Never lose sight of the white wolf in the new Wild Wild East

"During my most recent trip to Hollywood, I met with executives from Warner Brothers and Dreamworks," he said with a deep southern accent. "Your friend Betty helped me a lot. She recommended you for help with cleaning up the English translation of the script."

It came as no surprise that Betty, an established screenwriter, would never associate herself with such a project. It was a story about an American stranded in Beijing, having a relationship with a Chinese girl while still pining for a Middle-eastern girl whom he had met in Paris and who was now trapped in her war-torn home country. It had all the clichs of a Chinese melodrama and none of the cultural understanding of foreign countries. Structurally too, it needed a complete rewrite.

"I wrote the script myself," the producer announced proudly. He looked like your average Chinese businessman with his chubby face, faded zipper jacket, and a man-purse on the coffee table. "The West has Gone With the Wind and Titanic. It's time that we Chinese have a similar movie classic. Once the script is finished, I'll go back to Dreamworks and ask Steven Spielberg to direct it."

That made me gasp. I had gathered that he had made a fortune from somewhere; he was an avid movie fan and it was his first attempt at filmmaking. But hiring Steven Spielberg?

Soon after the meeting I had to leave Beijing for six months and forgot completely about the project. In late 2007, while having coffee with a French filmmaker friend, she told me that she had been working on pre-production for a tri-country love story set in Beijing.

It shocked me that the project had survived this long. Then a year later, after the Beijing Olympics, posters for the movie suddenly popped up at all the Beijing subway stations and bus stops. The entrepreneur-writer-producer ended up directing the film himself. He invited the biggest Chinese movie stars to the premiere, and in the press, there was orchestrated fanfare of the movie going to the Oscars!

That the movie opened to a box-office disaster did not shock me. Internet users gossiped that he had made the movie on borrowed money and was now in big trouble.

I never watched the movie. But the more I thought about his story, the more my respect for him grew - foolish or not, bare-handed or not, he had a great dream of the white wolf and he went after it persistently until he caught it.

No wonder people call China the new Wild Wild East. Indeed, clichs exist for a reason.