Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 12, 1993 TAG: 9311120046
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That's a line with many possible meanings that virtually every woman has heard her mother say. It's also one of the central ideas behind Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club," both the novel and the movie that's opening today at the Grandin Theatre.
It's a complex, emotional novel, one that many Hollywood people said could never be filmed. They were almost right. It took an unusual combination of talent, risk and luck to bring these interrelated stories to the screen. Hollywood Pictures, part of the Disney organization, has been releasing the film slowly, counting on word-of-mouth to build interest. Tan and Ron Bass, who co-wrote and co-produced the film with director Wayne Wang, have been out on a long promotional tour.
Their efforts are paying off - the film has been doing extremely well, even if some of the reviews have been negative. The book and the film weave together the stories of eight women - four mothers and their daughters - taking place over more than 50 years on two continents.
When Tan and Bass stopped recently in Washington, D.C., to talk about the film, their enthusiasm had been tempered by a tough schedule - radio and TV interviews had started at 6:30 that morning - but it didn't seem forced. For Bass, whose credits include "Rain Man" and "Black Widow," collaboration and promotion are part of the business. For Tan, they're new.
In her dual role as writer and producer, she learned a lot. "Against all my expectations, I really enjoyed the process," she said. "We created something new, yet it's faithful to the intentions, or rather to the emotions, of the original stories and characters. It's not the same as the book. It was never intended to be or should it have been."
From the beginning, though, Bass, Tan and Wang agreed to maintain the book's structure and scope. To do that, they took a chance. Tan remembered that "In our first meeting we decided to do this on spec - meaning that we developed this on our own without any idea that anybody would be interested. We sat down for three days and went through the entire movie scene by scene. At the end of three days, we had 60 single-spaced pages of the script in a narrative format. By then it was easy for me to adapt the book to a screenplay."
At that point, Bass thought that no studio would want such an ambitious, unusual film. "I believed it would be made the way I used to put films together when I was a lawyer, cobbling together foreign investment one territory at a time, putting together enough money for $10-12 million. When we sat down with [Disney studio chief] Jeffrey Katzenberg, he volunteered that we have full creative control. As long as we kept to the budget. And it was a low number." The film cost $10.6 million, modest by Hollywood standards.
"We learned early on that you can control anything in life if you don't mind not getting paid for it," he said. "Once you take money, you have to give away your control."
That control allowed them to take the risky step of using a large amount of voice-over narration to bind the stories together and to give the film a smoother flow. Tan said they chose the technique so "that these women would allow us to come into their inner lives through voice-over. To do it any other way would distance us. We also have flashbacks within flashbacks, and sometimes we come out of a flashback into somebody else's mind.
"We knew that logically it didn't make any sense, but we thought that the emotional logic mattered. It had nothing to do with sequence or with traditional ways you see movies. If we've done it in an honest and true way, then the viewer is unconscious of that and will go with the logic."
Given the film's success at the box office, audiences are accepting that unconventional approach. And the movie also got a thumbs-up from its toughest critic, Tan's mother, Daisy.
"She said, `It's great!' My mother doesn't speak English that well and that's a word that's very uncharacteristic of her. Then she said later, `What did I do to deserve such a daughter?'
"It was such a wonderful comment because it was full circle. My mother doesn't like to express to me things having to do with being proud of me. The fact she said that to me and the fact that she had said those very words to me at another point in my life with a different intonation meant an awful lot to me."
by CNB