HONG KONG BABYLON
New Yorker, August 7, 1995
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS The cult of Hong Kong movies is growing. Why are they so outrageous and violent? It may have something to do with the industry that produces them.
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BY FREDRIC DANNEN
JACKIE CHAN, the most popular film actor in the world, stepped out onto the ledge of a clock tower. More than fifty feet below, in a town square, a group of onlookers waited anxiously to see him jump. They had been waiting for days. The onlookers were the cast and crew of “Project A,” a comedy-action film about pirates on the China Sea in turn-of-the-century Hong Kong. In reality, the time was 1982, and Jackie Chan was the new king of the Hong Kong cinema, the colony’s biggest draw since Bruce Lee died, a decade earlier. Chan, like Lee, had once been a kung-fu artist, but now he was something different—a comedy-action star who did his own stunts. The scene in the town square called for Chan, who has been cornered by pirates, to dangle Harold Lloyd-style from the clock’s minute hand, then plummet through two cloth awnings and hit the ground—all in one take, to make it clear that Chan was not using a safety mat. The crew had pretested the stunt, in a manner of speaking, by tossing a sack of topsoil off the ledge, but the test was not terribly scientific, and Chan could not be certain that the fall wouldn’t kill him. “I just don’t want to go down,” Chan recalls thinking. “Scared.” So the entire production of “Project A” came to a halt for more than a week while he stood on the ledge every day, steeling himself. Finally, he announced that he was ready, let go of the clockface, and, as planned, tore through the first awning. But instead of tearing through the second awning, he inadvertently bounced off it, was flipped upside down, and hit the ground head first. By some miracle of Hong Kong luck, he was not seriously injured. A few days later, he tried the stunt again. This time, it went perfectly.
When I met Chan one morning, at his office building, on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong, he had recently broken his ankle jumping from a bridge onto a hovercraft for his new movie, “Rumble in the Bronx.” I got there early and waited for him downstairs, expecting him to arrive with an entourage. Instead, he walked in unaccompanied and, as if I might not recognize him, said, in a quiet voice, “I am Jackie.” He was dressed in black pants, a matching vest, and a white shirt, and carried a cellular phone. Chan is about five feet nine, lean and muscular, with a Beatles haircut, and a handsome face offset by a pug nose. The nose, which he has broken three times, gives him an underdog look, which is central to his screen persona. He escorted me upstairs, moving slowly and stiffly. Chan is now forty-one, and more than twenty years of stunt work have wrought permanent skeletal damage. His most serious accident occurred in Yugoslavia in 1986, during the filming of “Armour of God,” an Indiana Jones-style adventure: he had no trouble executing the film’s most dangerous stunt, in which he jumps off a mountain and lands on top of a drifting hot-air balloon, but while he was performing a relatively easy leap onto a tree he turned to make sure the camera would catch his face, missed a branch, fell forty feet, and hit his head on a rock. He required brain surgery, and still has a hole in his skull.
Chan hoped that “Rumble in the Bronx,” which he filmed primarily in Vancouver, would appeal to an American audience, for he has had a long, perplexing romance with the United States. Though between 1980 and 1985 he appeared in four American films, including “The Cannonball Run” and its sequel, and starred in two—“The Big Brawl,” opposite Jose Ferrer, and “The Protector,” opposite Danny Aiello—he has yet to achieve fame here. But he is the biggest movie star in Asia, a far larger audience. A personal appearance by Chan in Taipei or Seoul or Tokyo can cause a riot. “In Asia,” he says, “I am ‘Jurassic Park.’ I am ‘E.T.’”
Hong Kong is often called Dongfang Haolaiwu, the Hollywood of the East. It produces more than two hundred features a year, and is the world’s second-largest exporter of films, after the United States. Besides entertaining Hong Kong’s own movie-mad populace, the colony’s films fill the movie theatres in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, and are immensely popular in South Korea and Japan. In mainland China, Hong Kong movies are pirated like crazy. Though for American audiences the movies remain cult films, the cult is growing rapidly. The Hong Kong festival held each summer at Cinema Village, in New York, is always a sellout, as was a recent Jackie Chan marathon there.
It must be said that the production values of Hong Kong films are not always the best. Budgets are minuscule by Hollywood standards: a million United States dollars is average, and four million is very big. Film companies are able to churn out features from start to finish in seven or eight weeks. Movies are edited as they are being shot, and post-production time is astonishingly brief. (I was told of one major film for which the shooting ended four days before the sneak preview.) Most Hong Kong movies are filmed without synchronized sound; the entire soundtrack is created afterward in a recording studio. Often, top stars, including Jackie Chan, don’t even bother to dub in their own voices, but instead use voice doubles.
