Published by: World Tibet Network News Sunday, October 26, 1997

By Bob Strauss,the Boston Globe Correspondent, 10/26/97

LOS ANGELES - Jon Avnet wears a traditional Chinese jacket, beautifully crafted in rich black silk with a mandarin collar. It was made by a Beijing tailor he met while working on his latest movie, ''Red Corner.''

Avnet commissioned more jackets for the film's crew. Which was nice, since most of them never set foot in China.

Although the story is based in Beijing, almost all of ''Red Corner'' was filmed in southern California. This had to be done because the star, Richard Gere, has not been allowed to enter China for the past three years due to his outspoken support for the free Tibet movement and his devotion to its leader, the Dalai Lama.

''Red Corner'' has nothing to do with the communist regime's occupation of Tibet, but even without Gere's participation, it's unlikely the government would have sanctioned, let alone cooperated with, so detailed a peek at their Kafka-esque legal system.

''When I shot some stills of the front of a Beijing courthouse, I was accosted by two armed police guards,'' Avnet recalls of one preproduction foray into the country. ''If that's what happens on the outside of the building, imagine what they think about filming something inside a courtroom. Richard's involvement was always a problem for the Chinese government, but the subject matter was as just as large an obstacle, maybe even larger.

In ''Red Corner,'' Gere plays American entertainment lawyer Jack Moore, who's in Beijing to negotiate a lucrative satellite broadcasting deal. Following a night of celebrating, he's rudely awakened by the police to find a young woman's bloody corpse in his hotel suite.

He's arrested and quickly informed of the basic local rule: confess and you're less severely punished. None of the handful of private criminal attorneys who could handle so sensational a case will touch it (the dead girl, it turns out, was a powerful general's daughter), and all the American embassy can do is provide Moore with an English edition of the Chinese legal code. His court-appointed lawyer, Shen Yuelin (Chinese actress Bai Ling), pleads him guilty since she sees her job as saving his life, not proving his innocence.

But gradually, Moore convinces Shen that he was framed, and together they try to prove it. Of course, finding corroborating evidence is a tall order in what is hardly an open society. Even if it's found, will it persuade a system that's predisposed to harsh judgment and swift punishment?

Unexpected candor

Easy to see why officials would be no more pleased with ''Red Corner'' than they are with ''Seven Years in Tibet'' or ''Kundun,'' Martin Scorsese's forthcoming Dalai Lama movie. But however much they may wish to, party officials do not speak for everyone in China. On his preproduction research trips to the country, Avnet was amazed and inspired by the things people told him - and what they were risking to say it.

''They got me into courts, they got me inside prisons - and that could have gotten some of them shot,'' says the director, a serious-minded New Yorker with specks of gray in his black beard. ''They were giving me all kinds of information and taking all of these risks for a stupid Hollywood movie. I could only believe that, in some way, they viewed me as a messenger for all of those voices that were crushed by the tanks in Tiananmen Square.

''I so respected that commitment and was so moved by it. That, and the fact that I was working with an actress who put her life on the line to some extent.''

Avnet has kept in mind that Bai Ling or any of the other Chinese actors could face repercussions for appearing in ''Red Corner.'' Although Bai is based New York, she frequently returns to China, and she was once denied a role in a Chinese production for ''financing reasons.'' Many of the actors came here on visas or were Chinese exiles. Avnet hopes that, at the very least, his obsessive attention to the authenticity Bai and others provided will stave off some

official criticism.

That was a major concern of Gere's as well.

''When Jon and I met, we felt like brothers right from the beginning,'' Gere says. ''He's probably the hardest-working director I've ever worked with, a stickler for detail and doing his homework. We both were very clear that if we were going to do this, it has to be totally accurate. I can't afford to have something that can be criticized on that point.''

How to visualize it, though, was a new challenge for the filmmaker. Though he trained as a director at La Mama (the progressive New York theater company) and at the American Film Institute, Avnet established himself as a producer first with such films as ''Risky Business,'' ''Less Than Zero,'' and the landmark television movie ''The Burning Bed.'' His first full-length directing effort, the television movie ''Between Two Women,'' won star Colleen Dewhurst an Emmy Award. The Avnet-directed feature films ''Fried Green Tomatoes,'' ''The War,''

and ''Up Close and Personal'' were relatively small-scale, human-interaction stories, like most of his work (even the ''Mighty Ducks'' kid comedies his company produces).

