Hong Kong Babylon by Fredric Dannen and Barry Long
Johannes Schonherr
One of the great pleasures of living in New York City in the early to mid-1990's was walking down to Chinatown in Lower Manhattan, heading for the Chinese movie theaters.
By then, three Chinese movie theaters were left from what must have been a much larger number a decade or two earlier.
Movie Theaters
Those three theaters were the Sun Sing movie house, located right under the access ramp to the Manhattan Bridge, the Rosemary Theater on Canal Street close to the street level entrance to Manhattan Bridge and the Musical Palace on the corner of the Bowery and Hester Street.
The Sun Sing was the largest of the three. It was a large dark hall right under the train tracks of the New York subway which crossed the Manhattan Bridge above the theater. Every train passing noisily rattled the building.
On screen was a strange mix of Hong Kong martial arts movies and Category III films, with sometimes a Japanese pink movie thrown in.
The Sun Sing closed shortly after my arrival in the city. Then, the only choices were the Rosemary and the Music Palace.
The Rosemary was clean and neat but specialized in Category III films, Hong Kong's version of soft-core sex movies. That made for a limited program choice.
The Music Palace was the most unpredictable of the three. They played the latest releases of major studios like Golden Harvest - but what those releases might be you could hardly guess.
The Chinese-language posters in the windows were often misleading. Gritty pictures on the posters could announce an utterly inane comedy incomprehensible to anyone not reared on the streets of Hong Kong.
Kitschy-looking posters with all smiling faces on the other hand had the potential to announce a hard-hitting gun fight action movie. You never knew.
That is what I loved about the place. There was always a surprise in store.
Double bills were 6 Dollars at a time when admission to a single movie in a regular New York City theater was 8 Dollars.
The Music Palace, like all three Chinatown theaters, operated in grindhouse fashion. The movies ran continuously, you could enter at any time.
The Music Palace did not operate 24 hours a day though, like say, the grindhouses on Times Square. The Music Palace opened in the morning and closed for the night. The film starting times depended on the length of the movies, though.
The theater opened at 9 am in the morning, I believe. After the first film finished, they started right away with the second one. Which would mean a starting time for the second film at, say, 10.37 am. Thus, those odd starting times continued throughout the day.
They were written out on a sheet at the ticket booth. So, it was better to take a stroll earlier on, check the starting times, perhaps have a Vietnamese pho beef noodle soup nearby (3.75 dollars for a big bowl at the time) and then arrive at the right time at the theater.
I pushed my 6 dollars through a tiny slot, the ticket-seller behind the impenetrable glass window pushed an admission slip back. With that in hand, I could enter the lobby.
There was a small concession stand. Maybe popcorn was on offer. I usually went for a large black coffee in a paper cup and a few of those small packs of delicacies only labeled in Chinese. I went up to the balcony on the second floor. The auditorium was large and dirty and smoking was permitted - despite the signs saying otherwise. Finally, the logo of Golden Harvest or some other Hong Kong film production company unfolded on screen. What was I in for this time?
Some incredible Chinese fantasy world a la Chinese Ghost Story, the Tsui Hark classic from the 1980's? A serious triad gangster shoot-out movie by the likes of John Woo, Ringo Lam or Johnnie To? An exciting look into the violent subculture of Hong Kong youth prison gangs? Something absolutely amoral like Fatal Love (Wei qing, 1993)? The movie about the handsome cool gangster who successfully seduces the female police officer investigating him and made her fall in love with him - a movie with a more than cruel end. The bad guy triumphs and gets away unpunished. Unimaginable in Hollywood. Not even European art cinema would produce such a wicked but well-made movie.
I knew however well that I could just as well be in for an unbearable comedy. I had no grip on Cantonese humor and just hoped that the second half of the double bill would be more to my taste.
I was usually the only non-Chinese person in the audience. In fact, at all my visits to the Music Palace I never met another non-Chinese person unless I took such a person to the theater myself.
Hong Kong Babylon
The year 1997 marked the end of the Hong Kong movie fun. Not only that by then the last of the New York Chinatown movie theaters had closed down - Hong Kong itself underwent a radical change.
On July 1st 1997, the British colony of Hong Kong was transferred back to China. Anticipating problems with censorship, many Hong Kong actors and film directors had left Hong Kong in the previous years, looking for a new chance in Hollywood. Hong Kong cinema never recovered from that drain of talent.