The majority of Hong Kong films have subtitles in Chinese and English—the former because written Chinese is the same for all the different spoken dialects, and the latter simply by tradition. Similarly, the movies have dual Chinese and English titles, and most top stars have Chinese and English names; Anita Mui, for example, is actually Mui Yim-fong. These conventions greatly assist the American fan, although the English subtitles can be disconcerting. (“After seeing Kitty…I had priapism!”)
The movies’ low budgets help explain why so much emphasis is placed on stunt work. The definitive moment in “Stone Age Warriors” (1991), a medium-budget shocker filmed in New Guinea among aboriginal headhunters, comes as the movie’s two heroines plunge over a hundred-foot waterfall; and the way the director, Stanley Tong, filmed the scene is a perfect illustration of the difference between Hollywood and Hong Kong. When Harrison Ford appears to dive over the raging waters of a dam in “The Fugitive,” it is an illusion created by means of a computer matting technique known as blue screen. Hong Kong directors cannot afford the blue screen, so Tong and his stunt assistant dressed up as the two heroines, tied themselves to some trees with wire, and went over the falls.
The Hong Kong community of male and female actors in leading roles is rather small; it does not take long for the same twenty or thirty faces to become familiar. When Hong Kong movie stars are on a hot streak, they can work at a pace that American film actors would find incomprehensible. For example, over the past decade, Andy Lau, who, like many top actors, is also a Cantonese-pop recording star, has appeared in more than seventy films. At his peak, in 1991, he averaged a movie a month, and during one stretch he was acting in four different movies a day, at as many locations, and sleeping in his car.
The overexposure of certain top names has to do with the unique economics of the film industry in Hong Kong. The theatre chains of Asia are so eager for new Hong Kong pictures that a movie company can pre-sell an as yet unproduced film, for a considerable sum, all around the Asian circuit. The only thing that matters is the cast. Indeed, many Hong Kong films are shot without a script. Anyone—literally, anyone—who can persuade a popular performer or two to appear in his movie can make the movie with little or no investment of his own. As a result, some of the most active movie producers in the colony during the past decade have been the triads—Hong Kong Chinese organized-crime figures—whose powers of persuasion compensate for their ignorance of film technique.
Perhaps the best way to describe the Hong Kong genre is to speak of its comic-book aesthetic: it is a cinema of incessant action, eye-popping effects, and cartoonlike violence. I think, for instance, of the tree-devil serpent in “A Chinese Ghost Story,” who saps the life of its victims with a mile-long tongue, and whose human form is an aging drag queen; the climactic shootout in “Full Contact,” which is filmed from the bullets’ point of view; the martial-arts star Jet Li in “Once Upon a Time in China,” fighting on a ladder suspended high above the ground like a seesaw; the psychotically evil male and female Siamese twins in “The Bride with White Hair,” who kill with a look; and Jackie Chan in “Police Story,” hanging from a speeding bus by an umbrella.
While certain stars—Chan, to name one—strive for wholesomeness, the level of sex and gore in the Hong Kong cinema is peerless. Popular, mainstream films shock the viewer in ways that no Hollywood studio would ever attempt. The gangster film “The Big Heat” (1988) opens with a shot of a power drill piercing a man’s hand. In “The Heroic Trio” (1993) three of the top actresses in Hong Kong—Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui, and Maggie Cheung—are costumed superheroines doing battle with a subterranean villain who is kidnapping babies he plans to train as his netherworld army; in one scene, two of the heroines encounter a group of five-year-old boys who already show signs of training, so they blow them up. In “Run and Kill” (1993) a man incinerates his enemy’s twelve-year-old daughter into charcoal, sets her corpse at the enemy’s feet, and mimics the girl’s voice, saying, “Daddy, I am so dark, can you still recognize me?”
Hong Kong films are mostly in Cantonese, the local dialect, which is considered rather less refined than the Mandarin dialect of mainland China and Taiwan, and is apparently better suited to commercial rather than art films. Hong Kong’s most internationally famous director is John Woo, a commercial filmmaker whose 1989 New Wave gangster movie “The Killer” is probably the best-known Cantonese-language film in the West. Woo, who has since been lured to Hollywood, has had a lot to do with the growing audience for Hong Kong movies here. (Until recently, most of the Chinese-language movies that have received national distribution in the United States have been art-house features in Mandarin from mainland China or Taiwan—films such as Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern” and Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine.”)
Perhaps another reason for the enhanced interest in Hong Kong films is the popularity of Quentin Tarantino, a fan of the genre, whose first feature, “Reservoir Dogs,” appropriates plot elements from a Hong Kong movie, Ringo Lam’s “City on Fire.” Miramax has given Tarantino his own distribution company, Rolling Thunder, through which he plans to release “Chungking Express,” a story of two lovelorn cops, directed by Wong Kar-wai, a member of Hong Kong’s small coterie of art-film directors. Miramax also plans to issue two Jackie Chan movies next year—”Drunken Master II,” the superb 1994 sequel to a Chan film from the late seventies; and “Crime Story,” a 1993 action film that, for a change, emphasizes Chan’s dramatic acting over his stunt work.
