by Mitch Moxley
Through clenched teeth, I agreed to one more take.
About a month later I was riding my bike through the city when I received a text message from Viko. “Hi Mith!” he wrote, misspelling my name. “The video you did with Marry is finished! I will send it to your e-mail. You are very handsome ;)”
My heart skipped a beat. When I got home, I opened my laptop and followed the link Viko had sent. My roommates, Paul and Kit, gathered around to watch. As we waited for the video to download, I wondered if I should even watch it. I swallowed.
The video, called “Le Seine,” opens with bright, overexposed shots of Marry on the veranda followed by images of what I assume Viko and the others thought was Europe. (Curiously, the video’s version of Europe is home to Yankee Stadium.) Then, there I am, doing an awkward little jig on the stairs beside Marry and Derek. My scenes are brief. The three of us appear running through the mall, and then I’m “looking happy” walking down the hall with ice cream in hand. If I do say so myself, the shot where I was to “look blue” is a real tour de force. My dancing part was almost entirely cut from the final edit, except for the odd glimpse of my arm or chin at the corner of the frame.
“This is amazing,” Paul said, looking over my shoulder.
“Fine work,” Kit chimed in.
I don’t appear in the video’s last three minutes. Total screen time was about thirty seconds, and I’m amazed they managed to salvage that much. In the credits I was listed as “MITH (CANADA).”
“I think we have a new nickname for you,” Kit said, struggling not to laugh.
“What’s that?”
“The man . . . the Mith . . . the legend.”
18
Chollywood Dreaming
Some people toil for years to crack the movie business. In China, it took me five hours.
One wintry Sunday evening a few months later, in early 2011, I opened an online classifieds page looking for acting jobs and found a want ad for foreign extras needed to play journalists, police officers, FBI agents, and military personnel in a Chinese movie. I sent out an e-mail with a photo and bio at 7:30 p.m. I listed under experience acting in a Chinese music video and modeling for Cosmo.
At 12:30 a.m., sitting in the front seat of a taxi headed home with Paul and Kit, I received a phone call from a woman named Cathy who had an air of desperation in her voice. She said she was a casting agent and was urgently looking for foreigners for a shoot the next morning.
“Do you consider yourself fat?” she said, totally deadpan.
“Hmm. No.”
“So you’re not very big?”
“No. I’m tall, athletic . . . I’m not small. But I’m not fat, either.”
“Okay.” She paused. “Do you think you could play a police officer?”
I thought about it for a second. “Sure.”
“Can you come at six a.m. tomorrow?”
“Wow. That’s pretty early.”
“I know it’s not much notice,” Cathy sighed, “but we have scientists. They’re seventeen years old—”
“You have seventeen-year-olds playing scientists?”
“No—seventy! Not seventeen. And they get up very early. It’s no problem.”
I paused. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
“Do you consider yourself a good actor?” Cathy asked through the phone. “Could you say some lines?”
“I don’t know if I’m a good actor. We’ll have to see.”
“Could you say some lines?”
“Sure.” I winked at my roommates, who were listening to the conversation and holding back laughter in the backseat of a taxi. “I could probably say some lines.”
And so began my brief career in Chinese cinema.
The music video had left me shell-shocked. In the weeks after filming, I periodically glanced at want ads online and found plenty of small-time acting and modeling gigs, but I was reluctant to seek them out. I would compose an e-mail and attach a few photos, but as I was about to hit send, I would picture myself standing beside Marry, atop the stairs at the outdoor mall and dancing like a moron as the director and crew looked on in horror. I would think to myself, You’re a journalist, for chrissakes, and then I would delete the e-mail.
But I was on to something. It occurred to me in the months after the “Rent a White Guy” article that people in the West might want to see the lighter side of China. They wanted a break from news of growing economic might, postapocalyptic skies, excesses of the rich, and hardships of the poor. I figured that as a writer, by slipping into the character of Tall Rice and chasing the rabbit down the rabbit hole—seeking out the most offbeat, unusual, only-in-China adventures I could find—I could offer a glimpse into the other China, the surreal place where my friends and I lived. This, I decided, would be my new beat: Chinese Neverland.
I put concerns about my dignity aside and began looking for roles in Chinese movies.
The movie business was booming in China. Box office returns in 2010 topped $1.5 billion, a 64 percent increase from the year before, making China’s movie market on target to be the world’s second largest by 2015. The industry, sometimes dubbed “Chollywood,” pumped out 526 films in 2010 (compared to 754 in the United States), and the government announced plans to more than double the size of the entertainment industries, including movies and television, over the next five years.
Hollywood had taken notice. Chinese-U.S. coproductions were on the rise, and Christian Bale, Kevin Spacey, and Keanu Reeves were among the stars who had sought projects in China. So eager were American studios to crack the Chinese market that MGM edited out the Chinese villains from its Red Dawn remake, replacing them with North Koreans. Studios couldn’t afford to offend the officials who decided which twenty-odd foreign films were allowed to play each year on Chinese screens, whose numbers were growing at a rate of four per day.
