Published by: World Tibet Network News Monday, October 27th 1997
BusinessWeek, November 3, 1997
(International Edition)
Director Jon Avnet knows a bit about China's tough tactics. During a research trip for Red Corner, the Richard Gere film that MGM/UA Telecommunications Group is to release on Oct. 31, two soldiers with automatic weapons stopped him from photographing the Bejing People's Intermediate Court House. Avnet, whose credits include Risky Business, turned into a political advocate before he left China. And Red Corner, the story of a corporate attorney caught in a Chinese judicial system given to quick convictions, includes footage of an official execution and of the Tiananmen Square massacres.
''This is a country that executed thousands of people last year,'' Avnet says, ''and we continue to trade with it as if none of that matters.''
Hollywood's klieg lights have found a new focus. By yearend, three films featuring damning portraits of China will be in U.S. theaters. Red Corner's producers have scheduled a special screening for Amnesty International and other advocacy groups. And Director Martin Scorsese blasted Beijing at this year's Cannes Film Festival for its ''genocide'' in Tibet--just as he was completing Kundun, a film on the Dalai Lama's life. ''Hollywood has always needed a villain,'' says Peter Guber, ex-chairman of Sony Pictures Studio, ''and with the end of the 'evil empire' in the Soviet Union, China fits the bill perfectly.'' Guber should know: He produced the Brad Pitt film Seven Years in Tibet, which opened on Oct. 10.
SPIN MACHINE. Beijing has not been munching popcorn. To advance its own
spin it hired Michael Medavoy, the former chairman of TriStar Pictures Inc., to help shoot Red River Valley, about Tibetan resistance to Britain's 1904 invasion. Beijing also persuaded India to close down the set of Seven Years in Tibet, in which Pitt plays an Austrian mountaineer much taken with Tibetans. Then there's Walt Disney Co., which is to release Kundun on Dec. 25. The project drew pressure just as Disney was negotiating for a theme park in Shanghai.
But none of this has made much difference. Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director of Seven Years in Tibet, shipped his cast and crew to the Andes in Argentina. And Disney executives never caved. Instead, they quietly hired former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to smooth China's ruffled feathers. ''They aren't going to stop that country from having Mickey Mouse,'' Richard Gere has said.
The worst news for China now, at least as far as its image in Hollywood goes, would be for one of these films to become a hit. Red Corner's premiere was moved up to allow it to capitalize on Chinese President Jiang Zemin's Oct. 29 visit to the White House. But box-office triumphs are unlikely for political dramas such as these. Seven Years in Tibet got splashy coverage in Time and Newsweek, but ticket sales were $20 million in its first two weeks, a good but unspectacular opening.
Will these films give China a new respect for human rights--or alter U.S. policy? Hard to imagine in either case. ''Characterizing the Chinese legal and political system in such harsh terms may make a good movie,'' says Jonathan Hecht, a professor at Harvard law school's East Asia Legal Studies Program. ''But this is a government in which the power of public opinion is viewed differently than in the U.S.'' Indeed, says Hecht, who has worked with Chinese scholars to nudge China's legal and political systems closer to democracy, Hollywood's blitzkrieg may make change even more difficult.
By Ronald Grover in Los Angeles
