Hollywood and China: Revenue and Responsibility

At a pre-Oscars press lunch the other day, Christopher Dodd, the former Connecticut senator who now heads the Motion Picture Association of America, was positively giddy with news: Hollywood, he said, has fallen hopelessly in love with China. “Chinese box-office receipts grew a staggering thirty-one per cent—to about $2.75 billion—making China the second-largest international market, behind Japan,” he told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. The number of Chinese movie screens is expected to double by 2015. “Ten new screens a day are opening,” he said.

His enthusiasm was notable because, until recently, Hollywood looked upon China with a mix of dread and desperation, eying across the Pacific a vast wasteland of pirated DVDs, moth-eaten theatres, and rigid import controls, which limited the number of non-Chinese films to only twenty per year. The pirated DVDs still abound—especially this time of year, when they are often watermarked with the words “for your consideration,” an indication that they leaked somewhere on their way to (or from) Oscar judges.

But Hollywood’s view on Beijing has—in Washington parlance—evolved, because China is now where the money is. Under a trade deal with the United States, China allowed an additional fourteen foreign movies last year, as long as they were in 3-D or IMAX format, and it agreed to nearly double the share of revenue sent back to foreign film companies, increasing it to twenty-five per cent. In Shanghai, DreamWorks is opening a joint-venture animation studio, and American studios have tapped Chinese investors for co-productions such as “Kung Fu Panda 3,” and “Iron Man 3.”

But as Hollywood acclimates to China, it is encountering an awkward new level of collaboration with Communist Party censors. The latest Bond picture, “Skyfall,” was shot partly in Shanghai and Macau, but when it reached Chinese screens, the filmmakers had agreed to cut a scene in which Daniel Craig killed a Chinese security guard and to nix a plotline in which Javier Bardem explains that he became a villain after MI-6 left him in Chinese custody. In another case, Chinese investors put more than ten million dollars into “Cloud Atlas”—the largest Chinese investment yet in a foreign film—but then censors required the removal of no less than thirty-eight minutes of the movie, mostly love scenes. In perhaps the most energetic effort to please the Chinese government, producers of last year’s remake of “Red Dawn” altered the story of Americans fighting off invaders so that they were no longer mowing down Chinese soldiers but, instead, North Koreans.

As for Oscar contenders, most of them were not on the list of films released in China. One exception was Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” which is nominated for eleven Academy Awards. The last time Lee had a movie in Chinese theatres was five years ago, when “Lust, Caution” was shown without three of its sex scenes. (Some people flew to Hong Kong to see them.) Censors found) few problems in “Life of Pi,” however, other than a line in which a character declares, “Religion is darkness.” It was changed.

Historians point out that this is hardly the first time that Hollywood has heeded the demands of foreign customers, and that some of the most severe cuts were ordained by our allies. In the nineteen-twenties, the British Board of Film Censors had what the author Ruth Vasey called a “range of idiosyncratic requirements” relating to animal cruelty, references to mental insanity, Christian ceremonies, and depictions of colonial relations. The British censor in Hong Kong, then a Crown Colony, explained to the American consul that protecting Britain’s image onscreen was vital in “a small settlement of white men on the fringe of a huge Empire of Asiatics.”

But, these days, Hollywood directors find themselves in the curious position of being more compliant than some of their Chinese counterparts. When censors ordered the Chinese director Lou Ye to make additional cuts to his movie “Mystery” just over a month before the film’s release date, Lou took the unusual steps of publicly tweeting the censors’ demands and then removing his name from the credits. Online, he explained his decision to break the taboo of discussing censorship in the hope that the system would “become more transparent and eventually be cancelled.” He was not willing to comply in silence. “We are all responsible for this unreasonable movie-censorship program,” he wrote.

By comparison, Hollywood has been less vocal on the subject of censorship. When James Cameron released “Titanic” in 3-D last year—having agreed to censor Kate Winslet’s breasts—the Times asked him about the compromises of working in China. He said, “As an artist, I’m always against censorship… [But] this is an important market for me. And so I’m going to do what’s necessary to continue having this be an important market for my films. And I’m going to play by the rules that are internal to this market. Because you have to. You know, I can stomp my feet and hold my breath but I’m not going to change people’s minds that way.”

Cameron may be pleased to discover that foot-stomping and breath-holding are a proud Chinese tradition. Just ask Lou Ye and his fans. American filmmakers are afraid of offending their Chinese investors and the censors. And they take comfort in the philosophical argument that even censored American movies in Chinese theatres promote greater openness in the long term, which is largely true.

But, taken to the extreme, that argument becomes an excuse for complicity. Censorship, as any Chinese artist and filmmaker can tell you, is a process of negotiation. Speaking publicly and calmly about censorship does not necessarily require denouncing China, and Hollywood could, for instance, make it a routine practice to tally up and announce the cuts that the industry makes for censors with the same precision and the enthusiasm that the industry now musters for describing the money it makes from Chinese customers. Doing it on an industry-wide basis would not require any one filmmaker to take a lonesome stand.

Hollywood and China could have a profitable new future together, but American directors might be surprised by the way Chinese fans can react to some good-natured pushback against the censors. When Lou Ye did it, Chinese fans cheered him. As a commentator named Zhang Bingjian put it: “What would happen if every director and producer published the censorship process on Weibo from now on?”

Photograph by Andy Wong/AP.