Word: studio
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Even though it's hardly in doubt that The Two Towers will be a smash at the box office, Jackson is still on edge. "The pressure last year was, Is the studio going to survive?" says the director. "The pressure this year is, Are people going to like this one as much as the first...
...wonderfully presold. It was like Superman or Batman." By making them all at once, they reasoned, the cost per film would be diminished; most of the stars, for example, would take just 1.5 times their usual fees for all three movies, effectively working for half price. The studio also followed its usual business practice of selling off international rights to cover production costs. New Line's initial investment in the franchise was just about $25 million per movie...
...squeezed the wide-screen panoramas down to TV shape and dubbed the Mandarin dialogue into an Anglicized cacophony of kung fu grunts and maniacal giggles. Most of the company's other films have not been seen at all; they have slept in the Shaw vaults, taken for dead. The studio's reputation decayed too; it was thought to be the stuffy monolith whose primacy was usurped in the '70s by the upstart Golden Harvest. That was the company smart enough to sign Bruce Lee when Run Run Shaw offered the actor a lowball figure, and to find budding star quality...
...Transfer this cinematic blackout to Hong Kong. That's what happened with the films produced by Shaw Brothers, once the dominant movie studio in East Asia. The pictures produced by Run Run Shaw and his sibling Runme from 1951 to 1985 set the colony's standard for opulence, vigor and splash in a dozen genres. But because Sir Run Run refused to put his old films on video, or even allow film museums to show them, younger movie fans have had to wonder: What did a martial arts classic like Chang Cheh's The Heroic Ones or Chor Yuen...
...familiar Shaw logo?the SB embossed on a scallop-shaped shield?is visible again, in ravishing color and wide-screen ShawScope. In an $84 million deal, the studio's library was purchased by Celestial Pictures, a pan-Asian company run by William Pfeiffer, an American who has lived in Asia for 20 years. Celestial is restoring Shaw films from their original negatives and plans to release several titles, with nifty add-ons like original trailers and interviews with the old stars, to Southeast Asian video outlets every few weeks. The first batch of 10 hits stores this Thursday...