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Chinese Titan Takes Aim at Hollywood

September 22, 2013 by

Wang Jianlin, who is chairman of Dalian Wanda Group and reputed to be China’s wealthiest investor, announced plans on Sunday for the Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis. Costing from $4.9 billion to $8.2 billion, it would encompass film studios, resort hotels, an indoor amusement park, movie theaters with up to 3,000 seats and even a hospital.

Stars like Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, Leonardo DiCaprio and Zhang Ziyi, among others, showed up on Sunday at a ceremony in Qingdao for the development, which Mr. Wang billed as a sign of China’s effort to become the world leader in yet another industry: filmmaking.

Dalian Wanda purchased AMC Entertainment for $2.6 billion in a deal last year that signaled China’s biggest splash yet in the American movie market.

“It is estimated that China’s film box office revenue will surpass North America’s by 2018 and will double it by 2023 — that is why I believe the future of the world’s film industry is in China,” Mr. Wang said, according to a text of his remarks.

Dalian Wanda will build a series of movie sound sets, and has reached preliminary agreements with four of the biggest Hollywood movie agent businesses to help negotiate contracts with actors and actresses for the production of 30 foreign movies a year, Mr. Wang said. It is also planning deals with 50 domestic companies for the production of 100 films and television shows a year.

Chinese officials were quick to extol the Qingdao project. “Whether in terms of investment, scale or grade, Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis is an unprecedented project that will create history as it represents the highest level and the future of the development” of China’s film industry, said Li Qiankuan, the chairman of the government-controlled China Film Association.

Mr. Wang also announced plans to host an annual film festival in Qingdao every September, starting in 2016. The festival would include an elaborate awards ceremony.

But the moviemaking aspects of Sunday’s plans appeared to be dwarfed by the real estate project surrounding it. Mr. Wang, who made an estimated $14 billion fortune as a real estate developer, said that he planned to build eight resort hotels, an enormous shopping mall, a 300-berth yacht club, numerous apartment towers, a seaside restaurant row and even a celebrity wax museum — in addition to 20 movie sound sets and the amusement park.

Famed for its gentle coastal climate and located between Beijing and Shanghai, Qingdao has some of the costliest real estate in China. But as it is everywhere in China, all land is owned by the government, and the support of local officials is needed to obtain land at low cost and get permission to build on it.

In a city where even the smallest plots have set off bidding wars, Mr. Wang’s vision seems to have captured the hearts of local leaders. Mr. Wang said that the project would cover 929 acres in a new development on the city’s outskirts. The plan calls for constructing 58 million square feet of buildings on the site, the equivalent of 21 and a half Empire State Buildings.

Qingdao’s top Communist Party and municipal government officials attended Mr. Wang’s ceremony but did not release financial details for the land.

Until a few years ago, the best way to obtain a large plot of urban land cheaply was to agree to build an auto assembly plant. That has contributed to the development of more than 100 auto companies in China, many producing tiny numbers of cars.

Even the largest automakers in China, like Geely Group, tend to have Balkanized manufacturing networks, having set up many small assembly plants on large urban sites in cities scattered all over the country instead of just a few, high-output operations.

In the last five years, local governments changed tack at the direction of Beijing and began offering nearly free land either downtown or in inner suburbs to renewable energy companies. That has helped produce a huge surge in the production of solar panels and wind turbines, as China has become by far the largest manufacturer of both.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/business/global/chinese-titan-takes-aim-at-hollywood.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Dawn Hudson’s New Job as the Academy’s Chief Is a Balancing Act

October 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Dawn Hudson, the first person to hold a newly created post as the organization’s chief executive, has hung in more than twice as long. But that does not mean Hollywood’s film academy is at ease with the latest strong-willed woman to promise what has always come hard for it: change.

In June, Ms. Hudson was named to replace the academy’s retiring executive director, Bruce Davis. A 20-year presence on the independent film scene, she arrived with a commitment to social and ethnic diversity, a determination to raise the academy’s public profile and a reputation for shaking things up.

“If you don’t want to say yes, don’t take her phone call,” advises Michael Donaldson, an admirer who was Ms. Hudson’s general counsel at a nonprofit called Film Independent, which supports independent filmmakers, and its predecessor, the Independent Feature Project/West.

In Bette Davis’s day, the fights were about whether to charge for Oscar night tickets and cutting screen extras out of the academy.

At issue today is whether Ms. Hudson can accomplish a delicate balancing act: opening the group to fresh talent and unleashing its vast resources — net assets topped $258 million last year, while television deals for the Academy Awards guarantee a billion dollars in revenue over the next decade — without losing the confidence of a 43-member board that built its nest egg, and the Oscar brand, by protecting what already works.

For some, this seems to be a defining moment in a film industry that has surrendered energy to television and other media, adding urgency to Ms. Hudson’s task as the awards season churns toward the Oscar ceremonies on Feb. 26.

“It’s about preserving the emotional connection that people have to the movies,” said Terry Press, a publicist who serves on one of the academy’s internal boards. “That’s got to be the mission.”

Ms. Hudson and Tom Sherak, the academy’s elected president, declined to be interviewed. Both said it was too early in Ms. Hudson’s tenure to discuss the direction that she might take the academy.

