Funding for ‘Crouching Tiger’ a Work of Art

Come Oscar time, Ang Lee’s martial-arts romance “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” will surely win awards. And a special statuette should go to the film’s co-writer and producer, James Schamus, for a remarkable performance by a financial acrobat.

Schamus delivered an epic network of cross-cultural funding. He not only found financing for the arthouse fare, but he managed that feat with a $15-million Chinese language film, one of the worst box office bets around.

“It was crazy,” says Schamus, who along with his partner Ted Hope at Good Machine have been players in the New York independent film scene for more than a decade, shepherding even lower cost hits such as Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” and “Eat Man Drink Woman,” Edward Burns’ “The Brothers McMullen” and this year’s Sundance Film Festival hit “The Tao of Steve.”

Judging from its stunning debut this weekend in New York and three Canadian cities--grossing an impressive $43,000 per screen--”Crouching Tiger” is expected to be the must-see independent film this holiday season. It opens Friday in Los Angeles and select other markets and expands in late December and early January.

“The reason the film has excited so many people is that it gives them the kind of old-fashioned movie satisfactions that we’ve been missing for so long,” says Times critic Kenneth Turan, who put the movie on his 2000 Top 10 list. “It has the kind of feeling ‘Star Wars’ had when it first came out.”

The movie, shot entirely in mainland China, stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in a story about the fight to recover a stolen legendary sword as it transforms the lives of those who encounter it.

“We believe ‘Crouching Tiger’ is going to open the doors for American audiences to be more accepting of Asian films,” says Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is releasing the movie in North America.

Barker predicts “Crouching Tiger” could gross $50 million. Miramax Films’ 1998 Italian movie “Life Is Beautiful” is the highest-grossing foreign film ever with $57.6 million in domestic box office.

Chinese-language films have had a tough time in the U.S., with most top performing films making less than $10 million.

Schamus says “Crouching Tiger” serves as “a good snapshot” of what the international independent film business looks like today. “It’s one of the first times that this level of financial sophistication was applied to a Chinese-language film.”

With Lee’s New York lawyers, Schamus worked for seven months from Good Machine’s SoHo offices, stringing together a complex web of financing commitments that crossed Asia, Europe and North America. A Paris bank financed the production once the producers got a bond company in Los Angeles to insure the film.

Originally, “Crouching Tiger” was to be financed entirely by one “high-net individual in Taiwan--a billionaire--who backed out because he got cold feet,” says Schamus.

With no financing in place and the film’s preparation well underway in Beijing, the producers and director became responsible for keeping the movie alive.

“Ang and our co-producer Bill Kong had their houses at stake. They were paying people--I mean they were owing people,” recalls Schamus. “It was hair-raising.”

Schamus describes a typical day during that exhaustive fund-raising process:

“I’d start the day about 6 in the morning, because I had to talk to everybody in Hong Kong and Taipei before they closed for business. When I finished those discussions, I worked with our attorneys in New York and our international sales company and start interfacing with Europe.

“We’d have to get all the European business done before noon. Then, we’d start talking to Columbia and our bond company in Los Angeles and their lawyers, who would be opening for business at 1 o’clock our time.

“We’d spend the afternoon wrangling with the Sony attorney and the bond company. And then, at the end of the day, I’d pick up the phone and fill in my partners in Asia, Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing because they’d just be waking up.”

This dragged on for months. “It was so complicated,” says Schamus, who at the same time was charged with rewriting the script. “By the time we started production, I was mincemeat.”

Schamus, who would then spend the next six months of production on a continuous loop commuting from New York to the set in China, says he’ll never forget the last day of his long-planned family vacation in Cape Cod in July 1999.

“I spent the entire vacation on the phone and the last day of it, I closed the finances--at which point I basically averted a divorce.”

In the end, the film was produced by a Taiwanese company formed by Lee and his producing partners in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Good Machine International, headed by partner David Linde, pre-sold rights in five European territories--Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Benelux. Rights deals for North America, Latin America and Asia were simultaneously being negotiated with New York-based Sony Pictures Classics, its Columbia Pictures sister studio in Hollywood, and Hong Kong-based Sony Pictures Asia.

Lee and his Hong Kong-based producer Bill Kong and Taiwan producer Hsui Li Kong retained the Chinese rights.

Also, a separate music rights deal was cut with Sony Classical Music, based in New York, to finance the film’s soundtrack.

“That’s what we had to do to get the movie made,” says Schamus, 41, in an interview at his loft offices. Based in an unfashionable section of Soho, Good Machine’s walls and furniture are made of recycled newsprint and plexiglass, and maple doors serve as table tops.

Schamus, a native Californian who went to Hollywood High, is practiced in the art of “begging” for money and has done so for independent movies ever since going to New York in 1987 “to check out the filmmaking scene” as part of his UC Berkeley dissertation on film history and theory. He meant to stay three months, but never left.

Because he had no technical filmmaking skills, Schamus says he had to rely on something that came natural to him. “One of the things I wasn’t shy about doing was using a telephone and begging for money--that’s what producing essentially is.”

In 1989, he hooked up with Hope, and two years later, they formed Good Machine, where they have produced 36 feature and short films, including seven of Lee’s.

And, just like “Crouching Tiger,” each was a financial high-wire act.

“We suffer from the fact that we actually like making the kind of movies we make,” Schamus says.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Chinese Films

Among the top-grossing Chinese-language films in terms of U.S. box office receipts:

* “The Legend of the Drunken Master” (Cantonese), $11.5 million

* “Eat Drink Man Woman,” $7.3 million

* “The Wedding Banquet,” $6.9 million

* “Farewell My Concubine,” $5.2 million

* “Raise the Red Lantern,” $2.5 million

* “Shanghai Triad,” $2.3 million