Hollywood is coming to China

[wushijiao]

Here's an interesting artcile. Among the highlights:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/04/business/media/04film.html

Drawn by China's fast-growing economy, inexpensive film production sites and its increasingly popular martial arts and feature films - most notably "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000 - Western studios are stepping up their presence here and looking to eventually turn China into a major film production base.

Hollywood executives also say they are making plans to produce and invest in movies with a Chinese theme or Chinese language movies that could later be exported to the rest of the world. And American studios are laying the foundation to produce movies solely for China's domestic film market.

Maybe this should go in the business section.

[Outofin]

This is good! I think Chinese movie industry has a huge potential. They already have great expertise but are short of investments.

And American studios are laying the foundation to produce movies solely for China's domestic film market.

But this maybe a bad idea. They probably will loss money. I think Chinese will love Hollywood movies more than Hollywood-made-for-Chinese movies.

[wushijiao]

There always a debate about whether Hero or CTHD are good movies. See:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5091-hero-good-or-bad&page=1&pp=10

These debates will grow exponentially.

I think Chinese will love Hollywood movies more than Hollywood-made-for-Chinese movies.

I agree with that.

If Hollywood produces movies for the Chinese market, but still wants to make significant money overseas, the movies are probably going to disapoint Chinese audiences.

The problem is that masses in foreign audiences have little understanding of Chinese culture. Any scene that isn't directly adding excitment or entertainment will be too slow for foreign audiences.

For example, I used to show Hollywood movies to my Chinese students on a regular basis. I've developed a 6th sense for recognizing what goes over well and what doesn't. What doesn't go over well:

1) Long scenes of dialogue

2) Any period of 30 seconds that builds towards something else. For example, I showed the movie "Heat" to 20 people. All but 3 left before the movie ended because they thought it was too boring. Personally, I love the scene when De Niro and Al Paccino sit down at the coffee shop and have a respectfful talk as adversaries. This scene directly contributes to the power of the ending. However, it was too boring for most students who really couldn't follow what was happening. On the other hand, movies like October Sky (which isn't bad) go over really well because there is not a period of more than 10 seconds in the movie that isn't directly entertaining or moving the plot forward.

Likewise, Tarentino with Jackie Brown wanted to give the viewer a lot of semi-meaningless dialogue that would hopefully add to the power of how characters react to events later in the movie. It seems to me, many good Chinese films have this quality, dialogue scenes that can't be considered action packed, but in hindsight the viewer can appreciate the dialogue scene's value as the film goes on, exploring the lives of ordinary characters. Hollywood will most likely kill this in order to make movies that go form an action scene, quickly to love scene, quickly back to action. Just as McDonalds represents American food to non-Americans, and "Sweet and Sour Pork" and mysterious "Fortune Cookies" represent Chinese food to non-Chinese, movies will lose their original flavor and become bland and filled with mental lard in order to fit the lowest common denominator.

3) Sex scenes. These don't go over well usually with Chinese audiences. It will be interesting to see how they will try to give Western audiences their yellow scenes while also aiming at the Chinese market.

I think the good news is that as Western audiences watch more Chinese movies, they will probably be able to accept greater and greater amounts of Chinese culture in their movies. Also, Hollywood will probably help China tremendously as far as having access to massive distribution abroad, and of course raw investment capital.

[skylee]

2) Any period of 30 seconds that builds towards something else. For example, I showed the movie "Heat" to 20 people. All but 3 left before the movie ended because they thought it was too boring. Personally, I love the scene when De Niro and Al Paccino sit down at the coffee shop and have a respectfful talk as adversaries. This scene directly contributes to the power of the ending. However, it was too boring for most students who really couldn't follow what was happening. On the other hand, movies like October Sky (which isn't bad) go over really well because there is not a period of more than 10 seconds in the movie that isn't directly entertaining or moving the plot forward.

I like "Heat" a lot, especially De Niro's almost-empty house ...