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Filmmakers with local heroes
and digital technologies are disrupting
Hollywood’s global advantage.
BY BRUCE FEIRSTEINThe dawn
of the Chinese
blockbuster
In the fall of 2004, I was invited to speak about writing James
Bond movies and video games at the Golden Eagle Film and TV
Arts Festival in Changsha, China. Odds are you’ve never heard of
the city, or the festival — just as I hadn’t, before I agreed to go. But
like most things in China outside Beijing and Shanghai, the size and
the wealth of Changsha, and the importance of the Golden Eagle
festival, took me by surprise. Located 1,500 miles south of Beijing,
Changsha was a thoroughly modern metropolis, with a population
roughly the size of Houston’s, where high-end European luxury cars
were not uncommon on the streets, and old industrial lofts had been
turned into chic little restaurants where waiters in black Armani T-
shirts served US$100 bowls of shark-fin soup. And the festival itself,
an annual conference of media executives and content creators from
all over China, took place in an ultramodern convention center and
television broadcast facility, ringed by a condominium complex and
an amusement park that would have felt right at home in Los Ange-
les. The keynote speaker was Viacom chair Sumner Redstone.fea
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