Creating ''Beijing West''

''Red Corner'' is that, too, but it took massive logistics and cutting-edge computer graphics to create the illusion. For chase scenes and numerous shots of Shen bicycling around the city, Oscar-winning production designer Richard Sylbert (''Dick Tracy,'' ''Chinatown,'' ''Reds'') built a bustling hutong - the ramshackle neighborhoods of intersecting alleyways that are peculiar to Beijing - on seven acres of the undeveloped Playa Vista district in Los Angeles. Nearly five cargo containers of Chinese objects were shipped more than 6,000 miles to ''Beijing West.'' The props were often obtained and exported, like the guerrilla footage Avnet captured around Beijing landmarks, through the miracle of official corruption.

How convincing was Sylbert's hutong?

''It looked exactly the same,'' says Bai, whose grandmother still lives in a Beijing hutong. ''The ground, the dust, the walls, the curtains - everything seemed so old there, like so many generations lived there. I felt at home. Sometimes, when I left work, it seemed like a fast trip from China to a Western hotel.''

In some shots, you can see the cranes and skyscrapers that symbolize China's new prosperity rising over the hutong's ancient roofs. The tall buildings were digitally composited from shots taken in China onto Playa Vista footage. The vast depth of those extreme long shots may betray their special-effect origins, but Avnet defies viewers to guess which of some 40 scenes electronically placed Gere in actual Beijing locations he was barred from physically.

''No one had ever done effects that were meant to be this invisible,'' Avnet says proudly. ''In a movie that my company produced, `George of the Jungle,' Shep was a three-dimensional character effect and obviously so. But when you see Tiananmen Square in this one, you won't know what is real and what is Memorex.

''This is clearly a breakthrough with computer-generated images. What it suggests is what you know the future will be, which is you won't have to go to a place to shoot the movie there. The next film I plan to do is based on Leon Uris's `Mila 18,' which is about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. Well, that place no longer exists, and I'll probably have to build it digitally from still photographs. That'll be even more ambitious.''

For all the high-tech and logistical effort that went into ''Red Corner,'' however, Avnet maintains it is the human element that makes the film.

''The faces from China, the way those actors behaved, made the difference,'' he says. ''Without those actors, you could be there but it would still be fake.''

If there's a contraditory tendency in Avnet's approach to filmmaking, it springs naturally from his personality. For example, the director vociferously defends his films. Of ''Fried Green Tomatoes,'' he says: ''The gay people that were angry about it,'' because it reduced the sexual relationship between two women to the vanishing point, ''were selling themselves short. There was love between the two women in the film, and what difference does it make if it had a physical

component?'' And for ''Up Close and Personal'': ''I had no interest in doing the Jessica Savitch story. I did that story in `Less Than Zero,' poorly.''

Yet Avnet paradoxically claims to be good friends with John Gregory Dunne, whose book about writing the ''Up Close'' screenplay, ''Monster,'' is not always kind to the director.

''He's a great writer,'' Avnet says with a smile. ''If you're gonna get skewered by anybody, it may as well be by the best. What he saw, he wrote and wrote beautifully. He was even kind of charitable to me.''

Sounds more like a guy who'd produce ''George of the Jungle'' than want to direct a film about the Warsaw Ghetto.

''There's something really wonderful about making a film for kids, especially if you have kids,'' says Avnet, who has three with Barbara, his artist wife of 26 years. ''But as a director, I'm more interested in tougher stuff.''

In the end, Avnet can acknowledge that his work may be no more than disposable pop product, but he can also envision its powerful potential.

''There will be more impact from `Red Corner' in China than there will be in America,'' Avnet says. ''They are sensitive to this stuff. This stupid Hollywood film, this entertainment, this for-profit venture which some people put a lot on the line for - Chinese people, I'm not talking about myself - will have an enormous impact over there.''