MCLC: why Hollywood kowtows to China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: why Hollywood kowtows to China
***********************************************************

Source: The Guardian (3/11/13):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2013/mar/11/hollywood-kowtows-to-ch
ina

Why Hollywood kowtows to China

Films set in Shanghai, Chinese scientists saving the day, Beijing
portrayed as the promised land … US film-makers are flattering their
way into the world's fastest-growing movie market

Last week North Korea threatened America with a nuclear strike. This
week sees the UK release of Red Dawn, which features a North Korean
invasion of the US. An impressive instance of Hollywood's
far-sightedness? Not quite.

Red Dawn is the reboot of a cold war thriller that's much cherished in
some quarters. Back in 1984, when the original appeared, the aggressor
could only have been the Soviet Union. With the new film comes a new
commie bogeyman – but it was not supposed to be North Korea. These
days, it's not so much Kim Jong-un's eccentric dictatorship that makes
Americans tremble, it's their newfound rival for superpower status,
China.

So, MGM's re-imaginers decided to reallocate Russia's role to the
Chinese People's Republic. Fancifully enough, they envisaged Beijing
"repossessing" an America that had defaulted on its huge Sino debt.
However, this storyline didn't go down well in China. When excerpts of
the script leaked out in 2010, they prompted the headline "US reshoots
cold war movie to demonise China" in the Beijing-based,
1.5m-circulation Global Times. Buyers told MGM that distributing Red
Dawn in China would prove problematic. So the studio decided on a
change of tack.

Unfortunately, the film had already been shot. No matter. During
post-production, $1m was spent on digitally erasing Chinese flags and
symbols and changing sequences and dialogue to turn the invaders into
North Koreans. Of course, Hollywood would never have dreamed of bowing
like this to Soviet displeasure, but China is different.

The world's most populous nation has become the second-largest
overseas market for American films. Its increasingly avid cinemagoers
can easily add $50m to a Hollywood movie's gross. The number of
screens in the country, already more than 11,000, is expected to
double by 2015. In a recent report, Ernst & Young predicted that
China's box office would overtake America's by 2020.

Sadly for movie-makers, this burgeoning treasure trove is guarded by a
censorious state. China's government imposes a quota on film imports
and keeps a careful eye on the content of those it allows through.
Back in the 90s, Disney, Sony and MGM all had their Chinese business
blocked after releasing the movies Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet and
Red Corner, all of which were deemed critical of the regime.

Nowadays, any such potential transgressions are usually nipped in the
bud. When censors objected to a bald Chinese pirate in Pirates of the
Caribbean: At World's End, he was edited out of the film's Chinese
version. Footage was similarly removed from Men in Black 3 because
unpleasant aliens had dared disguise themselves as Chinese restaurant
workers. In the Chinese version of Skyfall, references to prostitution
and corruption in China were removed or obscured in opaque subtitles.
All mention of the torture inflicted on Javier Bardem's villain when
he was an MI6 agent in Hong Kong was carefully expunged.

Accommodations like these are not enough for some film-makers, who opt
instead for proactive ingratiation. The setting of large sections of
Looper was transferred from Paris to Shanghai. In Battleship, it's
Hong Kong that is credited by Washington with divining the alien
origins of the earth's attackers. The 2010 remake of The Karate Kid
saw the young hero's family turned into importunate migrants leaving
decaying Detroit to seek a better future in thriving Beijing. In spite
of the film's title, the all-conquering martial art becomes kung fu
instead of karate, and the fount of all skill, wisdom and fortitude is
an altogether Chinese kung fu master.

It seems to pay off. Looper, like The Karate Kid a co-production with
a Chinese partner, was gifted a much sought-after Golden Week holiday
release; all-American blockbusters such as The Amazing Spider-Man and
The Dark Knight Rises are often forced to play against each other to
stop them squeezing out indigenous productions. Audiences, as well as
the authorities, seem to appreciate a Hollywood kowtow. In disaster
epic 2012, a White House staffer lavishes praise on Chinese scientists
when an ark they've designed saves civilisation. At this point in the
proceedings, filmgoers sometimes rose to deliver a spontaneous
standing ovation.

Among Hollywood's old guard, all this has provoked a certain amount of
disquiet. A producer, anonymous for fear of offending his industry's
new masters, was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as complaining: "It's
a clear-cut case – maybe the first I can think of in the history of
Hollywood – where a foreign country's censorship board deeply affects
what we produce."

There have been complaints that both America and the rest of the world
are being given an unduly rosy portrait of a repressive behemoth.
China's social injustices, human rights abuses and imperial
aspirations are, it's suggested, being discreetly veiled from view.

Still, what's happened with Red Dawn isn't exactly unprecedented.
During the first world war, Cecil B DeMille made a film called The
Cheat with a Japanese villain. In 1923 the film was reissued, but by
then Japan had become an American ally. Without benefit of digital
technology, the wily oriental was quickly turned into a Burmese ivory
king.

If Hollywood now finds itself cheerleading for an assertive
superpower, that isn't new either. For almost a century, Tinseltown
buttressed America's own hegemony by puffing up the American way to
sell more movie tickets on the home front. If economic success is
winning communist China a piece of that pie, well, put that down to
capitalism's market forces.