The eighties and early nineties were a glorious era for the industry, both creatively and financially. Innovators such as Wong Kar-wai and Tsui Hark, a master of the comic-strip style of Hong Kong filmmaking, flourished. After such a sustained boom, a down cycle was probably inevitable, and one set in about two years ago. Although movies featuring the biggest stars, such as Jackie Chan, the dramatic leading man Chow Yun-fat, and the comedian Stephen Chow, still draw huge crowds, over-all theatre attendance has declined thirty per cent since 1992. What is different and, to some people, disturbing about the current down cycle is that it comes at a time when the entire colony is nervous about its future, because of the ceremony that is to take place at midnight, June 30, 1997—the moment when a century and a half of British colonial rule will come to an end, and Hong Kong will revert to China. The atmosphere of “Take the money and run” has certainly not helped the film industry; a number of top people have left the business or, like John Woo, left Hong Kong. Those who remain feel some anxiety. Hong Kong directors who have filmed in China complain that they have encountered censorship, bureaucracy, and corruption. No one knows what to expect.
THE FIRST HONG KONG MOVIE, “To Steal a Roasted Duck,” was made in 1909 with financing from an American and with a director and cast from Shanghai. Until the early nineteen-fifties, both Shanghai and Hong Kong were major movie towns, but the nationalization of Shanghai’s private studios by the Communists left Hong Kong’s movie industry preeminent. After the war, Asia’s most powerful movie mogul was Run Run Shaw, one of four brothers from Shanghai who began producing and exhibiting films in the nineteen-twenties. In 1958, Run Run moved the Shaw Brothers operation to Hong Kong, and three years later he oversaw the completion of Movie Town, the largest studio complex ever built in Asia, on a forty-six-acre lot in Hong Kong’s Clearwater Bay. He was subsequently knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
The year Shaw Brothers relocated to Hong Kong, Run Run hired Raymond Chow, a former journalist and the son of the chairman of the Bank of China, as his head of advertising and publicity. Before long, Chow had moved up to head of production, a position he held for eleven years. “We were very close, but our relationship was strictly business,” Chow says of Sir Run Run. “I was never really a partner of Shaw Brothers. Had I been one, I would probably never have set up my own corporation.” The company that Chow founded—in 1970, along with Leonard Ho, who had been his right hand at Shaw Brothers—was Golden Harvest. It has gone on to become the biggest movie conglomerate in Hong Kong, while by 1986 Sir Run Run had all but withdrawn from movies to concentrate on television.
Chow, who is now in his late sixties, is a shy, slight, balding man with glasses, but as a boy he studied kung fu, and his appreciation of the martial arts proved fortunate. In 1970, he signed Bruce Lee—a dual Hong Kong and American citizen who had three years earlier played the role of Kato in the American television program “The Green Hornet.” Lee’s first chop-socky, “The Big Boss,” broke all previous box-office records in Asia when it was released, in 1971, and netted Golden Harvest a return of five hundred times its investment. After making two more hits the following year, Lee starred in an English-language film, “Enter the Dragon,” which was co-produced with Warner Bros. In July, 1973, when Lee was partway through filming a fifth feature, “Game of Death,” he died suddenly, at age thirty-two, of an edema in the brain caused by a reaction to an unprescribed painkiller.
Golden Harvest rebounded, first with comedies and then, beginning in the late seventies, with Jackie Chan, whose popularity in Asia has surpassed even Bruce Lee’s. Chan, who directs many of his own films, is a perfectionist, and his productions are the antithesis of Hong Kong’s rapid, assembly-line approach to filmmaking. “With a Jackie Chan movie, there is no schedule and no budget,” says his longtime manager, Willie Chan (no relation).
Chan often speaks of Buster Keaton, who also performed stunts of considerable bravado, as his idol and inspiration. (In one of Chan’s best films, “Project A II,” the 1987 sequel to “Project A,” the façade of a building collapses on him, but he passes safely through a window—a sight gag borrowed from Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill, Jr.”) While Keaton grew up in vaudeville, Chan grew up in a kind of travelling circus. He was born Chen Gang-shen, in Hong Kong, on April 7, 1954, and was an only child. His father, a cook, and his mother, a maid, were so poor, he says, that they offered to sell him for twenty-six dollars to the British doctor who delivered him. The doctor declined the offer, but when Chan was seven his parents moved to Canberra, Australia, abandoning him to a boarding school in Hong Kong called the China Drama Academy. There Yu Chan-yuan, a feared taskmaster, trained a hundred or so boys and girls in the art of Peking Opera—an entertainment in which acrobatics, mime, martial arts, and swordplay are as important as singing. The school was free, but Master Yu was entitled to whatever his students earned from their performances. Too young to understand his enrollment contract, Chan selected the longest possible term of indentured servitude—ten years.
