Never lose sight of the white wolf in the new Wild Wild East

To say that in the new Wild Wild East of China, anything is possible, may sound like a tiresome clich. But clichs do seem to exist for a reason.

In early 2006, Betty, a Chinese screenwriter friend living in Los Angeles, forwarded me a movie script in English and asked if I could help rewrite it. I was on a two-year filmmaking stint then. There was a small circle of bilingual filmmakers in Beijing who, like me, were trying to leverage the West's growing fascination with China to work on joint projects.

But few seemed to pan out. Some American independent producers I knew made frequent trips to China, visiting film studios and attending film conferences as "Hollywood experts". The scripts that they pitched varied from mediocre to trash. One such meeting that I attended was about a 3-D film of humans battling giant alien lizards in the Gobi desert. I admired the Chinese studio head for his patient smile throughout the session.