Acting's school of hard knocks

Young would-be actress finds that getting into the glamorous world of film is not an easy act. Liu Wei reports.

"Come to my room tonight for the audition," was the only message she got - nothing more, just a simple text message.

And it had Zhang Wenli thinking that maybe it was time to give up her dreams of being a film star.

The year was 2006, and Zhang had worked for her third year as an extra in Hengdian, a small town in Zhejiang province, and China's largest film center. It has every kind of set imaginable - palaces, residences, old streets, different dynastic settings, and so on.

Every day, producers and directors are at work on dozens of films or TV dramas with everyone, from the big shots, such as Jet Li and Jackie Chan, down to thousands of bit-part actors and part-timers, such as Zhang.

She first went to Hengdian in 2004, as an 18-year-old dance student at a community college. At her school in Shandong province, 1,100 km from Hengdian, she'd heard endless stories about the town, from seniors who had worked there.

She had long dreamed of being a film star since back when she was a girl, and now she found that she just couldn't wait any more. She pleaded with her parents and teachers, explaining that acting in a real film would teach her a lot more than reading books in school.

Finally, she boarded a train to Hengdian with two classmates. The three girls didn't even know the journey would take 15 hours, but, with all the excitement, they didn't sleep a wink on the train.

The joy and excitement didn't last long. The only lodging they could find was a 20-square-meter room, which they had to share. They walked around the town leaving their address with the actors' guild, and in the first week found nothing at all.

Then, just as they were about to run out of money, they found a notice stuck to their door asking them to come join a TV drama at 6:00 the next morning. The three girls laughed with surprise and hugged each other. But that first job turned out to be nothing more than just standing around with hundreds of the "emperor's maids".

Then Zhang got a bit luckier and was picked out by the assistant director, who asked her to just say one sentence. She made four attempts at the 10 words and couldn't pronounce them correctly. The director gave up and asked her to count from one to 10. Then he said he'd have someone dub the part in later.

Zhang was irritated and bravely pushed the director to give her a fifth chance. This time it was a success and she ended up with 40 yuan ($6) for the day, twice the amount her friends had made. And she thought she was now starting out on the path to becoming the next Zhang Ziyi or Gong Li.

For the next two years, she got nothing but small roles with just a few lines.

She tried to improve her acting skills, watching one film after another at the Internet cafes in town. She didn't have enough money to buy a computer.

Looking back, she says, "Watching how an actor steals the show was the most important part of my self-study." If she got any role in a TV drama, she would use what she'd learned.

At one point, she was playing a concubine who was standing by a table as the man and his wife were having dinner. The next take had the wife flying into a rage and slamming her bowl down on the table. The script had no description of Zhang's response, but she shivered dramatically when the bowl hit the table. The director liked it and kept the cut in the final version.

By her third year in Hengdian, Zhang could earn about 4,000 yuan ($634) a month, but she didn't find her dream getting any closer.

There were literally thousands of extras working in Hengdian, very few of them from the top list. Most had never even studied acting in school. At the same time, there were hundreds of film or drama school graduates flooding into the town and the industry every year.

Once, while she was a stand-in for the supporting role in The Forbidden Kingdom, which starred Jackie Chan, Zhang met the star himself. Chan gave the bit-part actors some of his own brand of clothing, but the most useful thing he gave Zhang was a bit of advice: Being an actor isn't easy.

"I began to regret quitting school so early," she says. "I'd hoped to learn more about acting and become a qualified actress."

Soon, as she got a peek at the darker side of the industry, she found she might need more than just acting skills: She might need a hard heart.

One director said he appreciated her talent and wanted her to star in his next work. Zhang was overjoyed and eagerly did what he asked her to do in his text message: go to his room at midnight for an audition. She ended up humiliated and outraged, but managed to escape.

The third time this happened, Zhang sadly decided to give up her dream.

"I'm not saying all actresses need to go through this experience to be famous, but things like this do happen and I'm just not tough enough to handle them," she explains.

And, "I was an extra, without a diploma, and no outstanding skills or powerful friends in the industry. I felt helpless."

She thought that working behind the scenes might at least give her something more "down-to-earth". So she made friends with some of the crew members, make-up artists, cinematographers and prop makers, and learned a lot.

Then in late 2006 she found out that some college students were making a movie in Yunnan province and were looking for an assistant to the producer. She sent them an e-mail.

The film was a bold attempt by a group of students who were a bit younger than she was and they soon became friends. The students liked her and didn't really care whether she was a veteran or not. The filming was more like an adventure that allowed young people to come together.

Zhang made full use of this unusually precious chance and scouted around for actors and locations, negotiated with locals over room rents or the use of cattle, and coordinated the actors' and producers' schedules.

"I was like a lunatic," she recalls with a laugh. "On the bus, on the streets, literally everywhere, I'd grab complete strangers I thought might be good in our film. Some got angry and some thought I was a bit crazy."

For help, she turned to some friends she'd made during her Hengdian years. Some sent her samples of call sheets, others taught her over the phone or Internet about communicating with actors, producers and directors.

For one week, her first meal of the day came after midnight and scripts covered her walls, her bed, and floor. Call sheets and scripts littered the place. After the filming finished, she got a second chance to work for a TV drama.

And, she still watches a lot of films - on her laptop. Her focus has shifted to film budgets, flaws in production and design, and figuring out how the producer juggles the schedules of two lead actors.

Her dream of becoming a big star may have ground to a halt, but Zhang's good at comforting herself.

"I've seen Jackie Chan. Every step, every move he makes, he's surrounded by a dozen or more people. That's not an easy life to lead," she concludes.

(China Daily 01/27/2012 page7)