neighbors summoned for the experience, or in dilapidated auditoriums devoid of concession stands or comfortable seating. Warner Bros. would bring the goods. Per Chinese rules, they would need a local partner to do business in the country—a rule put in place to ensure that no foreign entity grew too powerful or capitalized on Chinese citizens without some benefit flowing back to China. Warner Bros. found the perfect partner in a real estate conglomerate then riding high on the expansion of China’s cities.
Dalian Wanda Group was the country’s biggest developer of that quintessential symbol of an ascendant middle class: the shopping mall. As Chinese people moved into metropolises, a Wanda mall would often greet them—a multistoried attraction that included shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. Adopting the strategy of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. founder, most Wanda malls included a movie theater to provide a steady stream of foot traffic. Under the terms of the agreement with Warner Bros., Wanda would pay for the construction of these new theaters, while Warner would provide the technical know-how it had used to construct multiplexes in other countries. Once the theaters were built in Wuhan, Beijing, Zhengzhou, and other cities, they would be branded Warner Wanda Cinemas, their designs including the iconic Warner Bros. shield logo and characters from its Looney Tunes brand. It was an easy trade-off: for its knowledge of how the theater business worked, Warner Bros. would gain unique access to the moviegoers it wanted to adore its movies—and finally get them to pay to see them.
Under the deal, announced in early 2004, Warner Bros. shared with Wanda a trove of data and information. Building a movie theater was more complicated than just setting up a giant room. The studio had developed algorithms that determined the best location for a theater based on factors like population hubs or access to public transportation. It knew the technical specifications for an auditorium with the perfect screen-to-seat ratio and picture quality. Concession stands and surround sound, which had proved appealing in other countries, would be included, too.
If the theater strategy worked, it would be a game changer for Hollywood. The Chinese box office was growing but still operated at a fraction of its potential—in 2005 its annual box-office grosses matched those of Switzerland. A “hit” in 2005 was a movie like the disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, which made a whopping $10 million. The next year, the adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code took off, making $13 million on its way to passing Pearl Harbor as the country’s second-most-successful import after Titanic. The government hastily pulled the movie from theaters after realizing that it would eat into the box-office share of several party propaganda films on the schedule. No film was going to replicate the performance of Titanic.
Building more theaters that sucked business from the pirates’ market might help change that. But the deal Wanda had signed with Warner was going to give the studio a 51 percent ownership stake after seven years, at which point it would likely sell the venture to another firm at a profit. The Chinese government, however, had rules against foreign companies taking a majority position in domestic companies, one of several protectionist measures in place that executives said created an unfair playing field. Soon after announcing the partnership, Warner Bros. executives learned that the terms had changed, and the new conditions were not up for negotiation. Warner would not be the majority owner but instead a minority stakeholder.
Wanda wasn’t kicking Warner out of the agreement, but it was making it nearly impossible for the studio to continue doing business with it. If Warner Bros. couldn’t manage the locations, it had no way of ensuring that the theaters didn’t operate in a way that damaged its reputation. Some theaters in China were home to fishy ticket-buying schemes. Others played pirated movies in their auditoriums. The last thing Warner Bros. wanted was to be called out by another studio for profiting off pirated movies in its theaters. As with many similar situations in China, it was always unclear whether the decision to alter the arrangement originated at the company or with the government.
As they weighed what to do, executives wondered whether the American rush toward China was going to come back to haunt them. A clash of values was inevitable. Was the prospect of billions of dollars in new revenue blinding American executives to the fact that they were getting the raw end of the deal—always having to find ways to benefit Chinese partners, and without any guarantee they would emerge unscathed?
Warner backed out of the theater deal. Wanda’s chairman, Wang Jianlin, though, already had Warner Bros.’ blueprints and business plans for building better movie theaters. It was a galling turn of events, one that would have immediately led to arbitration and lawsuits in the U.S. Some Warner executives, however, were quietly relieved to see the deal dry up. Their ultimate goal was supporting a legitimate theatrical business in the country, and that would happen now whether they were involved or not. Besides, getting out of the messy business of managing theaters halfway around the world was going to save them some headaches. Still, the brazen theft, as some characterized Wanda’s actions, aggravated them. It would continue to bother them when they saw just what Wang Jianlin was able to do with the goods.
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It was not just the financial terms of Chinese deals that were new and confounding to Hollywood. If American studios were going to enjoy access to Chinese moviegoers, executives would need to reframe their thinking about what was allowed in the country and what of their output ran ideologically counter to the motives of the state. In these early days, confusion reigned about what exactly the Chinese took issue with. No one in Los Angeles planned on shipping the next Basic Instinct over for approval by Chinese censors, but innocuous movies were getting rejected. Studio chiefs appealed to Glickman at the Motion Picture Association of America. His job was maintaining warm relations between his studios and foreign markets, much as his predecessors had done as the industry wove its way around the world.
In 2004, Universal Pictures had failed to get a forgettable comedy called In Good Company into Chinese theaters. This was not the kind of film the studio expected to see rejected. In Good Company starred Topher Grace as a young business executive who climbs the corporate ladder and becomes the boss of an older colleague who happens to be the father of his new girlfriend—a classic tale of upstart ambition, complicated by love and an ignorance of work-life balance. Glickman approached a Communist Party contact. This movie, he explained, was rated PG-13, with no excessive violence, drug use, or graphic sex scenes. Its plot hardly challenged China’s worldview in the ways that Kundun had. It didn’t have anything to do with the Communist Party or even Communism. Why weren’t the Chinese people allowed to see it?