In exactly in year, Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider's Guide to the Hollywood of the East by journalist Fredric Dannen and Hong Kong movie lover Barry Long hit the bookstore shelves, the first English-language in-depth investigation of Hong Kong cinema.
The book is not an epilogue of Hong Kong cinema. Is was written right in the middle of the final frenzy of the early to mid-1990's though Dannen does report on the worries of the Hong Kong film industry regarding a future under Chinese rule.
He also reports on the exodus of talent and writes about the first American productions of directors like John Woo (Hard Target, 1993) and the preparations for actor Chow Yun-fat's first major American film (Replacement Killers, 1998).
In the first chapter of the book, Hong Kong Babylon: A Reporter Looks at the Hollywood of the East, Dannen gives a thorough low-down of the complicated history of post-World War II Hong Kong cinema history, focusing on the development of Golden Harvest, the film production company that succeeded the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio in the 1970's as Hong Kong's biggest studio.
From there he branches out to the smaller studios of the 1980's and 1990's, to the people who run them. He describes in detail his many meetings with actors like Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat, actresses like Michelle Yeoh and Anita Mui, all the main producers including the heads of Golden Harvest, as well as a good number of organized crime figures involved in the Hong Kong movie business.
Dannen, who had previously written on the intersection of American organized crime and the culture industry, goes into quite some detail uncovering the involvement of Chinese organized crime (the so-called triad societies) in the Hong Kong film business.
Movies meant quick money for the triads. According to Dannen, there were the "good" triads that give the film people considerable freedom in their productions and "bad" triads that tried to coerce famous actors / actresses into their productions. Sometimes violently – which could mean threats, kidnappings, beatings and even the murder of unwilling participants.
Those real-life crime stories engulfing the Hong Kong movie industry Dannen reports on are hair-raising to the extreme. Still, Dannen met up with even the most notorious of the triad-linked film producers.
The book is an absolutely thrilling read - and it puts all those films I had seen in New York Chinatown finally into a perspective. The text explains all the major interconnections between the people working in the industry at the time, it talks about the backgrounds of the people involved (including the prison records of a good number of the film producers / financiers).
Hong Kong cinema was not only energetic, high-speed, high-excitement on screen. It was glamorous, dangerous and dodgy to the extreme off-screen as well. Not to speak of the countless stunt men who jumped off high buildings and the like for very little pay and without health insurance, often working for more than one film at a time.
Dannen follows his first chapter up with brief interview outtakes with many of the main players in the business. He uses the occasion to give detailed filmographies of all involved.
The third section of the book is a contribution by Barry Long. Long was a New York University Cinema Studies student in the early 1990's, he also worked as assistant manager of the Kim's Video chain outlet on Saint Marks Place. (I frequently met him in both capacities - as an NYU classmate and as a Kim's Video customer.)
Barry Long was an ardent visitor to the Music Palace and it was him who got Kim's Video, the coolest and most eclectic video rental chain in New York City, into acquiring hundreds of tapes of Hong Kong movies.
Long always attached short plot summaries to the tapes at the store. For Hong Kong Babylon, he provided more than 300 such film synopses, including all necessary data such as the name of the director, main actors etc. The tape covers themselves were usually only in Chinese though the films all had English subtitles.
All plot summaries in the book also feature the original Chinese title of the film - written in Chinese characters. This way, readers could ask for specific titles in Chinatown or Hong Kong video stores.
The final section of Hong Kong Babylon features the recommendations of twelve well-known film critics working with Asian cinema in the 1990's. Some of them, like Tony Rayns, a former programmer for the Vancouver Film Festival and a real authority on Asian cinema are still relevant today but most featured in the list have by now long faded away. That final part of the book has certainly become dated by now.
But the rest of the book has not. In particular Fredric Dannen's insights into the Hong Kong cinema of the 1990s read as fresh as at the time they were first printed.
The films are still available now, many on the net, and it is still a pleasure to watch them.
I do feel nostalgic though, thinking about the unpredictable surprises dished up in the adventurously shabby Music Palace. On the big screen, projected from 35mm prints in a real New York grindhouse atmosphere.
Fredric Dannen & Berry Long: Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider's Guide to the Hollywood of the East
London: Faber & Faber, 1997
412 pages
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