129Nevertheless, I still believed that Hollywood’s dominance in the international
tentpole category was unassailable. Especially after hearing the audience whoop
and cheer at a sold-out showing of Transformers: Dark of the Moon in a theater
just outside Tiananmen Square, where it struck me that there were only two
essential lines of dialogue in the movie, and they needed no translation at all:
“What the f—k is that?” and “Kill it!”
The cultural imperialism trap
By the end of my first decade in China, we’d made a few films, with middling
success. The one I was proudest of, Hong He, was a love story set on the border of
Vietnam and China, in the aftermath of the “American war” in Vietnam.
Between overnight flights to Beijing, I was still working as a screenwriter in
Hollywood, and loved working on American movies. But there was something
about the American film industry’s attitude toward China that had begun to
gnaw at me. Hollywood wanted — no, needed — the Chinese box office to
make those high-budget tentpole movies profitable. A $200 million movie might
break even in America, but the real profit came from overseas markets, and Chi-
na was about to become the biggest market of all. Nonetheless, the American
film executives who were now showing up in Beijing seemed both complacent
about Hollywood’s dominance and clueless about the Chinese market they were
so determined to capture.
Every month, it seemed, a Hollywood executive would appear at a Chi-
nese-American film conference and deliver the same “we know how to make
big movies” declaration I’d made a decade before. I cringed every time I heard
it, embarrassed not just by my own impetuousness 10 years earlier, but by the
snickers and eye rolls that I saw from my Chinese colleagues hearing it now. As
one of my mainland friends snickered, “What’s with these guys? Do they think
we’re still using shadow puppets?”
It also seemed as though every month, yet another Hollywood execu-
fea
ture (^)
tec
h (^) &
(^) in
no
va
tio
n
129