“You don’t understand,” the official told Glickman. “It’s not that you’re challenging the Chinese Communist Party. It’s that so many American movies have a basic premise of a little guy taking on the system, and that is at the heart of what we worry about.”
“The system” could be the principal at the local high school or the chairman of the company. If the narrative that the Chinese official described was going to present a problem to Chinese censors, then studio executives had to reevaluate core structural aspects of their films. The underdog narrative has underlaid much of American cinema, from the American origin story of rebel colonists fighting the British Empire to any David-versus-Goliath story, and has deepened Americans’ reflexive support for the outsider, the rebel with or without a cause: James Dean, Norma Rae, Ferris Bueller.
“When you show things that are critical of the state, even implicitly, or even challenging the authority of a mayor, that really triggers their belief that this could break apart this need for stability,” Glickman said. “Stability drives their thinking”—so much so that a Topher Grace rom-com was seen as a possible fissure.
For Glickman, it was an awakening to another core dynamic of the China-Hollywood relationship, one that would undergird every decision made by officials in charge of controlling their country’s cultural spigot. Even if Hollywood movies gained an entrance onto Chinese screens in order to lift its theaters out of near bankruptcy, there would be a check on their power through quotas and censorship that went deeper than cosmetic edits on racy material. As much as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms had opened China to this most American of products, China’s leaders did not lose sight of the greater priority.
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More than anything, Chinese officials made sure to stop American movies from monopolizing the marquee. Not only was there a cap on the number of Hollywood imports allowed in each year, but there was still a prolific output of Chinese propaganda or main-melody features required to play in auditoriums. American movies would need to exist alongside these Chinese anthems—a check, not unlike those seen in France and other protective markets, on Hollywood simply sweeping away all of the business and cultural cachet.
The career of actor Michael Gralapp offers a sense of what this arm of China’s entertainment industry produced as an alternative to Hollywood blockbusters. Gralapp was a Sioux City native who moved to China in his forties to take advantage of its post-WTO growth. In the early 2000s, Gralapp was managing a shopping program on Chinese TV. For fun, he acted in English-language productions at the Beijing Playhouse, breaking out in his most famous role: Oscar Madison, the slob of The Odd Couple. After one of his performances, a Chinese agent asked Gralapp to audition for a main-melody movie, a genre that was often in need of non-Chinese actors. Gralapp got the part and in 2007 made his big-screen debut, playing George Marshall in a Chinese drama about the country’s victories in World War II. It was merely a prelude to his signature role: Winston Churchill.
No topic then consumed Chinese propaganda producers more than the battles of World War II and Japanese atrocities, so simply existing as a balding, jowly white guy in China had given Gralapp the most unlikely of moonlighting gigs. He soon lost count of how many times he played the British prime minister. Though he isn’t British, Gralapp wanted to do right by the hero of Western history. He scrutinized his mannerisms and studied his speeches, watching videos to mimic how he sat or held his cane. The director’s degree of investment in his preparation varied.
“Some don’t even ask for a British accent,” he said.
The World War II parts forced Gralapp to consider the morality of such roles. One fellow actor always passed on the parts, worried they might jeopardize a desired future in American politics. Gralapp himself tweaked the language of the scripts, never delivering lines written in broken English, and turned down roles he called “Down with America!” parts. The main-melody movies he made, usually timed to a Communist Party anniversary, were like Hollywood films about Americans at war, he told himself. It was just that here, audiences were following Chinese soldiers and rooting for them instead of American ones. The only difference was the pervasive family-friendly tone these Chinese films struck. Gralapp always led the only soldiers in history who didn’t curse.
Gralapp got to know the fraternity of white American actors who had moved to China and suddenly found themselves in demand by casting agents. One of his acquaintances was the guy producers knew to call when they needed a Hitler. Many others were like Nathaniel Boyd, a Los Angeles native and air force veteran who studied abroad in China and got himself jobs playing every conceivable part a white man might play in a Chinese movie set in China: backpacker, missionary, soldier, businessman. After a while, he realized that to be a Western character in these movies required growing accustomed to playing the corrupting influence: “I’m either a guy who tries to chase a Chinese girl and I don’t get her, or I get her and something terrible happens to her,” he told me. In one movie, he wooed a Chinese woman whose father had fought in the Korean War and was devastated to see his daughter fall for an American.
Gralapp was a small player in a much larger infrastructure of production that churned out pro-China messaging with new fervor in the decade following Tiananmen Square, the ultimate break in the stability Glickman’s associate had described. Though Top Gun or Rambo can be called American propaganda, often by critics in America, the term was embraced by Chinese authorities, who had a heavy hand in producing such movies. Like an early Hollywood studio chief with a list of players under contract, these officials, as much today as in the 1980s and 1990s, have access to directors, writers, and actors who have little choice but to agree to the job. The movies are often tied to a prominent anniversary that the party wants to celebrate and use as a chance to boost national patriotism. It could be the founding of the party, or the army, or the People’s Republic. When a director is contacted to helm such a feature, there is little room for negotiation—in the euphemisms of China, the directors are “requested” to make such a film, or “given the opportunity.” Even onetime state agitators like Chen Kaige take the gigs. A political currency system takes shape, one that rewards participation in propaganda features with easier approvals for commercial films down the line—a “one for you, one for me” model that savvy Chinese directors have perfected.
