On April 26, 1996, I visited a screening room in Manhattan to see PEACE HOTEL (1995), the last film Chow Yun-Fat made in Hong Kong in the 20th century. The screening was followed by a press conference with Mr. Chow, at a nearby venue, which I also attended. At the time, Chow was best-known in the U.S. for such John Woo-directed shootout-heavy action films as A BETTER TOMORROW, THE KILLER and HARD-BOILED and the Ringo Lam thrillers CITY ON FIRE and FULL CONTACT. He was in town to promote a retrospective series of his films at the Cinema Village Theater in Manhattan, programmed by Peter Chow, who had curated several series of Hong Kong films at the theater prior to this. Chow was being offered roles in Hollywood films and was in the process of choosing which project to commit to when the press conference was held.
I wrote up the event and pitched it to the magazine Entertainment Weekly in hopes of getting my foot in the door there as a freelance contributor covering the burgeoning popularity of Japanese animation and Hong Kong films in the U.S. I never got anywhere, since they relied on in-house staff writers for everything, but I still have a few short pieces I wrote and pitched during that time. Since the Chow Yun-Fat piece was never published and I recently discovered it languishing in a file, I thought I’d share it with my readers here, especially since it offers a snapshot of a time when Hong Kong movies were attracting attention in Hollywood and gaining wider acceptance in the U.S. beyond the niche audience that had initially embraced them.
I faxed the piece to Dave Karger at Entertainment Weekly on April 30, 1996. (Karger, of course, is now well-known to movie buffs as one of the on-camera hosts on Turner Classic Movies.) Here’s the pitch memo to Karger, followed by the complete piece:
Brian Camp's Film and Anime Blog 