The contract also permitted Master Yu to beat and starve his students at will, and he did so routinely. (The mainland-Chinese movie “Farewell My Concubine,” which realistically depicts a Peking Opera academy, contains scenes of child torture that are difficult to watch.) Chan and his fellow-students were awakened every morning at a quarter past five and put through their paces until midnight. They learned to sing by screaming in front of a brick wall, and to perform somersaults and backflips like Olympians. They learned to apply face paint. They learned to punch and kick, and to handle more than a dozen weapons, including the spear and the broadsword. Only about an hour a day was spent on formal education, and Chan still cannot read or write fluently in Chinese.
When Chan graduated, in 1971, the Peking Opera was dying in Hong Kong, and he discovered that his training best suited him to be a movie stuntman. He was eventually groomed to be the “new” Bruce Lee, and between 1976 and 1978 he made seven kung-fu quickies—all flops. Then he had an epiphany. “The audience like Bruce Lee and doesn’t like me,” he recalls thinking. “So how can I get rid of the Bruce Lee shadow and be Jackie Chan? Then I look at Bruce Lee all the film. O.K. When Bruce Lee kick high, I kick low. When Bruce Lee punch, he is the superhero; when I punch, ahh!”—he shakes his hand. “It hurts.” By combining kung fu and comedy, Chan was reborn a star. In “Drunken Master,” the 1978 movie that made him famous throughout Asia, Chan is a disrespectful young man who is taught how to fight by an old wino of an uncle.
Chan joined Golden Harvest in 1979, and the following year, with Chow’s support, he began a two-year residency in Los Angeles and enrolled in a language school in Beverly Hills to work on his English. After returning to Hong Kong, having failed to crack the American market, Chan decided that he would no longer make historical kung-fu films. He moved his stories into urban settings, and his new style of picture, beginning with “Project A,” probably has no better analogue than the action-filled comedies of the American silent-movie era. He also began a tradition of showing outtakes of flubbed stunts during the closing credits of his movies; at the end of “Project A,” for example, one can see him landing on his head after bouncing off the second awning of the clock tower. No one leaves a Jackie Chan movie during the closing credits.
With each new movie, Chan tried to outdo the outlandish stunts of the previous one. Before long, he was unable to get insurance. It was also becoming difficult for Golden Harvest to recruit stuntmen who were willing to act with him—”Everybody knows Jackie Chan is crazy,” he says—and soon he found it necessary to assemble his own stunt team, and pay their frequent hospital bills. (During the filming of “Police Story,” a 1985 movie about a maverick Hong Kong cop, two stuntmen crashed through the upper deck of a double-decker bus and hit the pavement, instead of landing on the car roof that was supposed to have cushioned their fall.) As usual, though, Chan leaves the most hair-raising moments for himself; in the last reel of “Police Story” he jumps off a railing in the atrium of a department store, slides down a seventy-foot string of exploding Christmas lights, and crashes through a glass ceiling. Because of a misunderstanding, the propman used house current instead of a low-voltage car battery to light the bulbs, and Chan could have been electrocuted. Luckily, he suffered no permanent injuries, although, he says, “all the skin peel off my hands.”
Over the years, the women in Chan’s movies have tended to be ornamental. “Jackie believes that women should not fight,” the director Stanley Tong says. Tong himself believes otherwise, so in 1992, when Golden Harvest asked Tong to direct Chan in “Police Story III,” better known as “Super Cop,” he cast the top action actress in Hong Kong, Michelle Yeoh, as Chan’s sidekick. Like Chan, Yeoh, who is now thirty-two, does her own stunts and fight scenes, and she is every bit as gutsy as he is. She comes from the small mining town of Ipoh, in West Malaysia, and she grew up speaking English and Malay before learning Chinese. She moved to England as a teen-ager, studied dance and drama, and acted in plays by Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Upon returning home, she won the Miss Malaysia beauty pageant. Then, in 1987, for a lark, she signed a contract to star in some action films for a new production company called D&B, one of whose co-founders, Dickson Poon, had made a fortune in wristwatches. Yeoh learned freestyle boxing, and discovered that she could punch and kick with tremendous speed. By the time she made her second feature, “Royal Warriors,” she was expected to do almost nothing but kick male butt. “My lines were like ‘Oh, well, we have to fight again,’“ she told me. In 1988, at the age of twenty-six, after completing her fourth movie, she was at the top of her profession, but at that point Dickson Poon married her and encouraged her to retire. Three years later, they were divorced, and Poon withdrew from film production.
