Play it again, Sam
With Asian movies increasingly being remade for western audiences, it has not taken long for Chinese authors to start claiming their stories are being copied by Hollywood. Li Jianmin, a playwright from Shandong Province , is the first man to have succeeded in getting a mainland court to hear his case. The 43-year-old is suing Twentieth Century Fox, for supposedly using two of his unpublished plays as the basis for their 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow.
Li's case made it to court last Wednesday. As cynics in the mainland media pointed out, that was just two days after the US government filed two complaints to the World Trade Organisation over China's failure to crack down on copyright piracy and the continuing restrictions on the sale of US movies, music and books on the mainland. Last Wednesday was also when the Motion Picture Association of America held a press conference in Beijing, to announce its members lost US$6.1 billion to online and DVD piracy in 2005.
But, as Li's lawsuit suggests, ideas are subject to piracy too. In fact, there is a vicious circle in operation in the entertainment industry, where the dearth of fresh concepts leads to contempt for the product from the public.
Even entertainment giants are not averse to cynical stunts that stretch the public's tolerance. The latest example is Jackie Chan, whose reality TV show The Disciple was launched with much fanfare in Beijing last week. Designed to discover worthy successors to Chan's crown as the kung fu king, the winners will get to star in martial arts movies produced by Chan's company.
Almost 100,000 people have applied to take part in the show, but reaction to The Disciple from netizens has been less than enthusiastic. Many expressed surprise that Chan should be doing anything as tacky as a reality TV show. Others wondered just how hands-on Chan's involvement would be, given that he is away in the US filming Rush Hour 3. It is another sequel for Chan, who has built his career on repeating characters and plots over and over.
It is hard to imagine Chan's hero Bruce Lee doing that. But since his death, Lee has been mercilessly recycled. Outtakes of his films have been packaged as movies, while his life has been the subject of movies and TV shows in both Hollywood and Asia. Now, CCTV is entering the fray. A 40-part series The Legend of Bruce Lee started shooting this month, with a reported budget of 50 million yuan - enough to fund numerous original dramas. It is so much easier though, to offer the long-suffering mainland TV audience more of what they don't want. As the Motion Picture Association rightly stated at their press conference, piracy harms the Chinese entertainment industry more than it does Hollywood. But it is the lack of new ideas that is really killing it.
David Eimer is a Beijing-based journalist