But interviews with academy members, including past and present governors, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of prohibitions on public discussion of internal deliberations, make clear that Ms. Hudson was recruited to help fix what not everyone inside believes to be broken.

In the last few months, for instance, Ms. Hudson ruffled feathers by suggesting her own choices for annual invitations to the membership rolls — something that has largely been left to directors, writers and other artists in the academy’s various branches. Within the secretive academy, even small things like this can loom large. Some governors were offended, though as a member herself Ms. Hudson was entitled to offer names.

Backers say moves of that sort reflect Ms. Hudson’s conviction that the academy needs new faces, many from underrepresented ethnic or social groups.

“I don’t think anyone, any white person, in this town is more dedicated to diversity than Dawn Hudson,” said Stephanie Allain Bray, a black producer who is an academy member and who worked with Ms. Hudson on the board of Film Independent.

Diversity is not a strong suit of the academy’s governors; all but one are white, only six are women, and the average age appears to be over 60.

Along with prominent names like the director Kathryn Bigelow and the actor Tom Hanks, the board includes seasoned but less-recognized film workers like Kevin O’Connell from the sound branch, and Richard Crudo, a cinematographer.

Because physical attendance is expected at board meetings, virtually all of the governors are Californians. Making the rounds at private meetings in New York recently, Ms. Hudson suggested opening up the board with the help of video technology like Skype, something Mr. Sherak has also advocated.

“She’s a woman of intelligence, guts and compromise,” offered Sidney Ganis, a past academy president who was on the search committee that recruited Ms. Hudson, and who became acquainted with her as a member of the Film Independent board. Ms. Hudson, Mr. Ganis said, has been raising questions since she took over in an attempt to understand the academy, not dictating changes in practice or policy.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=37d04b7aff5ed3ed2740f228b084b79b

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Uneven Growth for Film Studio With a Message

June 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In Hollywood, doing both turns out to be more complicated than you might think.

Participant Media, the film industry’s most visible attempt at social entrepreneurship, turned seven this year without quite sorting out whether a company that trades in movies with a message can earn its way in a business that has been tough even for those who peddle 3-D pandas and such.

“The Beaver,” Participant’s latest picture, is a flop. A mental health-themed drama with Mel Gibson in the lead, it has taken in less than $1 million at the domestic box office since opening early last month, though it cost about $20 million to make, and was backed by a vigorous effort to build a following among those who treat depression.

Despite accolades — Participant took 11 Oscar nominations in 2006, and films like “The Cove” and “An Inconvenient Truth” later became winners — nothing from the company has approached blockbuster status. The biggest ticket-seller among its films — it has produced about 30 — was “Charlie Wilson’s War” in 2007. A star-packed tale about the unintended consequences of America’s past dealings with Afghanistan, it took in just $66.7 million in domestic theaters.

And Participant’s owner, the eBay co-founder Jeffrey S. Skoll, is still pouring in money. In an interview, Mr. Skoll put the amount he has invested at “hundreds of millions to date, with much more to follow.”

Yet Mr. Skoll last week described his growing enterprise — which also publishes books, produces television programs, has a wide Internet presence through its TakePart social action network, and owns a major stake in Summit Entertainment — as only the beginning of a media empire that he and his partners expect to surpass eBay in terms of impact, if not profit.

“This is the very early stage, as far as I’m concerned,” said Mr. Skoll, who joined Participant’s chief executive, James G. Berk, in a broad discussion of their experience in an industry in which many players share their commitment to social causes, but only rarely have tried to build a business around their views.

Ted Leonsis, with his indie-minded SnagFilms, and Philip Anschutz, with his family-oriented Walden Media, have both made forays into film-related social entrepreneurship. But neither has matched Mr. Skoll’s attempt to penetrate the studio system by financing and producing a broad range of pictures that are intended to set off not just ticket sales, but social and political action campaigns.

In the past, those have aimed to pressure senators into ratifying the New Start arms control treaty (via “Countdown to Zero”) or to press for reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (with “North Country”).

Mr. Skoll and Mr. Berk spoke in a conference room on the third floor of their new quarters in Beverly Hills. The offices, Mr. Berk said, are made entirely of recycled material — the carpet comes from old tires, but the look is stylish and green. From the second floor, Mr. Skoll operates philanthropies to which he has donated, by his count, about $1.5 billion.

Eventually, Mr. Skoll said, Participant is expected to become self-sustaining, though both expansion and the soft performance of some films have kept it from making a profit to date.

In strictly financial terms, said Mr. Berk — who was previously the chief executive of Gryphon Colleges, Fairfield Communities, and Hard Rock Cafe International — Participant’s film business appears to perform “just above the median” for similar size companies, thanks to a slight edge in home entertainment sales. Those are helped by long, intensive campaigns that urge like-minded activists to rally for years around message films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” the global warming documentary.

In measuring its success, Mr. Berk added, Participant sometimes resorts to an unusual standard: On losers, the company assesses whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically.

By that measure, “Waiting for Superman,” about the failures of public education, was a hit, Mr. Berk said. It had just over $6 million in worldwide ticket sales, but managed to put the issue of teacher competence into what he calls “the pool of worries” for millions who were caught up in a fierce discussion of the film’s premise, that failing children are hindered by union-protected teachers.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1c7ed61078839c02decb5f401f8a8125

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