The nightmare of my first foray into the Chinese entertainment industry prevented me from sleeping that night. I tossed and turned until my alarm rang at 5:30 a.m. I showered, drank a cup of coffee, and took a cab to our allotted meeting place.
There were more than a dozen foreign extras waiting in the lobby of the Kunlun Hotel in downtown Beijing. Cathy, a short woman with a round face and a knit wool cap sitting crookedly atop her head, spotted me immediately as I entered through the lobby’s revolving doors.
“Mi Gao!” she shouted, reaching out her hand. She spoke to me in English. “Nice to meet you. Oh, you’re not very fat. You can’t play the police officer. He’ll play the police officer.” She pointed to a husky middle-aged man sleeping on a couch in the lobby. “You can play a military officer. But we’ll have to cut your hair. . . . Not too short . . . just a little on the sides. . . . . One week, back to normal!”
I tried to protest, but she brushed me off and told me to go make friends with the other extras. I took a seat on the couch beside the dozing man, whom Cathy woke and instructed to see the casting director to see if he was fat enough to play the cop.
After a brief delay on account of a crew member’s diarrhea, we piled into a minibus and drove to a studio on the outskirts of town. We were a grab bag of expat males: white-haired Americans with southern accents (the “scientists,” I was told); some well-groomed Italians; and a couple of burly Eastern Europeans. The soon-to-be police officer was Bulgarian. I sat beside Cathy with the hope of ingratiating myself to her and landing more movie gigs. I learned that her biggest achievement as a casting agent was finding the body double for Brendan Fraser in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which had been filmed in Shanghai a few years earlier.
Cathy briefed me on the movie we were filming. Called Qian Xue Sen, the film was based on the true story of the Chinese rocket scientist of the same name, who, in the 1950s, after making significant contributions to the American missile and space programs, was accused of being a communist spy and forced t
o escape back to China, where he started up the country’s own rocket program. On this day, we were filming scenes from Qian’s time in the United States, which is why so many foreigners were needed. The movie was funded by the behemoth China Film Group, to the tune of $9.5 million—no small sum for a Chinese project. Several crew members and an actor were brought in from the States; they had apparently worked on the series Lost, a fact of which Cathy was quite proud.
Before arriving at the studio, we stopped at a decrepit hotel on the outskirts of the city, where the crew was staying. Cathy ushered us upstairs to a makeshift makeup room, where a group of foreigners were getting haircuts.
I watched the military cuts being bestowed on the heads of my fellow extras, and I suffered a mild panic attack. Haircuts in China are always a risky proposition, and I’d had a number of devastating experiences over the years. Once I walked out of the salon looking like a marine, although I repeatedly told the bored-looking stylist “not too short.” My hair became a running joke among my friends for the next two weeks.
I pleaded with Cathy to spare my hair, but she insisted it would just be a trim. It wasn’t. The stylist removed his clippers and took the sides down to the width of a nickel, leaving the top intact. He doused my head with hair spray and pulled big wads of hair over to one side. (The next day a friend said of my hair: “It looks a little Hitler Youth.”)
Beside me, a young man who had arrived in the morning with a head of wild red hair was being sheared like a sheep.
“Did you know they were cutting your hair when you signed up for this?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said, looking terrified as his ginger locks tumbled to the floor.
After some toast and instant coffee, Cathy corralled us back into the bus and we drove to the studio. I sat beside a blond Canadian from Winnipeg, named Daniel, who was the same age as me. He ran his own business in Beijing and did acting as a side gig. He had recently starred as the foreign villain in a Chinese movie and was negotiating for a recurring speaking role on a TV show.
“You don’t need to be talented,” he told me as we drove. “You just need to be available when they call you. It’s a very low bar.”
We pulled up to a large brick building. Inside, in the dressing room, a number of young aides started handing out outfits. They quickly ran out of military officers’ uniforms, so my role was changed to FBI agent.
“It’s a better role,” Cathy insisted. “Very cool.”
She flashed a thumbs-up and I changed into a baggy gray suit.
We were brought into a massive soundstage built into a former factory next door. The set was made to look like a 1950s-era FBI office, complete with old newspapers, ashtrays, and file folders marked CONFIDENTIAL. The studio was not insulated, and it was freezing; the crew wore bulky winter coats and warmed their hands with their breath. The director and art director scurried about, placing the small army of FBI agents and military officers behind desks, in semi-hidden offices, and around a big table, in the middle of the set, covered with stacks of documents.
Cathy, for some reason, was in a state of near panic, insisting that we all be quiet and still as the scene was set up. She seemed keen on making a good impression on the American crew members.
“Shut up!” she hissed, grabbing my arm as I chatted quietly with one of my costars. “They’re from Hollywood.”
My role was simple: stand at a desk pretending to talk to a young French guy who totally did not look the part, and then I would be called to another desk where a thirty-something European military officer would instruct me to grab “that document.” I then walked over to the big table at the center of the set, where a group of older scientists were examining the papers looking for evidence of Qian’s Communist sympathies. I had to bring the document back to the officer.
After a few takes the director told me to “say something” to the scientist when I picked up the folder. One precious, unscripted, mumbled line. He inserted a small mic in my shirt. It was official: I had a speaking role.
