MCLC: Run Run Shaw dies at 106

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Run Run Shaw dies at 106
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Source: NYT (1/6/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/movies/run-run-shaw-movie-mogul-seen-as-c
reator-of-kung-fu-genre-dies-at-106.html

Run Run Shaw, Movie Mogul Seen as Creator of Kung Fu Genre, Dies at 106
By JONATHAN KANDELL

Run Run Shaw, the colorful Hong Kong media mogul whose name was synonymous
with low-budget Chinese action and horror films — and especially with the
wildly successful kung fu genre, which he is largely credited with
inventing — died on Tuesday at his home in Hong Kong. He was 106.

His company, Television Broadcasts Limited, announced his death in a
statement.

Born in China, Mr. Shaw and his older brother, Run Me, were movie pioneers
in Asia, producing and sometimes directing films and owning lucrative
cinema chains. His companies are believed to have released more than 800
films worldwide.

After his brother’s death in 1985, Mr. Shaw expanded his interest in
television and became a publishing and real estate magnate as well. For
his philanthropy, much of it going to educational and medical causes, he
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and showered with public expressions of
gratitude by the Communist authorities in Beijing.

Mr. Shaw enjoyed the zany glamour of the Asian media world he helped
create. He presided over his companies from a garish Art Deco palace in
Hong Kong, a cross between a Hollywood mansion and a Hans Christian
Andersen cookie castle. Well into his 90s he attended social gatherings
with a movie actress on each arm. And he liked to be photographed in a tai
chi exercise pose, wearing the black gown of a traditional mandarin.

Asked what his favorite films were, Mr. Shaw, a billionaire, once replied,
“I particularly like movies that make money.”

Run Run Shaw was born Shao Yifu in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, in 1907. As
a child, he moved to Shanghai, where his father ran a profitable textile
business. According to some Hong Kong news media accounts, Run Run and Run
Me were English-sounding nicknames the father gave his sons as part of a
family joke that played on the similarity of the family name to the word
rickshaw.

Evincing little interest in the family business, Run Run and Run Me turned
instead to entertainment. The first play they produced was called “Man
From Shensi,” on a stage, as it turned out, of rotten planks. As the
brothers often told the story, on opening night the lead actor plunged
through the planks, and the audience laughed. The Shaws took note and
rewrote the script to include the incident as a stunt. They had a hit, and
in 1924 they turned it into their first film.

After producing several more movies, the brothers decided that their
homeland, torn by fighting between Nationalists and Communists, was too
unstable. In 1927 they moved to Singapore, which was then part of British
colonial Malaya.

Besides producing their own films in Singapore, the brothers imported
foreign movies and built up a string of theaters. Their business boomed
until the Japanese invaded the Malay Peninsula in 1941 and stripped their
theaters and confiscated their film equipment. But according to Run Run
Shaw, he and his brother buried more than $4 million in gold, jewelry and
currency in their backyard, which they dug up after World War II and used
to resume their careers.

With the rise of Hong Kong as the primary market for Chinese films, Run
Run Shaw moved there in 1959, while his brother stayed behind looking
after their Singapore business.

In Hong Kong, Run Run Shaw created Shaw Movietown, a complex of studios
and residential towers where his actors worked and lived. Until then, the
local industry had turned out 60-minute films with budgets that rarely
exceeded a few thousand dollars. Shaw productions ran up to two hours and
cost as much as $50,000 — a lavish sum by Asian standards at the time.

Mr. Shaw went on to plumb the so-called dragon-lady genre with great
commercial success. Movies like “Madame White Snake” (1963) and “The Lady
General” (1965) offered sexy, combative, sometimes villainous heroines,
loosely based on historical characters. And by the end of the 1960s, he
had discovered that martial-arts films in modern settings could make even
more money.

His “Five Fingers of Death” (1973), considered a kung fu classic, was
followed by “Man of Iron” (1973), “Shaolin Avenger” (1976) and many
others. Critics dismissed the films as artless and one-dimensional, but
spectators crowded into the theaters to cheer, laugh or mockingly hiss at
the action scenes. To ensure that his films were amply distributed, Mr.
Shaw’s chain of cinemas grew to more than 200 houses in Asia and the
United States. “We were like the Hollywood of the 1930s,” he said. “We
controlled everything: the talent, the production, the distribution and
the exhibition.”