“Super Cop” was Yeoh’s comeback picture, and she made the most of it by performing a number of dangerous stunts, such as rolling off the top of a van and onto the hood of a fast-moving sports car. In the movie’s climax, Yeoh hops on a motorbike, chases after a speeding train carrying the bad guys, rides off a steep hill, lands on the train, and ditches the bike on impact. (Yeoh learned how to ride a motorbike the day before she executed the stunt.) “When I see the movie now, I sit there and think I must have been mad,” she says. Jackie Chan, who had sat glumly by the side of the train during the filming of the motorbike stunt, after vainly trying to talk Yeoh out of doing it, could not allow himself to be bested. In the same scene, he leaps off a building, grabs the rope ladder of an airborne helicopter, dangles a thousand feet over the city of Kuala Lumpur, crashes through a billboard, and jumps onto the train.
IN HONG KONG, movie stars are refreshingly businesslike and unpampered, and movie publicists don’t even exist. But because gangsters exert so much control, those who work in the industry face problems that are far more complicated—and potentially lethal—than any faced by their American counterparts. Perhaps the closest the film industry comes to a temperamental actress is Anita Mui, with whom Jackie Chan has been linked romantically. Mui, who is full-lipped and sultry, is sometimes called the Madonna of Hong Kong, because besides being an actress she is a platinum-selling Cantonese-pop singer who likes to get down and dirty in her concerts and videos.
In the early morning hours of May 4, 1992, Mui found herself in serious trouble. She and some friends were giving a birthday party for her assistant in a private room at Take One, a karaoke club in Kowloon, where many movie industry people have their offices. It was prime time for Mui—a night owl, she is notoriously difficult to roust for a daytime shoot—but she should probably have known better than to show up at a karaoke bar, since they are popular hangouts for triads. (The word “triad” is used to denote both a member of a Chinese criminal society and the society itself.) As it happened, a man named Wong Long-wai, who was both a triad and a movie producer—not an unusual combination in Hong Kong—was in another part of the club that morning, with his wife and at least one business associate. Wong Long-wai was no one to trifle with. The triad to which he belonged, the 14K, was a powerful one, and he was the head of a particularly violent faction.
Sometime that morning, Wong learned that Mui was at the club, and he evidently asked her to have a drink with him and sing a song. A social encounter between a film star and a triad is likely to have bad consequences. The next day, the triad calls the star’s manager with the news that the star has promised to appear in the triad’s new film. Actors have reputedly been kidnapped and actresses raped for refusing to work for triads. Mui declined Wong’s invitation, but, according to testimony from one of Wong’s employees, she declined rudely—and in English. “Don’t speak to me in English. I don’t understand,” Wong said, to which Mui responded, in English, “So what?” Wong slapped her.
The incident should have ended there, but other Hong Kong triads besides the 14K had an interest in the movie business, and perhaps not all of them were inclined to overlook an assault on a movie star. The following evening, Wong Long-wai was leaving a restaurant in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong when he was confronted by three men, one of whom claimed to be Andely Chan, also known as the Tiger of Wan Chai. The Tiger was a race-car driver in his early thirties who had many friends in the movie industry—including, it was said, Anita Mui. He was also a triad. According to testimony in a subsequent trial, one of the Tiger’s men slashed Wong Long-wai’s arm with a knife, and the Tiger struck Wong in the face with a mobile phone. Wong was hospitalized for the knife wound. Two days later, someone slipped into Wong’s hospital ward and shot him fatally in the head. Anita Mui immediately fled Hong Kong.
Many people were quick to criticize Mui, including Jackie Chan, her old boyfriend; he said he had repeatedly warned her to stay away from night clubs. Chan is virtually the only movie star in Hong Kong who is immune to triad pressure—partly because he has the backing of a major, legitimate company, Golden Harvest, and partly because his movies are expensive and take a long time to make, whereas most triads want a fast buck. Willie Chan, Jackie’s manager, has had grievous problems with triads, however. Managers in the Hong Kong movie industry perform a role akin to that of Hollywood agents, except that they rarely have multiple clients; there are no Mike Ovitzes in Hong Kong. Willie Chan was once the sole exception. In 1986, the top actress Maggie Cheung—who plays Jackie’s long-suffering girlfriend in the “Police Story” series—asked Willie to represent her, and when he agreed many other actors followed suit. “At my peak, I managed about forty-four artists,” Willie told me. “But then the pressure from the triads became too great. They just said, ‘I don’t care what you do—I want this girl or this guy.’ So a few years ago I decided to give up most of my artists. Maybe Jackie alone is good enough.” He refused to say more, and his agitation had become visible. Tony Deakin, a Detective Chief Inspector of the Royal Hong Kong Police, says, “We were informed that a gun was pointed at Willie’s head for release of the actor Andy Lau. Willie denies the incident, but I think the possibility of its being true is quite genuine.”
Fortunately for Willie, he had never managed Anita Mui. In the months that followed Wong’s murder, Mui lay low, in the United States, Europe, and Japan. A grisly rumor circulated that the 14K wanted her leg in retribution, though there was no evidence that she had conspired in Wong’s knifing or shooting, nor was she ever charged in connection with either offense. The Tiger, meanwhile, had been arrested in Macao as a suspect in the murder, and then released for lack of evidence, but he was scheduled to stand trial for the knifing.