I just need to take this book for a minute.
The night before, my roommate Paul had offered some advice based on my last acting role: try to relax. I noticed how nervous the French guy was and thought to myself, Don’t worry, kid, follow my lead. After all, I was practically already a music video star. And this time, I didn’t have to dance.
I tried to get into character, repeating in my head: I’m a thirty-year-old FBI agent. I’m on my way to the top. I just need to take this book for a minute.
We did the take about a dozen times and I varied my line with every take: “I need to borrow this book for a second . . .” “I need to take this off your hands for a minute . . .” “Just let me grab this folder for a few minutes.”
I nailed it.
After the scene wrapped, we drank instant coffee in the parking lot outside the studio. I chatted with fellow extras about the usual expat male topic—women—and had a prison lunch of soggy eggplant, cabbage, chicken parts, some sort of rice gruel, and donkey meat flatbread.
“Acting is waiting,” one of the extras said at some point in the afternoon, stating the obvious.
Several hours had passed since my one glorious line. It was getting late in the afternoon, and I was starting to doubt I’d be called upon again. It was freezing outside, so I went to the wardrobe room, where several extras had already gathered, and had a nap.
I woke half an hour later. Everybody around me was still asleep. I leaned back in my chair and put my feet up on a radiator, looking out the window at the pale winter sky. What a day, I thought. This place could be incredible.
Cathy roused us at 5 p.m. and said it was time to go home. She tried to dodge paying me the money she’d promised, saying she would meet me at a café downtown in the next few days, but I refused to leave before she handed it over, which she eventually did.
My line didn’t bump me up a pay grade. Cathy paid me the standard 500 yuan (seventy-seven dollars), and a few minutes later I crammed into the minibus heading back downtown, fantasies of Chollywood stardom floating in my head.
As with the “Rent a White Guy” story, I sat in Café Zarah one afternoon and wrote out the tale of my day as a film star. It was another unique take on the expat experience in China. Again, I pitched the article to the Atlantic, and the magazine took it.
These were the stories the world wanted to read. I’d found my niche. My career was going great.
Everything else, unfortunately, was turning to shit.
19
“Burst into Bloom”
My meteoric rise to stardom fell somewhat short of meteoric.
Not long after the Qian Xue Sen movie gig, I received two calls for acting jobs—one from Cathy and another from an agent named Jackie, who had surreptitiously slipped me his business card on the bus home from the set. Cathy called about a movie, Jackie a TV show. Neither of them gave much in the way of notice—about twelve hours—and for both jobs I had previous commitments.
For several weeks afterward, I was traveling or otherwise occupied. As Daniel had warned me on the set of Qian Xue Sen, Chinese agents cared less about talent than about reliability. It’s a one-strike-you’re-out system, he told me, and I was out. My dreams of Chollywood stardom were flitting away.
But that summer, with plenty of time on my hands, I redoubled my efforts to get marginally famous, to become the poor man’s Da Shan. I had a photographer friend of mine take head shots, called back the agents I knew, and started looking for more acting jobs on online classifieds.
My next potential gig came via Daniel. My phone buzzed one Wednesday night during a pub quiz. “A TV show really needs an actor for a few days starting tomorrow,” he wrote. “You available?”
I told him I was and waited for instructions. He said to call a woman named Sylvia first thing next morning, which I did, about half a dozen times. Her phone was off.
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br /> At 11 a.m., I was at the gym when my phone rang. It was Sylvia.
“I’ve been waiting so long for your call!” she yelled into the phone in English.
“I tried calling you like six times this morning,” I said.
“We need to meet you. Right now. Can you come now?”
“Right now? I’m at the gym now. I haven’t even showered.”
“Please, hurry. Go shower now and we will be there with the van in twenty minutes!” she pleaded. “Please, it’s an urgency!”
I rushed to the shower and hurried to the street out in front of my gym. There I waited for one hour and forty minutes before Sylvia pulled up in a van. She was accompanied by two other Chinese men—a driver and another agent—and two other foreigners: a middle-aged American named Kurt, who was from Hawaii and wore a Tommy Bahama shirt, and a Ukrainian male model. We picked up a third foreigner, a Syrian, and headed toward the outskirts of town.
“Where are we going?” I asked Sylvia.
“To the studio. It’s about an hour out of town.”
“What is this show anyway?”
“A historical show. They need a foreigner to play a doctor.”
We continued driving while the four foreigners tried to figure out what we were auditioning for, piecing together potential scenarios based on the tidbits of information Sylvia had provided.
When we arrived, Sylvia escorted us into a hotel lobby near the studio, where we met a producer who offered us all cigarettes. I asked Sylvia one more time for information about the program.
“It’s historical, about, I don’t know how you say in English . . . Gong Chan Dang.”
I didn’t know the word so I checked my phone dictionary. Gong Chan Dang = Communist Party of China. The foreign doctor, I guessed, was Norman Bethune, one of the best-known foreigners in Chinese history, a Canadian who helped Mao’s Communists until his death of blood poisoning in 1939. In China, Bethune is considered a martyr, and I wondered if my citizenship would give me a leg up on the role.