Other Hong Kong producers, directors and actors called Mr. Shaw’s methods
iron-fisted. In 1970, Raymond Chow, a producer with Mr. Shaw’s company,
Shaw Brothers, left to form his own company, Golden Harvest, which gave
more creative and financial independence to top directors and stars.

Mr. Chow’s biggest success, and Mr. Shaw’s most notable loss, was his
decision to bankroll Bruce Lee. Mr. Lee initially approached Shaw
Brothers, which turned down his demand for a long-term contract of $10,000
per film. Golden Harvest then offered Mr. Lee creative control and
profit-sharing.

“The Big Boss,” better known as “Fists of Fury” (1971), was Mr. Lee’s
first film with Golden Harvest, and it broke all Hong Kong box-office
records. Other big-name actors and directors flocked to Golden Harvest,
breaking Shaw Brothers’ virtual monopoly.

But Run Run Shaw had already expanded beyond the film industry. His
investments in the new phenomenon of Asian television were to prove even
more lucrative than his movie productions. In 1972 he began Television
Broadcasts (TVB), and he soon gained control of 80 percent of the Hong
Kong market. TVB churned out 12 hours of its own programming a day, much
of it soap operas and costume dramas that riveted Chinese television
viewers on the mainland and throughout Southeast Asia.

As his fortune grew, Mr. Shaw donated generously to hospitals, orphanages
and colleges in Hong Kong, for which he was awarded the Commander of the
Order of the British Empire in 1974 and a knighthood in 1977. In 1990 he
donated 10 million pounds to help establish the Run Run Shaw Institute of
Chinese Affairs at Oxford University, where his four children had studied.
In 2004 he established the Shaw Prize, an international award for research
in astronomy, mathematics and medicine. As Hong Kong’s days as a British
colony dwindled, Mr. Shaw stepped up his philanthropy in China. He
contributed more than $100 million to scores of universities on the
mainland and raised money in support of Chinese victims of floods and
other natural disasters. Chinese leaders toasted him for his generosity at
banquets in Beijing.

Mr. Shaw’s philanthropy did not extend to the United States, but he was
once viewed as a white knight in New York. In 1991, when Macy’s was on the
verge of bankruptcy, he bought 10 percent of its preferred shares for $50
million, becoming one of the largest shareholders in R. H. Macy & Company.

The investment had a personal aspect. Ten years earlier, Mitchell
Finkelstein, the son of Macy’s chief executive, Edward S. Finkelstein, had
married Hui Ling, a Shaw protégée who appeared in many of his movies. Mr.
Shaw met the older Finkelstein at the wedding, and they became friends.

In later years, the aging mogul himself seemed in need of help to keep his
media empire intact. Concerned with the rise of cable and satellite
television, he sold a 22 percent stake in TVB to Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corporation in 1993.

Mr. Shaw had intended to maintain control over his media business by
balancing his one-third share in TVB against Mr. Murdoch’s 22 percent and
the 24 percent held by Robert Kuok, one of Hong Kong’s richest
entrepreneurs. But the balance of power shifted when Mr. Murdoch sold his
equity to Mr. Kuok shortly afterward. Then, in 1996, in Hong Kong’s first
case of a hostile takeover, Mr. Kuok forced Mr. Shaw to sell him his
shares in TVE, the lucrative publishing, music and real estate subsidiary
of TVB. The deal reduced Mr. Shaw’s TVB stake to 23 percent.

Mr. Shaw’s business situation was also hindered by his inability to groom
credible successors. His sons, Vee Meng and Harold, were at one time
heavily involved in the family enterprises, but their relationship with
him had become strained.

Even after turning 90, Mr. Shaw maintained a powerful presence in the Hong
Kong film world through his control of Shaw Studios. But a newer
generation of independent producers came to dominate the Hong Kong market
with their own violent brand of police and gangster films.