On November 20, 1993, the Tiger finished second in the Macao Grand Prix, and was almost immediately disqualified when his race car was found to have illegal modifications. As he stepped out of a hotel in Macao around three o’clock the following morning, he was shot dead by three men wearing motorcycle helmets. After that, the matter seemed to be settled. No convictions resulted from either the Tiger’s murder or Wong’s, or from the knife attack on Wong. Anita Mui, who had returned to Hong Kong, kept quiet about the entire affair, except for complaining in a Singapore newspaper, “Which man would want to marry a woman who has so much trouble?”
WHILE GOLDEN HARVEST, the movie conglomerate that produces Jackie Chan’s films, remains the industry leader, in recent years a company called Win’s Group has come on strong. Win’s has access to a large number of top stars, and it has produced so many hit movies that Golden Harvest, once a direct competitor, has agreed to distribute many of them through an affiliate. Win’s is controlled by two brothers named Heung Wah-keung and Heung Wah-sing, who are also known as Charles and Jimmy Heung. Next to Raymond Chow of Golden Harvest, the Heung brothers are probably the most powerful people in the Hong Kong movie business today.
Charles and Jimmy Heung are, respectively, the tenth and thirteenth children of the late Heung Chin, who, in 1919, founded the Sun Yee On, by far the largest triad in Hong Kong. In 1988, the eldest brother of Charles and Jimmy, a law clerk named Heung Wah-yim, was convicted in Hong Kong of being the Dragon Head, or boss, of the Sun Yee On, but the conviction was reversed on appeal in Great Britain. Charles and Jimmy have repeatedly denied being triads, and, as far as I was able to discern, neither of them has a criminal record. Earlier this year, the United States Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn won a racketeering case against a Chinatown businessman with alleged ties to the Sun Yee On. One of the key witnesses claimed to have been in the Sun Yee On, and identified five of the Heung brothers, including Charles and Jimmy, as “top guys.”
The Hong Kong police seem to view the Heung brothers as omnipotent. “No one in Hong Kong will talk to us about the Heungs unless he is willing to emigrate to Nigeria afterwards,” Tony Deakin says. One afternoon, I visited Charles Heung in his office, in Tsim Sha Tsui, at the southern end of Kowloon. It is pointless to ask someone in Hong Kong if he belongs to a triad, because membership alone is a crime. I raised the subject indelicately enough for Heung to catch on, however. He spoke at length in Cantonese to one of his employees, and she then told me, “Since you are curious to know the background of Mr. Heung, his family, to be honest, they do have a Mafia background, because his father was one of the heads. But the father died when Mr. Heung was very small, and he had very little knowledge of what was going on. Over the years, Mr. Heung has had to work even harder to overcome the negative effects of the family name.”
Heung, who is a handsome man in his mid-forties, with close-cropped hair and a face that suggests vulnerability, has acted in a few of his company’s films. In “Return of God of Gamblers” (the movie that will open the Hong Kong Film Festival at Cinema Village on August 11th) he plays a sensitive bodyguard. The movie’s director, Wong Jing, a squirrelly man with large glasses, makes most of his films for the Heungs, and is one of the most successful directors and producers in Hong Kong. He is sometimes called the Cantonese Roger Corman, because, even in a cinema known for its exploitation films, he stands out. (“Naked Killer,” a movie he wrote and produced, features a team of emasculating lesbian assassins in hot pants.) One day last November, at about three in the afternoon, as Wong was about to enter his office in Kowloon three men jumped him from behind and bashed his teeth in. Wong has a reputation for being talkative, but when the police questioned him about the assault—after his dental surgery—he was mum. “We firmly believe he got beaten up for something he said, because his attackers concentrated on his mouth,” Tony Deakin told me. “Maybe he was talking about certain people behind their backs.” I asked Charles Heung for his reaction to the assault. “We will leave it to the police to solve,” he said. Then he laughed.
The assault on Wong Jing did not appear to upset the movie industry—he is not terribly well liked by his peers. The Heungs, on the other hand, are surprisingly popular. Movie people make a distinction between “bad” triads and “good” triads, and when they complain about the involvement of gangsters in the film industry, they are usually referring to the ones who rape and kidnap and use other coercive means to get actors and actresses to sign contracts. The Heungs are never accused of anything like that. Both brothers are considered to be knowledgeable and creative filmmakers; Win’s Group, their company, makes a lot of good movies and pays competitive salaries. Moreover, if you work for the Heungs there is a considerable bonus: the bad triads tend to leave you alone. These days, Charles Heung told me, smiling, “the most famous stars in Hong Kong have contract with us.”
