Sometime back in July of this year, I was summoned to a meeting with a pair of high-level foreign film company executives whose national cinema has been widely acclaimed over the past several years for its high degree of cinematic polish and popular appeal. The purpose of the meeting, as I was told, was to advise the suits as to the nature of moviegoing public in America and, more specifically, how their company can work with organizations and companies such as Visual Communications to "grow" the audience for their brand of product.
As it turned out, I might have done well not to crawl out of bed that morning. Accompanied by our Executive Director and Festival Co-Director, I take the meeting in a Century City office, where we start out by presenting our organization and talking up our film festival, our audience, and how we build avenues for filmmakers to gain traction in the mainstream industry. As one of the executives fidgets through the pages of our festival catalog, he got to the point and tosses out the question -- "Why are none of your films commercial studio blockbusters?" Through the ensuing 30 minutes, as he dismissively tosses our catalog around the table (no lie; he riffled through the pages as if he would a cheap stack on Monopoly money) and expounded on the worthlessness of independent cinema, it became clear to me -- the suits were in town to find out how to make "home-run" blockbusters that would break box office records worldwide, as if cranking out countless CROUCHING TIGERS, YOU-KNOW-WHAT and HOSTS was the answer to bringing in legions of audiences to their product. In short, they wanted to know from us how their films can find mainstream success in America -- "art-house" acclaim was unacceptable to them, they stated. They wanted to know what works for audiences, and how to give that product to the masses.
While an air of subtext hung heavy over that meeting (and I won't go into any of it here, let's just say that some of it is scandalous, and more of it reflects a stubborn belief in their company's product), this little episode takes me back to another time, nearly 14 years earlier, when another haughty and bull-headed company acquired the distribution rights to a film that was acknowledged as a watershed achievement in Asian Pacific independent cinema. That film, PICTURE BRIDE by the sorely-missed Kayo Hatta, was being handled by Miramax Films, a company that, especially back then in 1994, typified the industry's habit of securing distribution rights to independent films by people of colors without putting any work into long-lasting audience development strategies. PICTURE BRIDE's chequered box-office performance, and the rather peculiar promotional strategies that Miramax held for the film (eg.: lack of initiative in direct engagement with the target audience -- rather, community organizations such as Visual Communications and the old National Asian American Telecommunications Association reached out to Miramax and its field publicists to host sneak-preview showings of the film for its target audiences) came back to haunt me as our meeting ground to a halt, with Visual Communications staffers getting nothing out of it and, from the suits' perspective, no useful information on how to position its products for maximum and immediate success with Western audiences.
As I begin this, an online diary that will hopefully reflect on what developments we've observed over twenty-five years of organizing the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, I found that encounter from back in July instructive as a means of showing how not a whole lot has really changed in respect to how the mainstream regards the commercial viability of alternative voices and visions in mainstream entertainment. Oh sure, there have been signs that things are getting better -- with the passage of time, how could they not? A black woman single-handedly created a hit medical drama, GREY'S ANATOMY; an Asian American director from suburban New York directed two of Oscars' most-talked-about films of the past decade, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN; director/producers ranging from our own Victor Vu to independent maverick Tyler Perry have circumvented the traditional studio and distribution network to get their works out to their own target audiences -- the ones that champion their work and know how and where to look for it. And closer to home, events such as the Film Festival have taken on a more indispensible role as a survey and, in some cases, a referendum on the vitality and pitfalls of our own mediamaking activity.
The question that a reviewer asked a couple of years ago in reference to Ham Tran's JOURNEY FROM THE FALL -- "Why can't such an artfully crafted and important film find mainstream distribution out of the gate?" could have easily been asked of award-winning works of recent vintage as KISSING COUSINS, EVE & THE FIRE HORSE, and many others like it. And I also admit that other well-respected, mainstream-caliber works including RED DOORS, FALLING FOR GRACE, SAVING FACE, THE MOTEL, and others have been met with either popular indifference or outright community outrage for daring to address the state of Asian Pacific America in truthful and candid terms. It seems that the diversity and range of our artists' creative endeavors are still being met by that old demon -- the need to create "one-size-fits-all" cinema that must satisfy everyone in the same way that film like THE JOY LUCK CLUB was obliged to do years before. I think we're bright enough to know the answer to that question: that is impossible. No single film can speak to a community, regardless of whether that "community" be a supposedly monolithic one, or a nuclear family confined within the walls of a suburban household.
Of course, I will be talking about all the things we have planned for our upcoming edition of the Film Festival, set this year for April 30 through May 7, 2009. But if international Asian studios are as concerned as Hollywood studios about hitting "home runs" instead of "base hits" -- and if you didn't get it already, I'm talking about making a long-term commitment to develop audiences for diverse and visionary cinematic voices and not about being fixated on developing audiences through blockbusters that won't hold up over time -- then I have to be concerned about what our own makers in our own backyards are creating. And more important, why.
