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.

The central issue, like always, was money. The most difficult for independent producers is to find the "first money" - usually with nothing more than a script, suggested star cast, and a fantasy revenue forecast - to attract later investors. In an industry well known for its crapshoots, this routine always reminded me of the Chinese saying, "to catch a white wolf with bare hands" (to build a fortune with nothing).

None of the stereotypes seemed to apply to the project referred by Betty, however. For one, the producer had a real office (albeit in an apartment building) staffed with young faces apparently busy in front of computers. Secondly, he did not once mention the need for financing in our two-hour conversation.