The martial-arts star Jet Li, for example, began making movies for Win’s in 1993. The previous year, he lost his manager, Jim Choi, to two gun-wielding assassins dressed as security guards: Choi was shot down as he stepped out of an elevator in the building where he worked, shortly after he had argued on the phone with a bad triad who wanted to use Jet Li in a movie. Andy Lau, who is both the biggest pop singer in Southeast Asia and a popular romantic leading man, is also in business with the Heungs. Before he struck up this arrangement, he had terrible problems with bad triads. In November, 1993, his assistant, a twenty-six-year-old woman, wound up in the hospital after her apartment was fire-bombed. “There is lots of movie that is made by the gangster, and it was hard for me to reject that kind of project, so I just take it with a smiling face,” he said.
In the past few years, one man has emerged in the eyes of the movie industry as particularly bad. His name is Chan Chi-ming. The South China Morning Post has suggested that Chan is connected to a mainland Chinese brotherhood called the Big Circle, though he has never been convicted as such. “We believe he’s been behind a lot of violence in getting actors for films,” Tony Deakin says, adding, “We have absolutely no proof.” Recently, Chan Chi-ming sent a script to the film star Chow Yun-fat, and when Chow didn’t respond someone threw a cat’s head into his courtyard. Chan is a former professional boxer in his early thirties, married, with three children. He is superstitious, and is said to have gone into the movie business on the advice of a fortune-teller. A portrait of Chairman Mao hangs in his office. He produced his first movie, “Hong Kong Godfather,” in 1991. It starred Andy Lau.
Chan Chi-ming wanted Leslie Cheung, the star of “Farewell My Concubine,” to appear in his next project, but Cheung’s movie company, Mandarin Films, refused to lend him out. The actor was busy completing Mandarin’s release for the 1992 Lunar New Year, a comedy entitled “All’s Well, Ends Well.” The first week of the Lunar New Year is the time of peak movie attendance in the Chinese-speaking world, equivalent to our summer and Christmas seasons combined. On January 9, 1992, a month before the scheduled release of “All’s Well, Ends Well,” five masked men armed with pistols and knives burst into Mandarin’s film laboratory in Kowloon and demanded the negatives. One of the thieves was tried and convicted; in a confession—later recanted—he said he had committed the robbery for Chan Chi-ming, but Chan was never charged. “All’s Well, Ends Well” opened as planned. “They stole the wrong negatives,” Leslie Cheung told me.
The Mandarin Films robbery was more than the movie industry could tolerate. Five days later, during the morning rush hour, more than three hundred actors, directors, cameramen, screenwriters, and production-crew members marched on Police Headquarters in the business district of Hong Kong. Jackie Chan was at the head of the parade, wearing a yellow armband. Among those marching beside him were Andy Lau, the comedy star Stephen Chow, and the busty soft-porn star Amy Yip, whose movies include “Robotrix” and “Sex and Zen.” The protesters carried a large banner that read “Show Business Against Violence,” and handed the police a petition urging that the movie community be protected from extortion. The march came to be known as a demonstration against triads, though in fact it was a demonstration against bad triads.
The following year, Chan Chi-ming’s career in motion pictures was interrupted when, during a business trip to Shenzhen, a city in south China, he was jailed for unlawful sexual intercourse with a Chinese resident. (It is widely believed that the Heungs lured Chan to Shenzhen and used their influence to arrange his arrest. When I asked Charles Heung if this was true, he laughed and said, “Of course not true. I am not so big power!”) After a year of incarceration, Chan Chi-ming returned to Hong Kong and, to the amazement of the movie industry, relocated his company, Wang Fat Film Production, directly across the street from the office of Charles Heung. On a recent afternoon, he agreed to speak with me about his career. Chan has a dark complexion and large, sensual lips, and he was dressed, improbably, in a herringbone jacket, a floral tie, and tortoiseshell glasses. I quickly discovered that Chan defies interviewing. Mostly, he giggled or made cryptic pronouncements, such as “The movie business is like a flying dragon.” I asked how he had managed to get a big star like Andy Lau to act in his first movie. “It was fate,” Chan said.
FOR ALL THE PROBLEMS the industry has had with triads, its movies tend to make them seem heroic. Perhaps the blame lies with John Woo, the acknowledged master of the Hong Kong gangster film. Woo, who was born in Canton in extreme poverty in 1946 and now lives and works in Los Angeles, has achieved the recognition from the American movie industry that continues to elude Jackie Chan. He is fascinated with the themes of loyalty and brotherhood, and the triads in his movies are modern, gun-toting versions of honorable Chinese swordsmen. Woo has them slaughter one another with operatic grandeur. His first gunplay picture, “A Better Tomorrow,” released in 1986, spawned scores of imitations, and set off a fashion craze for the trenchcoat and sunglasses worn in the film by the actor Chow Yun-fat. (This was no small accomplishment, since Hong Kong is too humid for trenchcoats.)
