Chan Is Missing
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Chan Is Missing Hong Kong Creatives in China’s Orbit Michael Curtin Peter Ho-Sun Chan is one of the most successful directors in the Chinese film industry, but, unlike his counterparts in Hollywood or Mumbai, he is still looking for a home. Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1962, lived in Thailand as a teenager, and attended the University of Southern California as an undergraduate. He started working in the movie business during the 1980s, first in marketing and then as an assistant director, apprenticed to some of the leading lights of Hong Kong’s golden age, including Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and John Woo. During the early 1990s, when Peter got his first chance to helm a feature film, he revealed a deft touch with urban melodramas, churning out a highly successful string of movies aimed at young adults (Comrades, 1996; Age of Miracles, 1996; He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, 1994). At that time, the Hong Kong industry was booming, but its success was tinged with anxiety about the upcoming handover of the territory to the People’s Republic of China. “People who could emigrate would do so,” recalls Chan. “There was a feeling that you should make as much money as you could prior to the handover since everything after that would be a big question mark.”1 Media Fields Journal no. 2 (2011) 2 Chan is Missing Peter Ho-Sun Chan at the 45th Golden Horse Awards, 2008. Source: Sulekha.com Chan, like many of his peers, began looking for other options and he has been on the move ever since. He took a shot at Hollywood in 1999, where he directed The Love Letter for Dreamworks, starring Kate Capshaw and Tom Selleck. Uncomfortable with Tinseltown corporate protocols, he then started his own Asian distribution company and took a turn at regional coproductions, working with filmmakers in Thailand and Korea. Most recently, and most reluctantly it seems, he has developed coproductions targeted at mainland China (e.g., The Warlords, 2007), a market that now figures prominently in the calculations of most Hong Kong filmmakers. Yet such ventures are fraught with challenges that include censorship, cronyism, piracy, and a general lack of financial transparency.2 Many filmmakers have complained about these problems and yet the People’s Republic of China 3 Media Fields Journal looms ever larger in their calculations, engendering a significant shift in the geography of Chinese-language cinema. Warlords (dir. Peter Chan, 2007) Peter Chan claims that today the shrewdest strategy for a Chinese director is to pursue an artistic vision without allegiance to any particular audience or locale.3 That’s a big change from the late decades of the twentieth century, when Hong Kong was the center of the Chinese commercial movie business and filmmakers consciously fashioned their products primarily for the local audience. Indeed, the city was then renowned for midnight premiers, where cast and crew would mingle among the moviegoers, taking the pulse of the audience and sometimes adapting the final cut accordingly. Movies were made for locals and their response in turn acted as a rough predictor of overseas success, largely because the city was regarded as a cultural tastemaker. Hong Kong was, moreover, a magnet for creative talent from the far reaches of Greater China and the epicenter celebrity culture. Aspiring 4 Chan is Missing talent saw Hong Kong as the most promising place to build a career and Chinese movie executives saw it as the best place to raise financing, recruit labor, and launch projects. My recent research attempts to capture this spatial dynamic through the analysis of “media capital,” a concept that at once directs attention to the leading status of particular cities and to the transnational regimes of accumulation that promote the concentration of resources in specific locales.4 Media capitals are powerful geographic centers that tap human, creative, and financial resources within their spheres of circulation in order to fashion products that serve the distinctive needs of their audiences. Their influence is dependent upon their ability to monitor and discern the imaginary worlds of their audiences and to gather and operationalize resources within their cultural domain. A media capital’s success is therefore relational and its preeminence is subject to competition from other cities that aspire to capital status. Dubai, for example, is self-consciously attempting to challenge the leadership of Beirut within the sphere of Arab satellite television and Miami has recently arisen as a transnational competitor to Mexico City. Media capital encourages a spatial examination of the shifting contours of production and distribution, which both shape and are shaped by the imaginary worlds of audiences. Such research seeks to understand why some locales become centers of media activity and to discern their relations to other locales. Media capitals emerge out of a complex play of historical forces and are therefore contingently produced within a crucible of transnational competition. Those cities that rise to prominence exhibit a shared set of characteristics with respect to institutional structure, creative capacity, and regulatory policy. Institutionally, media capitals tend to flourish where companies show a resolute fixation on the tastes and desires of audiences. In order to cater to such tastes, they adopt and adapt cultural influences from near and far, resulting in hybrid styles and aesthetics. Such eclecticism and volatility is moderated by star and genre systems of production and promotion that help to make texts intelligible and attractive to diverse audiences. The bottom line for successful firms is always popularity and profitability. Although often criticized for pandering to the lowest common denominator, commercial film 5 Media Fields Journal and TV studios are relentlessly innovative, as they avidly pursue the shifting nuances of fashion and pleasure. Profitability is derived from structured creativity that feeds expansive (and expanding) distribution systems. Such systems integrate marketing considerations into the conceptual stages of development and financing. Media capitals therefore emerge where regimes of accumulation are purposefully articulated to the protean logics of popular taste. Just as importantly, media capital tends to thrive in cities that foster creative endeavor, making them attractive destinations for aspiring talent. The research literature on industrial clustering shows that creative laborers tend to migrate to places where they can land jobs that allow them to learn from peers and mentors, as well as from training programs that are sponsored by resident craft organizations. Job mobility and intra-industry exchanges further facilitate the dissemination of skills, knowledge, and innovations. Thus a culture of mutual learning becomes institutionalized, helping to foster the reproduction and enhancement of creative labor.5 Workers are also inclined to gravitate to places that are renowned for cultural openness and diversity.6 It’s remarkable, for example, that the most successful media capitals are usually port cities with long histories of transnational cultural engagement. It’s also noteworthy that national political capitals tend not to emerge as media capitals, largely because modern governments seem incapable of resisting the temptation to tamper with independent media institutions. Consequently, media capitals tend to flourish at arm’s length from the centers of state power, favoring cities that are in many cases disdained by political and cultural elites (e.g., Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Beirut). Successful media enterprises tend to resist censorship and clientelism, and are moreover suspicious of the state’s tendency to promote an official and usually ossified version of culture. Instead, these enterprises absorb and refashion indigenous and traditional cultural resources while also incorporating foreign innovations that may offer advantages in the market, even though such appropriations tend to invite criticism from state officials and high-culture critics. The resulting mélange is emblematic of the contradictory pressures engendered by global modernity, at once dynamic and seemingly capricious yet also shrewdly strategic. Their choice of location is no less calculated: media capital tends to accumulate in cities that are 6 Chan is Missing relatively stable, quite simply because entrepreneurs will only invest in studio construction and distribution infrastructure where they can operate without interference over the long term. The conditions of media capital are dependent on converging forces and therefore subject to the vicissitudes of history. In 1997, when the People’s Republic of China reclaimed Hong Kong after more than a century of British colonial rule, the movie industry was abuzz with speculation about the handover’s impact on “Hollywood East.” The terms of transfer provided a fifty-year transition period in which the city would operate as a relatively autonomous Special Administrative Region, but it was clear that Beijing intended to exert its authority and many believed it likely that government scrutiny of the media industries would increase significantly. This posed a problem for Hong Kong film and TV companies that were accustomed to producing satirical and ribald comedies, as well as fantasy, horror, and crime stories. The city’s creative class grew nervous as the deadline for transition approached, for the very genres that had proven most prosperous were likely to become targets of censors and propaganda