"The One" did it. I was wrong again. It was certainly more than a week; but I am finally back in my digs at Beiwai after well more than two weeks hopping here and there making movies up and down the eastern sea board of China. Since June 30, the trail, in short, was thus: Beijing, Guangzhou (21 hour train ride; "The Legend of Bruce Lee," 40-episode TV series), Shunde; Ningbo, Dalian, Tianjin; Dalian - Shenyang - Beijing (late night, all-night train rides again); Dalian and Beijing. This stop at the house will be short. I fly back to Dalian, Friday, July 20, for what is expected to be only two or three days of shooting and then back to Beijing for a spell of grounding and healing.
I must happily correct a major mistake in the post just below this one; it will demonstrate the often comical breakdown in communications between producers, agents and actors in China even when language is not a problem. The really fascinating film titled, in English, respectively at this point, "The One" and "One Man's Olympics," is not about the Berlin Olympics of 1936, but rather the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932!
It really is a good story that deserves telling, though. In brief, it is about China's then champion sprinter, Liu Changchun, the first Chinese to compete in the Olympic games. It was not at all easy for him to achieve that benchmark. He was a university student in Shenyang when it and all of Northeast China was occupied by the Japanese as a puppet state and given a new name, Manchukou, to go along with its newly enthroned new/young/old emperor, Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty of China. Although he was alternately courted, imprisoned, cajoled, and beaten by the Japanese authorities in efforts to make him represent the puppet state in the Olympics, Liu Changchun refused, period.
In feats at times of intense intrigue, full-scale combat, multiple escapes and recapture, and derring-do of disguised, clandestine travel and familial heartbreak, the young sprinter made it to Shanghai. There he was able to board the American ocean liner Wilson (named for Woodrow Wilson, the former U.S. president) of which my character was Captain, in his attempt to reach Los Angeles in time to represent China, singularly, in the Olympics.
Aboard ship, the plot and his plight does not let up: Racism of the ugliest sort, and a killer typhoon, take over the story and through many flashbacks serve as the narrative spine of the screenplay.
I will not give away what actually happens aboard the Wilson, and Liu Changchun's eventual destiny within the annals of the modern Olympic Games (although the links provided do that and more).
I will say that shooting a movie on an aging ocean liner still plying its passenger trade between Dalian and Tianjin (with 1,000 regular passengers and crew continuing on about their lives and business as we several dozen do ours) ain't easy! It is decidedly unpleasant in every aspect--other than the film personnel, who are all brothers and sisters forevermore after the bonding we underwent aboard this nautical monstrosity. I have not the time or strength to detail much of what has happened thus far aboard this rusty, stinky, fume-belching behometh, at this moment. Perhaps I will be able to do so here or in a print venue at a later date. This is primarily because we are not done with that monster (I purposely also do not name it; I still have to work with its real-life crew).
With luck, we will finish with the sad old lady in another two or three days of shooting. Thereafter, we will shoot interior and other exterior scenes in sound stages and on locations in Beijing and Tianjin.
There are too many unknowns between now and the movie's release (intended to accompany the advent of the Beijing Olympics next summer) to predict the final quality of the project. But, it could be a pretty damn good story; all of the basic elements necessary are there.