I met Woo not long ago on the lot of Twentieth Century Fox, where he is now at work on “Broken Arrow,” a movie about a stolen nuclear missile, starring Christian Slater and John Travolta. He was dressed in black, down to a pair of zippered boots. A short, modest man, he greets visitors with a bow. Woo has found working in Hollywood a sobering experience. In Hong Kong, the director is king; when Woo made his movies there, he said, “even the boss from the studio is not allowed to see any footage. Every day, I can shoot based on my instinct, and I can put the new stuff in any minute. I only need to deliver the final print.” Within reason, this is the norm. Even directors who work for triads—a fate that Woo avoided—never complain of creative interference. As the director Wong Kar-wai puts it, “it’s better to deal with a godfather than an accountant.”
“Hard Target,” Woo’s first American movie, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, involved a lot of accountants. “I just didn’t get used to the system here,” Woo said, shaking his head. “Too many meeting, too many politic. So many people get their input in the script. The people have so much worry and fear, and sometimes they are afraid to make any decision. So you have to deal with them, and waste time and energy on those kind of things.… In Hong Kong, I feel I work like a painter. In Hollywood, I also work like a painter, but somehow my hand is tied up by rope.” He sighed. “But I still think I can do something here.”
AT THE END of “Super Cop,” Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong police officer jokes to Michelle Yeoh’s Chinese inspector that it doesn’t matter which government gets the bad guys’ loot, since 1997 is just around the corner. That is about the most daring political reference I’ve seen in a Hong Kong film—an art form that scrupulously avoids overt political content. The Hong Kong censorship board is far less interested in sex and violence than in references that might offend China. The director Ann Hui told me, “I have a subject I really want to do. It’s imperative we make a film about Hong Kong people in the period of June 4th”—the day in 1989 when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. “I spent the last two years trying to get money to make this film, and I was treated like someone with leprosy.”
Filmmakers have every reason to be worried about the coming reunification. Under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Hong Kong will be permitted to preserve its laws and its free-enterprise system for fifty years after its accession to China—provided, of course, that China keeps its word. “Who knows? The Chinese government, their policy can change every day,” the director Stanley Kwan says. Kwan’s most recent movie, “Red Rose White Rose,” was filmed in Shanghai, and the experience left him shaken. He discovered that the mainland government’s policy is to confiscate all negatives and, after a review by censors with an eye to political and sexual content, allow the director to take home no more than ten thousand feet of film—about two hours’ worth—for postproduction. “So that mean if you have a new idea after you get the final censor cut, no way can you do it,” he said. One of the love scenes in Kwan’s movie did not meet China’s stringent anti-pornography standards, and had to be smuggled out. As a penalty for the smuggling, Kwan will not be allowed to film on the mainland again for two years.
Even after the reunification, it may be financially risky for Hong Kong movies to appear pro-China in sentiment, because that might offend Taiwan. It was only a decade ago that Taiwan blackballed Hong Kong filmmakers or actors who so much as shot on location in China. (Tony Leung, the star of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “The Lover,” was unable to get acting work for years for this reason.) Taiwan remains the largest export market for Hong Kong movies, and ticket sales there can cover as much as twenty per cent of a movie’s budget.
The mainland has historically provided little or no income to the Hong Kong movie business, and what’s worse is that the Communist government has condoned, and officials have even profited from, the piracy of Hong Kong films. There is no guarantee that China will become a significant source of revenue for Hong Kong filmmakers after 1997, though the potential rewards of tapping into a hitherto closed market of a billion two hundred million people could be tremendous. “The China market is our future,” Charles Heung told me confidently. In August, 1993, the Heung brothers entered into a joint-venture agreement with a Chinese corporation to build theatres and video-rental outlets across China and a film studio in Shenzhen. Two months after the deal was signed, Golden Harvest followed suit by making a similar agreement. The Heungs and Golden Harvest now have distribution rights in China for all non-pirated Hong Kong videos and laser disks. “There will be a lot of teething problems,” Raymond Chow said, sounding rather less confident than Heung. “But it is a very important step in the right direction.”
One added benefit of Golden Harvest’s joint-venture deal is that Jackie Chan’s recent films are now officially sanctioned in China. Meanwhile, his popularity in the rest of Asia is undiminished. His latest movie, “Thunderbolt,” scheduled to open in Hong Kong on August 8th, is far and away the most expensive Hong Kong movie ever made—it cost more than twenty million dollars. Chan plays an internationally famous race-car driver who befriends a group of teen-age Hong Kong hot-rodders and helps them overcome some nasty triads; in the process, he crashes a few cars and sets himself on fire. When I asked Chan if he has made preparations for 1997, I was not surprised by his answer. “I never think tomorrow—I think what I’m doing today,” he said. “People ask me, ‘You don’t scare 1997?’ I say, ‘I don’t know I still alive in 1997.’” ♦